Though her boyfriend dedicates a novel to her and then leaves her in the middle of a party she gives to celebrate its publication, she comes away from it all with more than the bouquet of magazine scent strips that he left behind. In attempting to get rid of his stuff, she discovers the Zen of making jam, and through it the simple pleasure of creating a little world in which things turn out the way they're supposed to. She shares her funny stories of love lost, the twisted road out of her depression and the advice she got from psychics and strangers. Each of the chapters sees her go off in a new direction, looking for help in a different way, from dating again to taking a job, and sampling all the new cultural landscape has to offer to heal, from seeing a shrink to taking a seminar with a relationships guru.After years in New York and a move to Montana, Bull finds herself suddenly drawn back to her childhood home of Wisconsin, where "USA Today has just announced in a colorful pie chart that the people there are the only ones in the country who are fatter and drinking more beer than they were ten years ago." Bull delights in taking aim at all the celebrities who've crossed her path as a journalist, tossing their worst moments into the stories wherever they help. Wise, funny, and enlightening in spite of itself, Blue Jelly argues that depression, when it sends you off on adventures like these, is very good for the soul. Plus, there are 15 real canning recipes.

    Her weapons—the batterie de cuisine of grills and squeezers and knives—evoke a lifetime’s need to make dinner, love, and war. By prying open the past with these implements, Betty Fussell gives voice to a generation of women whose stories were shaped and yet simultaneously silenced by an era of domestic strife and global conflict, from World War II to Vietnam. My Kitchen Wars also is a love story, recounting Fussell’s liberation from the tyrannical Puritanism of her family by a veteran of the “Good War,” a young writer named Paul Fussell. But she soon finds herself captive again, constrained by the roles of faculty wife and mother. Still, she cannot stop hungering for both a life of the mind and carnal pleasures. Her inner war to unite body and mind brings down the marriage in a denouement as brutal as the whack of a cleaver. Yet Fussell, however bruised, emerges to cook another dinner and to tell her tale in this fierce and funny memoir. My Kitchen Wars was adapted into a one-woman play performed in Hollywood and New York.

    You love the smell of napalm in the morning, you see dead people, and you’re the king (or queen!) of the world. You’ve basically logged more hours at the local megaplex than the projectionist—and you deserve a drink!A perfect gift for film buffs and a terrific twist on movie nights, Gone with the Gin is the ultimate cocktail book for die-hard silver screen aficionados who prefer to be shaken, not stirred. Included within are 50 delicious drinks—paired with winking commentary on history’s most quotable films—plus an all-star lineup of drinking games, movie-themed munchies, and illustrations throughout.So go ahead, make my drink. Even if you don’t know every line from every movie, tonight you’re gonna drink like you do.Coming attractions include: A Sidecar Named Desire, Whiskey Business, No Country for Old Fashioneds, Taxi Screw-Driver, Bonnie and Mudslide, A Clockwork Orange Julius, and more!

    With the same eye for drama and humor that Corson brings to the exploits of the chefs, he delves into the biology and natural history of the creatures of the sea. He illuminates sushi's beginnings as an Indo-Chinese meal akin to cheese, describes its reinvention in bustling nineteenth-century Tokyo as a cheap fast food, and tells the story of the pioneers who brought it to America. He shows how this unlikely meal is now exploding into the American heartland just as the long-term future of sushi may be unraveling.The Zen of Fish is a compelling tale of human determination as well as a delectable smorgasbord of surprising food science, intrepid reporting, and provocative cultural history.

