I arrived home at dinnertime, braindead from a long day of car and plane travel but determined to eat a home-cooked meal. “There are all these vegetables,” my boyfriend had told me on the phone, when I was in the cab from LaGuardia. “Should I do something to them? I could boil some water and put some pasta in it.”

I've subscribed to Emily Books since the beginning, mostly just because Emily and Ruth have dynamite, dynamite taste, and it's like having a personal shopper for reasonably-obscure, fabulous reading. So we asked Emily if she would tell us a bit about how Emily Books came to be, and wheedled a discount code out of her (readers of The Toast can take 20% off purchases from Emily Books -- subscriptions or individual books -- by…