Center for the literary arts in New York State
SWEET FICTION BY FOOD WRITERS
Ruth Reichl and Mark Kurlansky
7:30 p.m. Monday, October 6, 2025
Page Hall - University at Albany Downtown Campus
135 Western Avenue, Albany NY 12203 See map.
(Photo credit: Shannon Greer)
Ruth Reichl is a beloved cookbook author, six-time James Beard Award-winner, former editor-in-chief of Gourmet magazine, and one of the most influential restaurant critics of her generation.
Her new book is the New York Times bestseller, The Paris Novel (2024), about a young American woman’s unexpected adventures through the food, art, and fashion scenes of 1980s Paris. Julia Louis-Dreyfus said, “This is a sumptuous book that I simply could not put down. C’est formidable!”
Reichl’s previous bestsellers include the memoirs, Tender at the Bone: Growing Up at the Table (1998), Garlic and Sapphires: The Secret Life of a Critic in Disguise (2005), Save Me the Plums (2019), and the novel, Delicious! (2014).
Ruth Reichl previously visited the NYS Writers Institute in 2021.
(Photo credit: Sylvia Plachy)
Mark Kurlansky is best-known for national bestsellers that explore history through the lens of a single subject, including Cod (1997), Salt (2002), Milk! (2018), and Salmon (2021). Food writer Mark Bittman proclaimed in the New York Times, “Mark Kurlansky is among our most intelligent, prolific and literate writers about food.”
His newest book is the novel Cheesecake (2025), the story of the inhabitants of a single block on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in the 1970s. A neighborhood already known for its poppyseed strudel, praline ice cream cake, and New York cheesecake, is forever changed by the rediscovery of a cheesecake recipe recorded by the Roman historian Cato the Elder (234-149 BC).
In 2004, Mark Kurlansky visited the NYS Writers Institute upon publication of his book 1968: The Year That Rocked the World. He was also a featured guest at the Albany Book Festival in 2018.