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It's hard to imagine a book more difficult to pull off, but Bell proves as self-assured as he is audacious. His prose, which manages to be both mournful and propulsive, is undeniable. While he's been compared to authors like Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges, his style is very much his own, lacking any obvious antecedent. In the House contains passages far scarier than most mainstream horror novels, but Bell writes with a warmth, a humanity that renders the scenes gut-wrenching on an emotional level. Characters in fairy tales are often stand-ins for ideas, props used to illustrate a moral. Bell does a superb job of avoiding this trap, though; he writes about the family with both a clear sense of empathy and an expert novelist's unblinking eye.

Bell's novel isn't just a joy to read, it's also one of the smartest meditations on the subjects of love, family and marriage in recent years. In one scene, the husband remembers his father lecturing him, "telling me the purpose of a marriage was the improvement of a man and a woman, each meant to make the other better." The father continues, "It is enough. ... You cannot expect to make the world better, not by any love." It's apparent Bell disagrees; the novel is a monument to the uniqueness of every relationship, the possibility that love itself can make the world better, though of course it's never easy.

Read an excerpt of In The House Upon The Dirt Between The Lake And The Woods

"Citizens who choose ...

To be defined by a wall,

or ... to tear it down. "

From Remarks by President Obama at the Brandenburg Gate. June 19, 2013.

****

(If you find examples of Haiku in the News, please send them to: protojournalist@npr.org)

Just as Dean meets Anne-Marie and decides to finish college, Lia is the catalyst that helps Viri begin the second half of his life. After their marriage, he "took stock of himself. He touched his limbs, his face, he began the essential process of forgetting what had passed." He, like Dean, went to Europe to meet a woman and "organize" himself. Lia and Anne-Marie are lunch stops on a man's road to self-discovery, their thoughts no more important to the narrative (and almost as absurd to worry about) as the thoughts of the tagliatelle that Viri actually orders.

Salter's depiction of women in his most recent book, All That Is, is no different, except that it's even more disturbing. The protagonist, Bowman, embarks on a love affair in Paris. He takes his ex-lover's college-age daughter there for a romantic weekend. But, of course, this affair is all about Bowman. When they first sleep together in New York, their sex is questionably consensual: "she moved from side to side and pushed his hand away, but he was insistent. Finally, not without relief, she gave in. She became his partner in it, more or less." In their final sex scene, Bowman realizes he is ready to forgive her mother for leaving him. He sneaks out of their hotel that morning, thinking about not anything she said or did, but rather "the freshness of her, even afterward." Much as you'd remember, well, a meal, though I feel icky just saying that.

Book Reviews

Real Writing, Real Life In Salter's 'All That Is'

Think our current culture has become food-obsessed? Take a look at this wall painting from ancient Egypt.

Long before Food Network, before Michael Pollan, before pop-up restaurants, humans were taking the time to enshrine the art of cooking. The painting depicts a recipe for baking bread that was carved on the wall of an Egyptian tomb some 4,000 years ago.

It's one of the many fascinating snapshots from the history of food that journalist William Sitwell chronicles in his first book, A History of Food in 100 Recipes.

The gastronomic compass guiding Sitwell's journey through time? The recipes, in all forms, left behind by the foodies whose tastes have helped shape the sophistication of our palates.

"I wanted to pinpoint foodie references in history that to me, told a very important part of the story of food," Sitwell tells Morning Edition host Renee Montagne.

Sitwell decided to start with one of the most basic foods, bread. Which is how he ended up in Luxor, Egypt — an ancient capital for pharaohs known in antiquity by its Greek name, Thebes.

"I found myself scrambling up the dusty slopes of a hillside overlooking the Nile in Egypt, where there's this amazing tomb," he says.

That's where he found the carvings in the photo above. Ancient Egyptians filled their tombs with riches they thought would follow them into the afterlife. The fact that someone included a recipe signals just how important it was, he says.

By 1700 B.C., recipes had made the jump from walls to clay tablets — such as this one for a meat and vegetable stew, from ancient Mesopotamia.

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