In these fifteen remarkable stories, M.F.K. Fisher, one of the most admired writers of our time, embraces the coming of old age. With a saint to guide us, she writes, perhaps we can accept in a loving way "the inevitable visits of a possibly nagging harpy like Sister Age" But in the stories, it is the human strength in the unavoidable encounter with the end of life that Fisher dramatizes so powerfully. Other themes—the importance of witnessing death, the marvelous resilience of the old, the passing of vanity—are all explored with insight, sympathy and, often, a sly wit.

This volume brings together two delightful books—Map of Another Town and A Considerable Town—by one of our most beloved food and travel writers. In her inimitable style, here M.F.K. Fisher tells the stories—and reveals the secrets—of two quintessential French cities. Map of Another Town, Fisher's memoir of the French provincial capital of Aix-en-Provence is, as the author tells us, "my picture, my map, of a place and therefore of myself," and a vibrant and perceptive profile of the kinship between a person and a place. Then, in A Considerable Town, she scans the centuries to reveal the ancient sources that clarify the Marseille of today and the indestructible nature of its people, and in so doing weaves a delightful journey filtered through the senses of a profound writer.

When her long-time agent and friend Robert Lescher died in 2012, the manuscript of M.F.K. Fisher's unpublished first novel was discovered packed tidily away in one of Lescher's signature red boxes.Following on the success of Serve It Forth and written when she was in her early 30s, the novel employs Fisher's characteristic sharp-eyed wit to sketch themes so outré they may have seemed too challenging for a proper woman of her time to attempt.Set in the late 1930s,The Theoretical Foot concerns two expat American couples in Europe, tramping from country to country without sanction of marriage, this during an era when cohabitation—to say nothing of a girl's hitchhiking!—could ruin a respectable woman's reputation for all time. As fascism spreads and war inevitably approaches, the idyll of a beautiful life of love and freedom from convention is also threatened from within, as the man in one of the couples falls gravely ill with a rare...