    A former punk-rock political activist, Edgar bluffed his way into his cheese job knowing almost nothing, but quickly discovered a whole world of amazing artisan cheeses. There he developed a deep understanding and respect for the styles, producers, animals, and techniques that go into making great cheese.With a refreshingly unpretentious sensibility, Edgar intertwines his own life story with his ongoing love affair with cheese, and offers readers an unflinching, highly entertaining on-the-ground look at America's growing cheese movement. From problem customers to animal rights, business ethics to taste epiphanies, this book offers something for everyone, including cheese profiles and recommendations for selecting the very best -- not just the most expensive -- cheeses from the United States and around the world and a look at the struggles dairy farmers face in their attempts to stay on and make their living from the land.Edgar -- a smart, progressive cheese man with an activist's edge -- enlightens and delights with his view of the world from behind the cheese counter and his appreciation for the skill and tradition that go into a good wedge of Morbier.Cheesemonger is the first book of its kind -- a cheese memoir with attitude and information that will appeal to everyone from serious foodies to urban food activists.

    The result is this astonishing first-person account of a pioneer woman who braved grueling work, profound tragedy, and a pitiless wilderness (she and her family faced floods, tornadoes, fires, bears, panthers, and snakes) to protect her home in the early American South.An early draft of Trials of the Earth was submitted to a writers' competition sponsored by Little, Brown in 1933. It didn't win, and we almost lost the chance to bring this raw, vivid narrative to readers. Eighty-three years later, in partnership with Mary Mann Hamilton's descendants, we're proud to share this irreplaceable piece of American history. Written in spare, rich prose, Trials of the Earth is a precious record of one woman's extraordinary endurance and courage that will resonate with readers of history and fiction alike.

    The ability to create dishes that are utterly sublime and turn them out at breakneck pace while simultaneously juggling kitchen crises, coddling demanding patrons, and managing overworked staff is what defines a four-star chef. In The Fourth Star, award-winning author Leslie Brenner goes inside those swinging doors to explore the realities behind Daniel, capturing the dramas that arise in the insular, high-pressure milieu of a world-class kitchen. New York’s food establishment had been stunned when Daniel Boulud’s newly opened flagship restaurant was awarded only three stars from the New York Times. From that moment on, it became Boulud’s unspoken mission to regain the four-star rating that he’d previously garnered during his tenure at Le Cirque and then at his own first restaurant. That he was striving to do all this on an unprecedented scale, turning out nearly four hundred meals in a few short hours of service—meals that had to be absolutely perfect every time—made this goal all the more ambitious.Brenner paints a portrait of a remarkable French chef at a pivotal moment of his career, as Boulud relentlessly drives his staff to the peak of excellence. The Fourth Star provides full access to every aspect of Daniel, investigating everything from the maître d’s table assignment policies to the internecine politics of advancing up the culinary ladder.Filled with delectable, undercover details and moving personal drama, Brenner’s chronicle is an addictive read about the inner workings of a super-lative restaurant. The Fourth Star is destined to satisfy restaurant lovers, professional cooks, and armchair chefs alike.

    But now destiny was about to manifest itself. I felt like it was looking right at me and nobody else." So writes Bob Dylan in Chronicles: Volume One, his remarkable book exploring critical junctures in his life and career. Through Dylan's eyes and open mind, we see Greenwich Village, circa 1961, when he first arrives in Manhattan. Dylan's New York is a magical city of possibilities -- smoky, nightlong parties; literary awakenings; transient loves and unbreakable friendships. Elegiac observations are punctuated by jabs of memories, penetrating and tough. With the book's side trips to New Orleans, Woodstock, Minnesota and points west, Chronicles: Volume One is an intimate and intensely personal recollection of extraordinary times.By turns revealing, poetical, passionate and witty, Chronicles: Volume One is a mesmerizing window on Bob Dylan's thoughts and influences. Dylan's voice is distinctively American: generous of spirit, engaged, fanciful and rhythmic. Utilizing his unparalleled gifts of storytelling and the exquisite expressiveness that are the hallmarks of his music, Bob Dylan turns Chronicles: Volume One into a poignant reflection on life, and the people and places that helped shape the man and the art.

