Go obscure, out-of-print, feminist, progressive, female authors!!! Woot!
February 14, 2015 3:02 AM   Subscribe

Drinking My Way Through the Literary 1930's : "The backbone of this blog is the amazing and unfortunately out-of-print book, So Red the Nose. To this 1935, somewhat tongue-in-cheek recipe book, thirty bestselling contemporary authors submitted original cocktails, based around their own original works ... My mission, then, is to recreate 29 of these cocktails ... and combine them with their namesakes, ... discovering which books are classics tragically forgotten and which are better left to collect dust in library basements." [via mefi projects]

Results thus far:

Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon
Oliver La Farge, Laughing Boy
Frank Scully, Fun in Bed
Roark Bradford, John Henry
Erskine Caldwell, Tobacco Road
Frank Buck, Bring 'Em Back Alive
S. S. Van Dine, The "Canary" Murder Case
Christopher Morley, Swiss Family Manhattan
Margaret Ayer Barnes, Years of Grace
Edgar Rice Burroughs, Tarzan
MacKinlay Kantor, The Voice of Bugle Ann
Harriet Monroe, Poets and their Art
Rockwell Kent, Salamina
E. Phillips Oppenheim, The Man without Nerves
Janet Ayer Fairbank, The Bright Land
posted by Monsieur Caution (11 comments total) 41 users marked this as a favorite
 
Tarzan is racist? ENGAGE SURPRISED FACE
posted by Potomac Avenue at 5:32 AM on February 14, 2015


This is a cool idea. Someone should do the same thing except with children's books & then tape oneself reading them to one's kid while mildly sloshed. And every cocktail would just be a pint of Old Grandad. Nobody steal this.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 5:34 AM on February 14, 2015 [3 favorites]


Someone should do the same thing except with children's books

I'm pretty sure you'd die if you tried to eat your way through Redwall.
posted by Wolfdog at 5:38 AM on February 14, 2015 [3 favorites]


That's pretty much exactly what I'd expect Rockwell Kent, arctic-living spare stern line drawing cartoonishly butch illustrator of the random house logo , to drink.
posted by The Whelk at 6:36 AM on February 14, 2015 [1 favorite]


This is a fun read. And she's totally sold me on Years of Grace! I'll be checking that out of the library for sure. (Also the accompanying cocktail sounds quite nice, especially once the weather warms up.)
posted by theatro at 6:37 AM on February 14, 2015


Ah, every generation must rediscover Erskine Caldwell. And then they can be shocked, either by the shocking content, or by how cynically and deliberately it's working to shock urban readers with the depravity of rural southerners. This writer, being young, earnest, and a bit credulous, goes for the former.
posted by ThatFuzzyBastard at 6:48 AM on February 14, 2015


I didn't realize how racist Tarzan was until I read it; pop culture Tarzan is just a guy who swings through trees and yodels. Although, one of my favorite juxtapositions was reading Tarzan, the Heart of Darkness, King Leopold's Ghosts, and Dancing In The Glory of Monsters, which provides a goofy semi-contemporary take on the Belgian Congo, a serious semi-contemporary take on the Belgian Congo, a journalistic take on Belgian Congo, and a journalistic take on the modern day consequences of the Belgian Congo on the Great Lakes region of Africa.
posted by ChuraChura at 6:54 AM on February 14, 2015 [2 favorites]


That was a fun read, and she's sold me on Laughing Boy and Years of Grace. Actually, she sort of made me wonder if it would be good to go back and read Pulitzer Prize winning novels, although looking back over them there are a few (Gone With the Wind, The Good Earth) that I read as a kid and have absolutely no desire to re-read. On the other hand, I read Age of Innocence and Angle of Repose in my early twenties and think they might be worth a revisit.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 7:41 AM on February 14, 2015


Bring 'Em Back Barely Alive!
posted by The Underpants Monster at 6:07 PM on February 14, 2015


(He could have made a dirty martini called "Bring 'em Back Olives.")
posted by The Underpants Monster at 6:08 PM on February 14, 2015 [1 favorite]


What a great concept for a blog, and well-executed to boot.

After reading all the posts I was dying to know why the first post mentions one of the cocktails, for American Tragedy, can't be recreated - then going from the Projects post, to a project-related Ask post, I found why:
"nitroglycerin, gunpowder, gasoline, and a lighted match."
posted by Gordafarin at 12:36 PM on February 15, 2015


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