My little slug on Kingley Amis' 'Everyday Drinking' appears in the Esquire.com Gift Guide, along with several other tiny mentions of key bartender gear, including Fee Bros. Complete Bitters Set which is very All I Want For Christmas. This will probably be the closest I get to writing about cocktails for Esquire as Big Poppa David Wondrich has that pretty firmly locked down there-as it should be. I did get to write up his book 'Imbibe!', however.
'Everyday Drinking' is really indispensable stuff, for any serious drinker or non-fiction writer. Astringent? I'm reminded of Hawkeye's description of exactly how dry he liked it: "I want a martini made while staring at the portrait of the man who invented vermouth". It took me hours to get through a chapter of 'Everyday Drinking' so exquisite is the prose-I'd savor every drop, putting the book down between sips. And interwoven throughout-indeed, the collection's very thesis-is an endorsement of the therapeutic value of drink, no matter the consequences. Amis writes, "..the collective social benefits of drinking altogether ..outweigh the individual disasters it may precipitate." For a more thorough review of the book check out Chris Ross' review over at my friends at Stop Smiling, the best magazine you've probably never heard of.
Speaking of Esquire, my successor at The Key West Literary Seminar, Arlo Haskell, put together a fine selection of remembrances of Rust Hills, Esquire's fiction editor. Arlo's blog for the KWLS is quite an impressive web-zine-Dwight Garner at Paper Cuts even took note and linked in, something I wasn't able to able to achieve during my tenure as Technical Director. Well done.
Meanwhile, over at the New Yorker there's an eganging piece on the new book of the collected correspondence of Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell. Many of Bishops letters were written from Key West, as it happens, and probably from the house above-I shot this for the KWLS website.
