Dwight Garner
6:00 pm | Wolstein Building Auditorium
Dive into the delicious intersection of food and literature with Dwight Garner, celebrated New York Times book critic, as he discusses his latest work, The Upstairs Delicatessen: On Eating, Reading, Reading About Eating, and Eating While Reading.
He will be in conversation with Elysia Balavage, Anisfield-Wolf Fellow and member of the ǿմý Department of English.
In this lively conversation, Garner will explore how our appetites for stories and food are deeply intertwined. With wit and insight, he will share his reflections on the joy of eating, the art of reading, and the unique magic that happens when the two collide. From unforgettable food scenes in literature to the pleasures of a great meal paired with a great book, Garner’s work is a love letter to the senses.
Dwight will read from the collection and engage in a Q&A.
There will also be pickles and peanut butter sandwiches served—a featured dish in The Upstairs Delicatessen!
This event is part of the Cleveland Humanities Festival: Appetite.
Registration is requested. Register .
About the Speaker:
Dwight Garner is an American journalist, as well as a writer and editor for The New York Times. Upon joining The Times in 1998, he spent a decade as an editor at the Book Review. In 2008, he became a book critic himself. Before joining The Times, Garner was a founding editor of Salon.com. Garner currently lives in New York City with his wife and fellow writer Cree LeFavour.
Learn more about Dwight Garner .
Elysia Balavage is an Anisfield-Wolf fellow at ǿմý. Her research interests include transnational modernist readings of nihilistic ideas; modernism and gastronomy; and the relationship between food culture and working-class spaces in modern British literature. Her chapter on “Orwell and Food” is forthcoming (late 2025) in George Orwell in Context (Cambridge UP) and her work appears or is forthcoming in English Studies, the Review of English Studies, the Journal of Modern Literature, Modernism/Modernity, and others. She is currently working on an article that investigates depictions of cannibalism in modernist literature.