Bread

Scott Shershow is a writer of beautiful sentences that convey the ambiguity of a thing we often take as a bland lump to be smeared with fats and oils. In prose as crystal as bread isn't, and as sensual as it is, Shershow reveals how deeply political and philosophical issues concerning hospitality (aka the breaking of bread) are fueled and interrupted by bread itself. All other bread books are now toast. * Timothy Morton, Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English, Rice University, USA , and author of Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence *

Anyone who spends serious time weighing a name for his starter has crossed over to the other side, but Shershow is comfortable there, too, at home with the philosophers and poets of bread. * Robert Pisor, Founder of Stone House Bread, Leland, Michigan *

For Shershow, bread is everywhere because it is a miracle, and miraculous because it is everywhere. To know bread, he argues, one must work with it. Learning to bake teaches the baker just how much is beyond his control. ... Shershow's Bread treats its object much like a critical theorist does language, as a human invention that exceeds human control. * Los Angeles Review of Books *

Eye opening. * Times Literary Supplement *