    But sweetness of the more intangible variety was harder to come by. Her parents were disastrously mismatched, far too preoccupied with their mutual misery to notice its effects on their kids. A frustrated artist, Kate’s beautiful, capricious mother lived in a constant state of creative and marital emergency, enlisting Kate as her confidante—“We’re the girls, we have to stick together”—and instructing her three children to refer to her in public as their babysitter. Kate’s father was aloof, ambitious, and prone to blasts of withering abuse increasingly directed at the daughter who found herself standing between her embattled parents. Kate looked for comfort in the imaginary worlds of books and found refuge in the kitchen, where she taught herself to bake and entered the one realm where she was able to wield control.Telling her own story with the same lyricism, compassion, and eye for lush detail she brings to her fiction, coupled with the candor and humor she is known for in her personal essays, Kate Moses leavens each tale of her coming-of-age in Cakewalk with a recipe from her lifetime of confectionary obsession. There is the mysteriously erotic German Chocolate Cake implicated in a birds-and-bees speech when Kate was seven, the gingerbread people her mother baked for Christmas the year Kate officially realized she was fat, the chocolate chip cookies Kate used to curry favor during a hilariously gruesome adolescence, and the brownies she baked for her idol, the legendary M.F.K. Fisher, who pronounced them “delicious.”Filled with the abundance and joy that were so lacking in Kate’s youth, Cakewalk is a wise, loving tribute to life in all its sweetness as well as its bitterness and, ultimately, a recipe for forgiveness.

    Hunger comes in many forms. A person can crave a steak in the same way that she can crave a perfect family life. In her memoir, Crave: A Memoir of Food and Longing, Christine O'Brien tells the story of her own cravings. It's a story of growing up in a family with a successful, but explosive father, a beautiful, but damaged, mother and three brothers in New York City's famed Dakota apartment building. Christine's father was Ed Scherick, the ABC television executive and film producer who created ABC's Wide World of Sports as well as classic films like The Taking of Pelham One Two Three and The Heartbreak Kid. Her mother, Carol, was raised on a farm in Missouri.With chestnut hair and the all-American good looks that won her the title of Miss Missouri and a finalist place in The Miss America Contest she looked to be the perfect wife and mother. But, Carol had a craving that was almost impossible to fill.Seriously injured in a farming accident when she was a girl, she craved health even though doctors told her that she was perfectly fine. Setting out on a journey through the quacks of the East Coast, she began seeing a doctor who prescribed "The Program" as a way to health for her and her family. At first she ate nothing but raw liver and drank shakes made with fresh yeast. Then it was blended salads, the forerunner of the smoothie. And that was all she let her family eat.This well-meant tyranny of the dinner table led Christine to her own cravings for family, for food and for the words to tell the story of her hunger. Crave is that story--the chronicle of a writer's painful and ultimately satisfying awakening.

     Leslie Marmon Silko's new book, her first in ten years, combines memoir with family history and reflections on the creatures and beings that command her attention and inform her vision of the world, taking readers along on her daily walks through the arroyos and ledges of the Sonoran desert in Arizona. Silko weaves tales from her family's past into her observations, using the turquoise stones she finds on the walks to unite the strands of her stories, while the beauty and symbolism of the landscape around her, and of the snakes, birds, dogs, and other animals that share her life and form part of her family, figure prominently in her memories. Strongly influenced by Native American storytelling traditions, The Turquoise Ledge becomes a moving and deeply personal contemplation of the enormous spiritual power of the natural world-of what these creatures and landscapes can communicate to us, and how they are all linked. The book is Silko's first extended work of nonfiction, and its ambitious scope, clear prose, and inventive structure are captivating. The Turquoise Ledge will delight loyal fans and new readers alike, and it marks the return of the unique voice and vision of a gifted storyteller.

    Until recently he held the American 24-hour record and he was one of the elite runners profiled in the runaway bestseller Born to Run.In Eat and Run, Jurek opens up about his life and career as a champion athlete with a plant-based diet and inspires runners at every level. From his Midwestern childhood hunting, fishing, and cooking for his meat-and-potatoes family to his slow transition to ultrarunning and veganism, Scott’s story shows the power of an iron will and blows apart the stereotypes of what athletes should eat to fuel optimal performance. Full of stories of competition as well as science and practical advice—including his own recipes—Eat and Run will motivate readers and expand their food horizons.

