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Thank you to this week’s sponsor: Fight Night: Ontroerend Goed, October 4–5 at Duke University.
What if debate club was an elimination-style gameshow? Five contestants pull out all the stops to win your favor in real-time. From charm to strategy – anything goes in this unforgettable theatrical experience.

Hi! Happy weekend.

Hope you’re staying dry, still have power, and are weather Helene okay. Maybe you can stay in tonight and bake something sweet? Last night I made a snack apple cake, inspired, not so subtly, by this interview with “Cake Doctor” Anne Byrn, who is coming through Durham this month on a tour for her latest cookbook, Baking in the American South. 

You may remember Byrn from her colorful, early-2000s (sort of Readers Digest-esque?) cookbooks that, as Lena Geller writes, offered instructions for how to doctor cake mixes, “with add-ins like sour cream and Sherry.” Byrn’s latest cookbook takes a more narrative turn with a survey of Southern recipes sourced from “department stores, school cafeterias, mills, and churches.” Ahead of an event at the Durham Hotel, Byrn chatted with Geller about researching the cookbook, and the recipes—from persimmon pudding and Atlantic Beach pie to Gastonia’s double-crust blackberry cobbler—that have shaped North Carolina. 

Byrn’s event is at the Durham Hotel on October 14. If you’re looking for other book events this fall, here are a few more on my radar: former UNC-Chapel Hill professor Minrose Gwin will present Beautiful Dreamers at Flyleaf Books tonight, Rachel Kushner (!!) will be at Duke for a talk on October 19, Duke’s Bill Adair will present Beyond the Big Lie (“an eye-opening and engaging history of political liars”) on October 24, and Toni Tipton-Martin, who wrote the foreword for When Southern Women Cook, will have an event at Fearrington on November 7. 

And for more literary content, here’s a nice feature on the Regulator from 9th Street Journal: “Part of what Durham is, in so many ways, is the intersection between Duke University and the broader community, and the bookstore is pivotal in that relationship,”  former Duke professor Laurent Dubois wrote about the Regulator in the book “My Bookstore.”

Thank you for reading, and we hope that you are staying safe and dry from the flooding.

Cookbook author Anne Bryn. Photo by Danielle Atkins.

out and about in the triangle

Walter Magazine has a nice guide to fall music across the Triangle. Petey Pablo on WUNC. Giorgios Epicurean Market (“GEM”) is now open in Raleigh. Ashley Christensen is raising money for the Southern Smoke Foundation’s “behind you” program, which provides mental health resources for service workers. And there’s a new dive in Raleigh, Stellas on West, described here as “If a dive bar were a girl.” (Interesting!) A breakdown of new additions to Durham’s dining scene. 

out and about in the world

“Elizabeth Catlett: Revolutionary Artist, Radical Inspiration.” An excerpt from Alice Driver’s forthcoming book on labor conditions in the meatpacking industry, available on the Oxford American. On developing friendships as an adult. Children’s books and the coast of Maine. (RIYL: Blueberries for Sal.)

— Sarah Edwards —
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Sarah Edwards is culture editor of the INDY, covering cultural institutions and the arts in the Triangle. She joined the staff in 2019 and assumed her current role in 2020.