Peter Lewis was
born and raised in Chicago. He worked for years as a bookseller (Reed College
Co-op, Cody's and Catbird Seat) and served on the board of Copper Canyon Press
for nearly a decade. He founded and operated Campagne and Café Campagne in
Seattle until he sold the restaurants in 2005. One of the high spots of Lewis's gastronomic life has been his stints as
traveling companion to Jim Harrison, poet, novelist and gourmand. Their forays, dubbed by Harrison a "Search for the Genuine,"
have taken them from the exquisite pleasures of the most recherché Parisian establishments to those of hidden
kitchens throughout la France profonde. Accounts of these lucullan adventures,
written by Harrison, have occasionally surfaced--most notoriously in the New
Yorker ("A Really Big Lunch,"
2004). Now a restaurant consultant, Lewis is also an author: his debut murder mystery, Dead in the Dregs, was
published by Counterpoint last month.
On your nightstand now:
When I'm into a restaurant consulting project, as I am now, the nightstand gets a little out of hand:
Muriel Barbery, Gourmet Rhapsody
Jack Gilbert, The Dance Most of All
Denis Johnson, Nobody Move
Neal Rosenthal, Reflections of a Wine Merchant
Mahmoud Darwish, Mural
Michael Steinberger, Au Revoir to All That
Niccolò Ammaniti, As God Commands
Charles Bowden, Some of the Dead Are Still Breathing
Boston Teran, God Is a Bullet
Favorite book when you were a child:
It's a race between The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling and Stuart Little by E.B. White. My mother read Kipling to me; Stuart Little was the first "serious" novel I read to myself that conferred an "adult" pleasure.
"And it's Stuart Little, by a whisker!"
Your top five authors:
This is a nearly impossible task. It's like being asked, "What are your top five favorite wines?" (Actually, the wine question would be much easier to answer.)
Mystery: James Crumley, Andrea Camilleri, Paco Ignacio Taibo III, Raymond Chandler, Michael Dibdin
Food & Cooking: Richard Olney, Paula Wolfert, M.F.K. Fisher, Roy Andries de Groot, Elizabeth David
Wine: Gerald Asher, Simon Loftus, Kermit Lynch, Andrew Jefford, Jancis Robinson
Book you've faked reading:
Dante's The Divine Comedy in the six-volume Bollingen edition. Thing is, you wouldn't have known if I hadn't told you. You'd just be impressed, seeing it sitting on my bookshelf. I prefer reading La Commedia in the various translations by poets: W.S. Merwin, Robert Pinsky et al.
Book you are an evangelist for:
Roberto Calasso's Literature and the Gods. Calasso wears his erudition so lightly--his scope of reference is so vast--that his work embodies the simultaneity of all art of which Eliot spoke. I've turned a number of poet friends onto his work. I'm not sure they ever see the world, or their own work, the same way again.
Book you've bought for the cover:
Roald Dahl's Taste in the Redpath Press edition. Then, of course, I read it, and it's a miraculous little story.
Book that changed your life:
Two books, actually, carried in tandem as I wandered the Niger Bend in 1972: Rexroth's 100 Poems from the Chinese and Penguin Modern Poets 9: Denise Levertov/Kenneth Rexroth/William Carlos Williams. They're virtually in tatters now, but they were constant and faithful companions and kept me centered and sane for months in some truly remote precincts. There's a beer label (Flag Spéciale: Société des Brasseries du Niger) still marking "The Red Wheelbarrow" on page 84.
Favorite line from a book:
"The world is so necessary." --from "Postscript," Letters to Yesenin by Jim Harrison.
Book you have re-read:
Moby-Dick
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
Homer's The Odyssey. On a trip through the Aeolian Islands several years ago, it felt as if I was experiencing Odysseus's voyage--the sea, the geography, the gods--through his eyes. Odysseus's eyes. Homer was blind as a bat.