Sublime

I don't eat mussels in restaurants unless I know the chef personally, or have seen, with my own eyes, how they store and hold their mussels for service.

It is astonishing how many experts there seem to be nowadays whose mission in life is to lecture us about the perils of pleasure. Scarcely a week goes by without some ominous pronouncement about the price we must pay for our brief moments of indulgence. Even moderation, which used to be an acceptable excuse for the beef on your plate or the wine in

chicken is boring. Chefs see it as a menu item for people who don't know what they want to eat.

had the temerity

I hired them, added to their expertise, and then had trouble turning some of them—especially on the offensive side of the game—fully loose to do their jobs. I was like a man dying of thirst who was sitting on the edge of a mountain stream. I denied myself what was available.

Your slice of pie is one less I can eat myself, that was his attitude, and for every orphan he helped in public there were ten he made in private.

But at its heart it was, of course, about women’s bodies, and what we do with those bodies. More specifically, it was about what claim others have to those bodies when we dare to live, eat and breathe in a public space. The man at the helm of the group, whom I won’t name for fear of feeding his ego, shrugged the whole thing off in an interview with

“Everything Max does is directed toward the whole effect of the book.... He believes in your characters; they become completely real to him.... He can take a mess of chaos, give you the scaffold, and then you build a house on it....