Andrea Chesman of Ripton may not be a household name, but in local foodie circles she’s known for writing cookbooks that make excellent use of Vermont’s seasonal ingredients, particularly veggies. Published in 2007, Serving Up the Harvest: Celebrating the Goodness of Fresh Vegetables is easy to find at local food markets and bookstores.... Read more

Think college kids today are self-conscious? “Call us the apathetic generation and we will become that,” wrote Joyce Maynard in her 1972 New York Times Magazine essay “An Eighteen-Year-Old Looks Back on Life.” “Say times are changing ... and you make a movement and a unit out of a generation unified only in its common fragmentation.”... Read more

If you arrive at Brad Kessler’s southern Vermont farmhouse and don’t find him at home, he’s probably out walking the goats. In clement weather, the slender 46-year-old ambles up a hill and through an aging orchard with his herd of nine Nubians, stopping for a moment to pluck small green apples. The copper and black goats, the largest of which weigh in at around 150 pounds, thrust their elegant necks toward him in anticipation of the treat.... Read more

In the first three pages of Tess Stimson’s novel One Good Affair, a neonatalogist enjoys torrid sex with her long-time lover, thinks tenderly about her clueless husband, receives an emergency call, leaps out of bed and heads off to the hospital in her sky-high red stilettos.... Read more

It’s a common practice: Release bad news late on a Friday afternoon.

That was the case in Burlington last week, when a shocking tidbit turned up in the email inbox at 2:57 p.m. on August 21. It came in the form of a joint statement from Progressive Mayor Bob Kiss and Steve Allen, chairman of the city Parks & Recreation Commission.... Read more

The University of Vermont uses its annual academic convocation to set the tone for the upcoming year. But this Sunday, townies might want to attend just to hear the keynote speaker, renowned nonfiction author Tracy Kidder.... Read more

It’s published original interviews with Christopher Hitchens, Jonathan Safran Foer, Barbara Ehrenreich, Sarah Vowell and John Cusack, to name a few. But Identity Theory doesn’t come between glossy covers. Its staff of about 20 is composed of volunteers, and its publisher and editor-in-chief’s office, at least on a recent afternoon, is a table in Burlington’s New Moon Café.... Read more

When Thomas Middleton enlisted in the Army Reserve in 1985, he never actually expected to go to war. Then a 17-year-old high school student in West Chazy, N.Y., Middleton saw the reserves as an exciting opportunity, but also as a mere “vestigial organ” of the U.S. military, he says. In an age when mutual assured destruction was “the theory of the day,” he assumed a conventional ground war was unlikely in his lifetime.... Read more

Nearly four years after Hurricane Katrina, the effects — and the memories — haven’t gone away. That’s the message of New Orleans poet Ray “Moose” Jackson, who’s currently crafting a piece about the city called “Danger Angels” during his residency at Montpelier’s nonprofit performance space Lamb Abbey.... Read more

As book publishers and Hollywood execs know well, kids love talking animals. So why not use a garrulous canine to teach them a bit about great ideas in philosophy?... Read more