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One woman, a tiny farm, unruly chickens, and the challenge of putting down roots in a rapidly changing world

Cat Woman in Dog Country is Helena Feder's witty, perceptive account of life on a tiny North Carolina farm. Part memoir, part nature writing, and part literary how-not-to guide to growing and raising things, it chronicles her attempts to cultivate a small plot while marveling at the symbiotic wonders of figs and wasps, navigating chicken politics, and learning to laugh at her own mistakes.

A transplanted Yankee by way of California, Feder often feels like exactly what the title suggests: a cat woman in dog country. Conspicuous in a place where men still largely own and work the land, she finds herself at once welcomed, bewildered, and fascinated by the culture around her. Along the way, she discovers that teaching Walden requires a very different skill set from growing her own beans and that country life comes with its share of challenges, from failed crops to an alarming abundance of rats and copperheads.

Charming, laugh-out-loud funny, and deeply thoughtful, Cat Woman in Dog Country reflects making a home in an era of climate change, forever chemicals, and environmental uncertainty. It is a book for anyone who ponders the personal, social, and planetary meaning of home.
 

Writers of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries—a period of vast economic change—recognized that the global trade in alcohol and tobacco promised a brighter financial future for England, even as overindulgence at home posed serious moral pitfalls. This engaging and original study explores how literary satirists represented these consumables—and related anxieties about the changing nature of Britishness—in their work. Riley traces the satirical treatment of wine, beer, ale, gin, pipe tobacco, and snuff from the beginning of Charles II’s reign, through the boom in tobacco’s popularity, to the end of the Gin Craze in libertine poems and plays, anonymous verse, ballad operas, and the satire of canonical writers such as Gay, Pope, and Swift. Focusing on social concerns about class, race, and gender, Consuming Anxieties examines how satirists championed Britain’s economic strength on the world stage while critiquing the effects of consumable luxuries on the British body and consciousness.