Table Talk & Second Thoughts - by Michael Martone (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

FINALIST, Big Other Book Awards (2025)

With wit and humor, Michael Martone writes his life as one of brief bites, effervescent episodes, and meaningful meals illuminated by the luminaries on the other side of the table. In many ways Martone's annotations of a life lived with words and writers, Table Talk & Second Thoughts surges with poignancy while recalling the little moments that make us human.

Review Quotes

"This is the name-dropping-est memoir I've ever read, and I told Michael Martone so when I met him at the Essenhaus in Middlebury Township. He was wearing a tan off the rack double breasted suit and had his draft card in the pocket. Martone is one of the few writers who was born in Indiana, writes about Indiana, and eats in Indiana, but meanwhile, he seems to have been everywhere else, too, meeting all the best writers. That's my life, he said. We both ordered the John Barth special, but the Amish maiden brought us mashed potatoes and a tub of fried chicken anyway. 'Tunnel of Fudge Cake for dessert?' I suggested. 'Bluaugh!' said Michael Martone, but he didn't say no."

-Bonnie Jo Campbell, National Book Award Finalist, author of American Salvage and The Waters

"April 1999, I went to Tuscaloosa for an interview at the University of Alabama. After the usual meetings-committee, department chair, dean-Michael Martone walked me to his car and took me on a tour. We talked about our native Midwest as we drove through town. We ended up on a street of brick ranch houses with tidy lawns. 'Faculty live here, ' he told me. 'Looks like my parents' neighborhood, ' I said. Wordlessly he made a quick U-turn, bumping the curb, and headed downtown. Double-parked in front of a record store called Whirligig, he pointed. 'There are apartments up there.'"

-Josh Russell, author of King of the Animals and Yellow Jack

"This Michael, this Martone, this Michael Martone."

-Stewart O'Nan, author of Ocean State and Henry, Himself

"When you gather in restaurants to talk books, poetry, gossip, celebrate famous writers, Martone brings his Fort Wayne-metafiction-autobiographical-half-the-time-you-don't-get-what-he's-talking-about humor, his irony and his wit, his love for his wife and his new-dad-means-everything zeal. Outside, the snow may be falling, and on the streets, among strangers, there may be only that clipped, cold briskness, but Martone is here, he's from Indiana, and he warms you; he makes you laugh. He makes you feel you belong."

-Rilla Askew, American Book Award Winner, author of The Hungry and the Haunted and Fire in Beulah

"Strange anecdotes and stranger laughter. A perfect hootenanny of Martone-ography."

-Robert Stapleton, editor of Booth