Cover: Food of Place
Blurring the borders of regional food. Or just what the heck is wine country cuisine?

Urban Garden: Stalking the wild persimmon.

On the Shelf: A quartet of engaging new cookbooks.

Dinner Date: Local restaurants unveil multicourse millennial menus for New Year's Eve.

Veg-Mex: Meatless Mexican cooking for the holidays.

Heard It Through the Grapevine: Get to the root of all things wine.

Organ Trail: Making a case for living-donor transplants.

Holy War: Filmmaker Kevin Smith skewers his Catholic faith in 'Dogma.'

Heady Stuff: 'Being John Malkovich' is a surreal cinematic tour de farce.

Bang the Drum: Newly revamped Healdsburg armory hosts Festival Africa.

SF Club Guide: Disco divas, hip-hop connoisseurs and salsa suaves to flannel-clad pinball players, jazz luminaries and more from the City by the Bay.

Taking Flight: A pair of local theater companies stage 'Angels in America.'

Field Manual: A handy guide to Napa Valley food-and-wine offerings.

Stiffed Upper Lip: Today's man is drifting and drifting, cut loose from the work that once defined him, according to author Susan Faludi and the creators of 'American Beauty' and 'Fight Club.'

A Beautiful Terror: Roddy Doyle's street-smart Irish killing machine doesn't give a 'shite'--but readers will.

Rush of Fortune: A young woman confronts cultural conflicts in Isabelle Allende's new novel.

Escaping From the Labyrinth: Robin Magowan recalls a life of leisure, verse and strife in 'Memoirs of a Minotaur.'

Emotional Baggage: Nick Bantock takes readers on a richly visual tour of 10 imaginary collections in 'The Museum at Purgatory.'

High Marx For Karl: Marshall Berman argues for a Marx better than the societies he begat.

A Human Hitler? In 'Hitler's Niece,' the terrible leader of the Third Reich is just a man--however dysfunctional.

Between the Lines: Iranian-Americans speak in verse and prose in new anthology.