Comfort Me with Apples

A literary syncopation on the theme of food, Comfort Me With Apples earned Joe Fiorito rave reviews and enthusiastic fans when it was first published in 1994. One writer declared it was “a small miracle of prose.” A rich buffet of diverse short essays, Comfort Me With Apples is about the appetites of the soul as well as the body.

Fiorito’s range is wide: from the ingredients for the best chili dog in the world to the recipe for chicken soup for the courting soul; from the sharp portrait of a young boy’s real hunger to the olfactory pleasures of a proper barbecue. His guests include an Inuk whom he takes to a sushi bar, an old man in pajamas, Julia Child, several daddies, a woman with a seductive appetite, and Hercules. You are invited to join them.

B.Y.O.B.“How does Joe Fiorito do it? The mixture of toughness, elegance and lethal wit. The street-smart, bruising tenderness packed into language sharper than flint.”
–Mark Abley, author of The Ice Storm

“Fiorito is that wonder of wonders, a deeply curious and perceptive reporter who is also a fine and imaginative writer.”
–Montreal Gazette

“There’s a wise-cracking tenderness to his writing that makes him come across as a sort of Damon Runyon of the north.”
–Canadian ForumJoe Fiorito is the author of Comfort Me With Apples, first published in 1994, and Tango on the Main (1996), a selection of his city columns from the Montreal Gazette. His family memoir, The Closer We Are to Dying, published in 1999, was a national best-seller and earned the author further critical acclaim. Guy Vanderhaeghe called it “a remarkable memoir, perhaps the finest by a Canadian writer since John Glassco’s Memoirs of Montparnasse appeared in 1970.” Fiorito lives in Toronto and writes for the Toronto Star.