Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.
Coffee--it's the thing that gets us through, and over, and around. The thing--the beverage, the break, the ritual--we choose to slow ourselves down or speed ourselves up. The excuse to pause; the reason to meet; the charge we who drink it allow ourselves in lieu of something stronger or scarier. Coffee goes to lifestyle, and character, and sensibility: where do we buy it, how do we brew it, how strong can we take it, how often, how hot, how cold? How does coffee remind us, stir us, comfort us?

But Coffee is about more than coffee: it's a personal history and a promise to self; in her confrontation with the hours (with time--big picture, little picture), Dinah Lenney faces head-on the challenges of growing older and carrying on.
Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

Dinah Lenney has served as core faculty for the Bennington Writing Seminars and in the Master of Professional Writing Program at the University of Southern California. A longtime nonfiction editor at LARB, she herself has published several books in the genre, including Coffee (as part of the Bloomsbury Object Lessons series), The Object Parade and Bigger than Life, and co-edited Brief Encounters: A Collection of Literary Nonfiction with the late Judith Kitchen. Dinah's essays and reviews have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, and The Washington Post among many other publications.

Prologue
1. The Impossibility of the Task
2. My Mother Is Coming, My Mother Is Coming
The Questionnaire
3. Coffee-Milk
From the Coffee Diaries #1
4. My Emerging Palate
A Coffee Story (Third-Hand)
5. What We Talk About When We Talk About Coffee (Teresa Was Right)
6. Coffee in Brooklyn
7. Twenty-Two Hands...
A Coffee Story (First-Hand)
Rules Shmules (Just a Few, in No Particular Order)
These Things About Coffee Are True
From the Coffee Diaries #2
8. Serious Business
9. Shouldn't Coffee Taste Like Coffee?
(If You Say So)
10. Coffee in Paris
11. Extending the Metaphor
12. All the Things You Are
13. The Power of Suggestion
14. One More Prompt
15. Am I Blue
From the Coffee Diaries #3
16. A Word About Tea
A Riddle (Excellent Advertising)
From the Coffee Diaries #4
17. Reunion
Coffee and My Father
From the Coffee Diaries #5
From the Coffee Diaries #6
18. Coffee and Catastrophe
From the Coffee Diaries #7
19. Coffee in Echo Park
20. Coffee and the Jews
Coffee and Dad
21. The Widow
22. Altered States
From the Coffee Diaries #8
From the Coffee Diaries #9
From the Coffee Diaries #10
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
My Coffee Book Fort (Further Reading)
Index