    Stirring left-handed, I did not want to leave the warmth of the kitchen. I felt good. And for a moment I forgot about the life that I was living. Being in the kitchen, the sights and smells, the smear of crimson tomato sauce on my borrowed apron, felt like a bit of home, a place that felt so far away."Adrienne Kane always loved food. Waiting by the oven for the sweet, crisp cookies she baked with her mother to emerge. Learning to create a simple yet delicious frittata with her best friend. Fueling long hours of work on her senior thesis with a satisfying tagliatelle.But just two weeks before her college graduation, Adrienne suffered a hemorrhagic stroke that left her paralyzed on the entire right side of her body. Once a dancer and aspiring teacher, she was now dependent on her loved ones, embarrassed by her disability, and facing an identity crisis. The next several years were a blur of doctors, therapists, rehabilitation, and frustration.Until she got back in the kitchen.It started with a stir. A stir and a taste. A little more salt. Maybe a side of crisp, sautéed potatoes. She learned to wield a chef's knife with her left hand, and to brace vegetables with her right. As she slowly stumbled from her quiet resting place at the kitchen table to where her mother stood by the stove, food became not only her sustenance and her solace, it became Adrienne's calling.She tested new recipes and created her own, crafting beautiful, delectable feasts for the people who had nurtured her -- her mother and father, who himself had survived a stroke several years earlier; the friends who encouraged her to write a cookbook; and, of course, the boyfriend-turned-husband who stood beside her all the way. Eventually, through determination, hard work, and a healthy portion of courage, she turned her culinary love into a career as a caterer, food writer, photographer, and recipe developer.Filled with simple, tempting recipes and complex, hard-won lessons, Cooking and Screaming is Adrienne's moving and heartfelt story of food, loss, work, and joy...and finding her identity through the most unlikely combination of ingredients.

    Time named foraging the "latest obsession of haute cuisine," but the quest to connect with food and nature is timeless and universal. Ava Chin, aka the Urban Forager, is an experienced master of the quest. Raised in Queens, New York, by a single mother and loving grandparents, Chin takes off on an emotional journey to make sense of her family ties and romantic failures when her beloved grandmother suddenly falls ill. She retreats into the urban wilds, where parks and backyards provide not only rare and delicious edible plants, but a wellspring of wisdom. As the seasons turn, Chin begins to view her life with new "foraging eyes"—experiencing the world as a place of plenty and variety, where every element, from flora to fauna to fungi, is interconnected and interdependent. Her experiences in nature put her on a path to self-discovery, leading to reconciliation with her family and finding true love. Divided into chapters devoted to a variety of edible/medicinal plants, with recipes and culinary information, Eating Wildly will stir your emotions and enliven your taste buds.

    Achievement Award, Austin Clarke has a distinguished reputation as one of the preeminent Caribbean writers of our time. In Pig Tails 'n Breadfruit, he has created a tantalizing culinary memoir of his childhood in Barbados. Clarke describes how he learned traditional Bajan cooking--food with origins in the days of slavery, hardship, and economic grief--by listening to this mother, aunts, and cousins talking in the kitchen as they prepared each meal.Pig Tails 'n Breadfruit is not a recipe book; rather, each chapter is devoted to a detailed description of the ritual surrounding the preparation of a particular native dish--Oxtails with Mushrooms, Smoked Ham Hocks with Lima Beans, or Breadfruit Cou-Cou with Braising Beef. Cooking here, as in Clarke's home, is based not on precise measurements, but on trial and error, taste and touch. As a result, the process becomes utterly sensual, and the author's exquisite language artfully translates sense into words, creating a rich and intoxicating personal memoir.