Death By Pad Thai

In this collection of 20 essays—including a number of recipes—by some of the country’s finest writers, food is the central player in memories both exquisite and excruciating. Food isn’t just a gustatory pleasure; it is the stuff of life. At its best and most memorable, a meal becomes a story—and a story becomes a feast. In this anthology, Richard Russo relates the celebratory day he and his wife spent eating their way through haute Manhattan—and departing utterly famished. Steve Almond recounts the gleeful daylong preparation of a transcendent lobster pad thai dish. Sue Miller reveals that after a lifetime of practical cooking, she is finally fed by a man who presents food as an offering, made just for her. Aimee Bender ponders her lifelong envy of what everyone else is having for lunch. Expertly compiled and edited by Douglas Bauer—including pieces by Amy Bloom, Peter Mayle, Jane and Michael Stern, Ann Packer, Andre Dubus III, Michael Gorra, Elizabeth McCracken, Michelle Wildgen, Claire Messud, Henri Cole, Margot Livesey, David Lehman, Michelle Huneven, Lan Samantha Chang, and Diana Abu-Jaber—this unforgettable collection presents food as education, test, reward, bait, magnet, and, most of all, gift. Gathered here are meals that sate our most complex palate, the appreciation of life.

In (Not that You Asked), Steve Almond documents a life spent brawling with the idiot kings of modern culture. He squares off against Sean Hannity on national TV, takes on Oprah Winfrey, nearly gets kidnapped by a reality TV crew, and winds up in Boston, where he quickly enrages the entire population of Red Sox Nation. Amid the carnage, he finds time to celebrate his literary hero, the late Kurt Vonnegut. These are essays the Los Angeles Times has called “rich, fearless [and] cutting.” Praise for (Not that You Asked) “Refreshingly irreverent . . . absurdly funny.” –The Boston Globe “[Almond] scores big in every chapter of this must-have collection. Biting humor, honesty, smarts and heart: Vonnegut himself would have been proud.” –Kirkus Reviews (starred review) “Taunting, revealing, irreverent, and earnest.” –The New York Times “Steve Almond has created a distinctive voice and literary persona. Pleasure-obsessed, self-deprecating, horny, hilarious and always dedicated to parsing the messy terrain of the human heart.” –Forward.com

Through an interdisciplinary approach that shows how food can reflect a culture and time, this book whets the appetite of students for further research into history, anthropology, geography, sociology, and literature. Food is a great unifier. It is used to mark milestones or rites of passage. It is integral to the way we celebrate, connecting a familial and cultural past to the present through tradition. It bolsters the ill and soothes those in mourning. The dishes in this text are those that have come to be known within a part of the world and culture, but also have moved beyond those borders and are accessible and enjoyed by many in our ever-smaller and more-interconnected world. Featuring more than 100 recipes and detailed discussions of dishes from across the globe, Global Dishes: Favorite Meals from around the World explores the history and cultural context surrounding some of the best-known and favorite foods. The book covers national dishes from more than 100 countries, including large nations like Mexico and small countries like Macao. There is also coverage of foods beloved by Indigenous peoples, such as the Sami of Scandinavia. Traditional favorites are offered as well as newer dishes.

In this masterful follow-up to Peter Spiegelman’s stunning debut Black Maps, private investigator John March finds himself drawn into a web of corruption that extends from the halls of high finance to the dark underworld of organized crime. Gregory Danes, a Wall Street analyst has gone missing, and his ex-wife, a fashionable painter, calls March to track him down. She just wants him to sign her alimony checks, but as March soon discovers, she’s not the only one looking for him. Danes was once an industry hot shot, but has lost his touch. His biggest gains lately, it seems, had been in enemies–including a few members of the Russian mob. When March receives a threat upon his own family, he realizes Danes had been involved in something far more dangerous than insider trading.

Successfully navigate the rich world of travel narratives and identify fiction and nonfiction read-alikes with this detailed and expertly constructed guide. Just as savvy travelers make use of guidebooks to help navigate the hundreds of countries around the globe, smart librarians need a guidebook that makes sense of the world of travel narratives. Going Places: A Reader's Guide to Travel Narratives meets that demand, helping librarians assist patrons in finding the nonfiction books that most interest them. It will also serve to help users better understand the genre and their own reading interests. The book examines the subgenres of the travel narrative genre in its seven chapters, categorizing and describing approximately 600 titles according to genres and broad reading interests, and identifying hundreds of other fiction and nonfiction titles as read-alikes and related reads by shared key topics. The author has also identified award-winning titles and spotlighted further resources on travel lit, making this work an ideal guide for readers' advisors as well a book general readers will enjoy browsing.

An essential tool for assisting leisure readers interested in topics surrounding food, this unique book contains annotations and read-alikes for hundreds of nonfiction titles about the joys of comestibles and cooking. Food Lit: A Reader's Guide to Epicurean Nonfiction provides a much-needed resource for librarians assisting adult readers interested in the topic of food—a group that is continuing to grow rapidly. Containing annotations of hundreds of nonfiction titles about food that are arranged into genre and subject interest categories for easy reference, the book addresses a diversity of reading experiences by covering everything from foodie memoirs and histories of food to extreme cuisine and food exposés. Author Melissa Stoeger has organized and described hundreds of nonfiction titles centered on the themes of food and eating, including life stories, history, science, and investigative nonfiction. The work emphasizes titles published in the past decade without overlooking significant benchmark and classic titles. It also provides lists of suggested read-alikes for those titles, and includes several helpful appendices of fiction titles featuring food, food magazines, and food blogs.

Frank May’s law office is in San Mateo, California, and his practice often deals with wills and estates. Dead clients are an essential part of an estates practice, but these are, for almost everybody, quite natural deaths. Yet somehow, through some quirk of fate, unnatural deaths seem to plague Frank’s clients and those close to them. And he gets drawn into these mysterious affairs. Andrew Wright, a schemer if there ever was one, was not exactly a client. Andrew had befriended a woman well past her mental prime, living in a big house in Palo Alto. Andrew took over the house, renting out rooms to a mixed group of people. Then Andrew came to Frank with a hare-brained plan: to install cameras in the house and film an actual murder. Frank wants no part of it ... but agrees, in a weak moment, to meet Andrew about the plan. That night, Andrew is murdered. Frank is, despite himself, entangled in the mysterious death of this schemer. But who killed Andrew? Was it one of the housemates? One of them, at least, has a sinister past — a past that seems to include getting away with murder. And what role did another of Andrew’s schemes — his collection of lurid tales about earthquakes, sex, and embarrassing moments — play in his death? After a copycat murder occurs nearby, the mystery only grows deeper. A Frank May Mystery from QP Books, an imprint of Quid Pro Books.

The Beckoning World is set in the first quarter of the twentieth century and follows Earl Dunham. His weeks are comprised of six days mining coal, followed by Sundays playing baseball. Then one day a major-league scout happens on a game, signs Earl, and he begins a life he had no idea he could even dream. But dreams sometimes suffer from a lovely abundance, and in Earl’s case her name is Emily Marchand. They fall quickly and deeply in love, but with that love comes heartbreaking complications. The Beckoning World gathers a cast of characters that include Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig; a huge-hearted Pullman steward offering aphoristic wisdom; and countless others, not least of which is the 1918 Spanish flu taking vivid spectral form. At the center is a relentless love that Earl and Emily are defenseless against, allied as they are “in this business of their hearts.”