Betty Fussell

How to Cook A Coyote

The Joy of Old Age

Soigné! A recipe for survival. A juicy, sexy, and wise memoir from the “gifted essayist and meditative thinker” (The New York Times) that captures the urgency of life at age ninety-eight

From telling what it’s like to go blind to confronting the ongoing erosion of time and the mystery of what’s to come, How to Cook a Coyote recounts a decade of change as Betty Fussell moves from Manhattan to Montecito and an old folks’ home, one where Julia Child once resided, recalling family, friends, enemies, and lovers with wry humor, affection, and a sharp-eyed confrontation with mortality. All the while, the coyote watches. And waits. But ultimately Fussel’s exciting new work provides a recipe for how to enjoy each moment as if it were the last day of your life.

Imagining the occasion of her final day in this life, celebrated food writer and critic Fussell reflects on the people, places, and events of an adventurous life. But she’s not alone. A coyote—an emblem of the wild and all the things one can’t control—stalks her, taking on greater emotional and metaphorical resonance as the day progresses.

Here Let Us Feast

A Book of Banquets

"M.F.K Fisher’s latest excursion into the art or science of gastronomy is more an anthology of the finest writing on the subject than strictly a text of her own composition . . . A royal feast, indeed!" —The New York Times

Betty Fussell—winner of the James Beard Foundation’s journalism award, and whose essays on food, travel, and the arts have appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Saveur, and Vogue—is the perfect writer to introduce M.F.K Fisher’s Here Let Us Feast, first published in 1946. The author of Eat, Live, Love, Die has penned a brilliant introduction to this fabulous anthology of gastronomic writing, selected and with commentary from the inimitable M.F.K. Fisher.

The celebrated author of such books as The Art of Eating, The Cooking of Provincial France, and With Bold Knife and Fork, Fisher knows how to prepare a feast of reading as no other. Excerpting descriptions of bountiful meals from classic works of British and American literature, Fisher weaves them into a profound discussion of feasting.

She also traces gluttony through the Old and New Testaments of the Bible, and claims that the story of a nation's life is charted by its gastronomy. M.F.K. Fisher has arranged everything perfectly, and the result is a succession of unforgettable courses that will entice the most reluctant epicure.

Eat Live Love Die

Selected Essays

Betty Fussell is an inspiring badass. She's not just the award–winning author of numerous books ranging from biography and memoir to cookbooks and food history; not just a winner of the James Beard Foundation's Journalism Award who was inducted into their "Who's Who of American Food and Beverage" in 2009; and not just an extraordinary person whose fifty years' worth of essays on food, travel, and the arts have appeared in scholarly journals, popular magazines and newspapers as varied as The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Los Angeles Times, Saveur, and Vogue.



This is a woman who at eighty–two years old (and despite being half–blind) went deer hunting for the very first time in the Montana foothills with her son, Sam (as described in her 2010 essay for the New York Times Magazine.) She got her deer.



This is a woman who declared in a 2005 essay for Vogue that she had to teach herself Latin and German from scratch (on top of teaching herself how to cook) as a young twenty–one year old bride, because "housewifery wasn't enough."



Indeed, for Fussell one subject is never enough. Counterpoint is thrilled to be publishing this selected anthology of her diverse essays.