The Sunday Supplement: #48
Pizza equipment for home cooking, sixty-eight interesting works of new fiction, an old PBS series to explain the world
In a galaxy far, far away, I started an email newsletter with a friend, which became a linkblog, which became a zine, which became an actual magazine with copy editors and graphic designers and fact-checkers, which eventually went back to being a linkblog, and now is back to being a newsletter again. Which, in a way, I guess, is a lens for looking at the web from 1.0 to 2.0 to now.
Anyway, we continue to do a big event every spring called the Tournament of Books. Which sounds like a dumb contest or prize, but is rather, as I describe to people, more like an anti-prize, a huge month-long discussion each March about writing and publishing, where thousands of fans play along, there are booth commentators and a zombie round, and our “prize” is a live rooster. It's a weird, fun, madcap thing.
I say all this because we just published this year’s long list of books: sixty-eight works of fiction from 2022 that we admired—so, in case you get drunk this weekend and feel like shopping.
Some were on the staff picks shelf at our local bookstore. One is a title someone mentioned on Instagram. One was a campfire recommendation on a fishing trip. Several were sent to us by people who work at small presses, thinking we might fit the vibe. And one was the favorite of a drunk young publicist at a Manhattan book party, who shipped us a copy two days later (and we loved it). Then there are personal favorites of the Rooster organizing committee, there are award winners, there are two books by authors we’d heard about for years and finally got around to discovering for ourselves. Is there a shared theme? Is there something five-dozen-plus books can share? We found them to be really interesting, basically, and in several cases we found them to be really great.
Btw if you’re interested in the Tournament, there’s a newsletter for that, too (very occasional, no spam).
For nonfiction, there were two really fabulous pieces in the New Yorker recently about fucked-up student-teacher relationships: “Did the Oscar-Winning Director Asghar Farhadi Steal Ideas?” by Rachel Aviv and “The Beautiful, Brutal World of Bonsai” by Robert Moor.
About pizza. My Sunday afternoon ritual for the last couple months, to go into the week softly, is to listen to jazz, drink red wine, and make pizza.
Before that it was frequently the same thing, but roast chicken.
I delivered pizza for a couple years in high school, and occasionally the chefs asked me to help in the kitchen, so I learned how to do the thing where you toss the dough with your knuckles. However, I am not a great pizza cook, I’m not even a good one, and I don’t care to be; pizza is dumb fun, that’s it. But there are things that make it easier and more delicious:
I got a decent pizza peel and it helps for scooching the pie into the oven. (What makes a bigger difference is getting it on/off the floured peel as fast as possible with all the toppings. (Though no cornmeal for me, I ate too much Too Boots in my early twenties, I have a thing against slices that taste like they were dredged in sand.)
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