A compilation of essays by a selection of international writers, all discussing pivotal moments in their lives that involved food. Ann Patchett discusses a trip to Paris with her boyfriend, sitting in a romantic restaurant and nearly breaking up because he didn't understand a word game she tried to teach him. Gary Shteyngart writes of growing up in Queens on a bland Russian diet that didn't satisfy him, and Chinese author Yiyun Li writes of the American drink Tang coming to China and becoming a status symbol. British author Pico Iyer discusses the importance of the local convenience store in the Japanese neighborhood, and George Saunders has a very funny essay called "The Absolutely No-Anything Diet", in which food is replaced with alcohol. ( )

I love essays. And if you want to read fantastic essays, get a bunch from the times and put them in a book!

I am in awe of Amanda Hesser and her ideas. Food writing that is not odes to grandmother's cooking, but instead essays about why grandmother cooked. I loved reading this on the subway as they were just the right length between work and home. She chose talented writers, playwrights, and poets to render memories into delectable bites.

My favorites were: The Great Carrot Caper, The Absolutely No-Anything Diet, Home Turf, Line of Sight, Turning Japanese, and Crossing to Safety. Altho really.. none of these stories were bad.. I love stories about tastes in other countries, how someone found a recipe, working thru your grief thru cooking. All of these appeal to me. I also was highly entertained by the fact that I have read many of these authors other works, making a glimpse into their life.. their food life.. more interesting. ( )

I don't know about the great in "Great Writers" but it was very enjoyable. More a collection of amuses than a main dish but very good amuses. The only difficulty I have with this book has more to do with me than with the book. The stories, to be appreciated for all they are worth, should be read seperately, I think and not, as I did, in two sessions.

I loved this anthology of columns from the New York Times Magazine relating to food and memory. The pieces are all short, and are in turns funny and meaningful. My favorites were probably "Inward Bound" by Chang-Rae Lee, about compulsively cooking while her mother was dying, and "The Sixth Sense," by Gary Shteyngart, in which he waxes poetic about his childhood deprivation of, and longing for, garlic. ( )

This slim collection of gastronomic essays from the New York Times is like an hors d’oeuvre; not quite enough to satisfy your appetite, but enough to stimulate it for something more substantial later on. You might, indeed, run straight to your kitchen to experiment with one of the recipes included here, but you’re more likely to be seen scanning your bookshelves for something good and meaty like Bill Buford’s Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany (Vintage) or Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly.

Not that this book isn’t as enjoyable as a good artichoke dip with pita chips. It seems unlikely that Colson Whitehead will convince you to forgo dessert with his essay, “I Scream,” but you’ll certainly understand why he does after reading about his summers working in an ice cream shop at the beach. Dawn Drzal’s essay about an uncomfortable interview with M.F.K. Fisher, the doyenne of food writing, is a sad tale of the havoc old age wreaks on our bodies. Yiyun Li’s story about how Tang once seemed like a magical, unobtainable treat, “Orange Crush,” gives us a peek at life in China in the 1960s. George Saunders’s “The Absolutely No-Anything Diet,” about how he gained 10 pounds by eating and drinking nothing but water, made me think about how I can gain an inch around my hips just be looking at Haagen-Daazs in the freezer at the grocery store (and the recipe for Sanders’s “Light-As-Air Brunch” is even funnier). Allen Shawn’s “Family Menu,” the tale of his mentally-retarded sister’s annual birthday luncheon and the year the menu changed, will touch your heart.

The recipes sound good, too, though I’ve not yet tried my hand at any of them. John Robin Baitz, in “American Dreams,” his essay about teenage life in Durban, South Africa, concludes with a recipe for Durban lamb curry with tomato and mint sambal that sounds frightfully complicated but completely delicious. I’m not sure I’m up to attempting the recipe for cream of watercress soup with caviar that comes from Taillevent, a French restaurant that boasts two Michelin stars, but I wouldn’t mind trying it in Paris, as Ann Patchett did in “Paris Match.” I think the shrimp with garlic – gambas al ajillo – described in Gary Shteyngart’s “The Sixth Sense” sounds the most scrumptious, especially since I can sympathize with Shteyngart’s longing for garlic as a child: my mother never used the pungent and fragrant bulb in her cooking, either.

You could probably gobble up all these essays in a single sitting, as I did, or parcel them out for a little taste at a time over days in order to savor them more completely. Either way, though, you’re going to be hungry for more good writing about food than this book can provide. Maybe Frank Bruni’s memoir, Born Round: The Secret History of a Full-time Eater should be waiting for you when you finish Eat, Memory. Or maybe you’ll just be plain hungry, in which case I recommend that you go shopping with this book in hand. In either case, this book will unquestionably leave you wanting more. ( )