The orchards of past times that have survived — in physical form or at least recorded in written documents — are those that belonged to kings and queens, the noble class, and religious orders. But while these estates were impressive, they did not represent the typical orchards that provided most people with fruit. As far back as the Middle Ages, networks of orchards surrounded many of central Europe’s villages and towns. In many cases, they were part of or located near vegetable or kitchen gardens. Crops such as potatoes, turnips, corn, or grasses grew in the shade of the trees and both crops and fruit were harvested by hand in the fall.
In the past, boundaries between the orchards planted near settlements and surrounding forests were often fluid. People went out into the forest to gather fruits and nuts, but they also used the forest as a source for rootstocks that they could then use to graft on scions from cultivated trees that were more productive than those growing wild. Information on the region around Paris in the eighteenth century provides examples. Wild cherry trees were collected as rootstocks for cultivated cherries. Hazelnut bushes and wild apple and pear trees were useful as rootstocks, too. And the currant bushes growing in the forest could simply be transplanted — no grafting required. As forests were often much drier than cultivated orchards and gardens, it often took some time for forest rootstocks (or sometimes transplanted bushes) to acclimate to their new surroundings.
Fried chicken, crispy chicken, chicken schnitzel: Is there another dish so ubiquitous and yet, so particular? Everyone has one, yes, but everyone has their own. An “Around the World in 80 Dishes” cookbook could easily be filled with nothing but fried chicken recipes: Austrian schnitzel, Korean fried chicken, Italian pollo fritto, Japanese tonkatsu, chicken Milanese, Chinese gong bao, Senagalese chicken yassa, Southern fried chicken and so on. Fried chicken is beloved globally.
I left the novel feeling as I often did after watching a great scary movie as a kid—totally convinced that whatever evil, implausible thing I had just witnessed on the screen awaited me in the next room. Not that this novel offers horror in the conventional sense. Under the mysterious sign in the sky, people go about the sort of stifled, frustrated lives that Knausgaard has made his domain: the creatively blocked, the spiritually starving, the terrifyingly sensitive, the queasily realistic failures.
This Thing Between Us is a superb debut from an author who understands that horror fails in the absence of empathy. More than just scare us, Moreno wants to hurt readers with this book, and I strongly suggest you let him — even if you end up turning off your smart speaker forever.
Like any good mystery, Anthony Horowitz's "A Line to Kill" has a gripping story, quirky characters who might be devious or might be innocent, a twisty plot, an enigmatic detective and a memorable setting.
But it also has something else: sly humor, most of it at the expense of the author.
Like the work of the writers he most admires—Heraclitus, Montaigne, Spinoza, Goethe, the physicist and aphorist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, and Balzac, among others—“The Notes” is about seemingly everything. But Hohl’s central preoccupation, and the subject of his first section, is what he calls “work”: earnest, determined, and courageous creative activity undertaken with the full consciousness that life is short. “The idea of death,” he tells us, “must be the beginning of all thought.”