Michael Paterniti

During a 1991 proofreading stint at a deli, following his graduation from the University of Michigan's creative writing program, the author read a paragraph describing a "sublime" cheese from Castile. "There was something about all of it, not just the perfection of Ari's prose, " writes Paterniti, "but the story he told--the rustic cheesemaker, the ancient family recipe, the old-fashioned process by which the cheese was born, even the idiosyncratic...