Why I was interested in this book

The Writer’s Table caught my eye as I wandered through Anthropolgie on a sunny Sunday afternoon. I really had no business buying anything that day, let alone a coffee table book, but the book’s concept & design were really captivating.

I own quite a few art books that mostly take up space as artful placeholders around my house. They’re occasionally used for their weight in flattening out one of my watercolor paintings, but I hate to admit: I hardly ever read any of them, and definitely not in their entirety. However, in flipping through this book pre-purchase, I could see that though designed in a fashionable format, the content was full of even more substance than style, and I was happy to dig in to it as a special treat for my form of a daily nightcap — reading hour.

Basic Info About the Book

• Author: Valerie Stivers, British
• Genre: nonfiction | cookbook, coffee table, casual literary criticism
• Book concept: favorite recipes of some literary greats; drawing connections between food and creative genius
• Published in 2025, Frances Lincoln

Did I like The Writer’s Table?

Yes! I really loved this book. Each of the 40 listed authors is covered with a brief essay pertaining to their relationships with food — cooking and/or consuming — and how they wrote about it. A recipe or description of a particular meal is also included in each section, either directly from the author’s personal collection, or Valerie Stiver’s interpretation of a food they were known to enjoy. Some recipes are outlandishly improbable to make (a whole peacock or oyster-stuffed chicken) and others sounded simple and delicious (coconut cake, fried trout, toad-in-the-hole or boiled apple dumplings).

I have yet to make any of the recipes, but I do love that not only did the book give me a taste of new books and authors to add to my TBR list, but provided that comfort-food-feeling you get when you savor the memories of established literary favorites. The Writer’s Table isn’t just eye candy for your coffee table (although the charming illustrations by Katie Tomlinson are delightful sweet) — this book has nourishing sustenance on every page. It’s the kind of book that I wished I had written, but was oh-so-glad to enjoy!

This book may be for you if you also like: Stiver’s long-running “Eat Your Words” column in The Paris Review; cooking, baking, drinking; reading good books; unconventional salads; learning about famous authors; cookbooks; travel; chicken dishes; short essays; Bite by Bite (Aimee Nezhukumatathil); food blogs; Jane Austen; Zora Neale Hurston; tea cakes; Truman Capote: black coffee; George Sand; oysters; Thomas Mann; Franz Kafka; Honoré de Balzac; Gabriel Garcia Márquez; Laura Ingalls Wilder and more!

SDG