Kathryn Nuernberger is an essayist and poet who writes about the history of science and ideas, renegade women, plant medicines, and witches. Her essay about listening through hearing loss, “The Loudproof Room,” originally published in New England Review, was anthologized in Best American Essays. She lives in Spokane, Washington, where she is an apprenticed cheesemaker to Lora Lea Misterly of Quillisascut Farm. Other recent work includes the cookbook Pie School, the poetry chapbook Seven Prayers to Cathy McMorris Rodgers (Entre Rios Books) and the anthology Pie & Whiskey: Writers Under the Influence of Butter and Booze (Sasquatch Books), which she edited with Samuel Ligon. Kate Lebo’s first nonfiction collection, The Book of Difficult Fruit: Arguments for the Tart, Tender, and Unruly will be published by FSG and Picador in April 2021.

Join three wonderful authors as they discuss their wonderful new nonfiction books!

White Magic, Difficult Fruit, and the Witch of Eye After reading The Book of Difficult Fruit, you will never think of sweetness the same way again.Note: This is a virtual event. Kate Lebo's unquenchable curiosity promises adventure: intimate, sensuous, ranging, bitter, challenging, rotten, ripe. What if the primary way you show love is through baking, but your partner suffers from celiac disease? Why leave in the pits for Willa Cather's plum jam? How can we rely on bodies as fragile as the fruits that nourish them? Here, these fruits will take you on unexpected turns and give sideways insights into relationships, self-care, land stewardship, medical and botanical history, and so much more. What makes a fruit difficult? Its cultivation, its harvest, its preparation, the brevity of its moment for ripeness, its tendency toward rot or poison, the way it might overrun your garden. In a work of unique invention, these and other difficult fruits serve as the central ingredients of twenty-six lyrical essays (with recipes). Q is for quince, which, when fresh, gives off the scent of 'roses and citrus and rich women's perfume,' but if eaten raw is so astringent it wicks the juice from one's mouth. M is for medlar, name-checked by Shakespeare for its crude shape, beloved by gardeners for its flowers. D is for durian, endowed with a dramatic rind and a shifting odor-peaches, old garlic. Inspired by twenty-six fruits, the essayist, poet, and pie lady Kate Lebo expertly blends natural, culinary, medical, and personal history.Ī is for aronia, berry member of the apple family, clothes-stainer, superfruit with reputed healing power. 'Dazzling.' -Samin Nosrat, The New York Times Magazine Named a Best Book of the Year by The Atlantic, New York magazine and NPR

The book of difficult fruit kate lebo