228 pages
Get Thee to a Bakery is a collection of short, tart essays that explore both humorous and harrowing aspects of growing older and making sense of social, technological, and environmental change. Topics range from earworms and industrial eggs to peaches and personal data, from bug die-offs to algae blooms and global warming, and from beards and yoga to the irrepressible American smile.
Many of these essays make discursive moves into science and literature, framing issues and conflicts that resonate in contemporary American life. With a conversational style, distinctive voice, and great comic timing, Bailey entertains and surprises.
1. Get Thee to a Bakery
2. This Body Offers to Carry Us
3. A Minor Memory
4. Con te partirò
5. On Wine Tasting and the Limits of Winespeak
6. Learning to Like It
7. You’re Not Going to Eat That, Are You?
8. Clean Up Your Act
9. Alien Pleasures
10. Ecumenical Meat Loaf
11. Good Eggs
12. Bombolone, Venus, Boar
13. Speak to Me
14. Do the Work
15. Take the Money
16. Listen to Teresa
17. Anyone Who Had a Heart
18. Drop It
19. Teeth First
20. Back to Comanche
21. Smitty
22. Still Alive
23. Badass
24. Stand Up
25. Waterful
26. We’re Melting
27. Monsters
28. Fit But
29. Quit It
30. A Suite, a Swim, a Fish
31. Me and Velociraptor and Forrest Gump
32. Rock Me
33. Faces in the Stone
34. Where We Are Was Once a Sea
35. But Why Florida?
36. Coffee Ma’am
37. In Search of
38. The Efficacy of Loud
39. Yoga, Space, and Bragadin’s Skin
40. Don’t Wait
41. Third Eye Seeing
42. This American Smile
