Hot in the Kitchen: Cookbooks

If Gina’s review of Ruth Reichl’s The Paris Novel has whetted your appetite for something new to eat, try a new cookbook!

Pick up one that makes you feel like you’ve also made a fresh start in the City of Light, or take home one that lets you recreate your favorite Florida Keys meals. No matter what you’d like to eat tonight, there’s a cookbook for that!

Drop by the store and browse our robust cookbook section for more!

At the Table in Paris: Recipes from the Best Cafés and Bistros edited by Jan Thorbecke Verlag

At the Table in Paris invites readers to take a culinary stroll through the City of Light, along the Seine, over the Pont Neuf, to the Eiffel Tower, while taking little pit stops at street cafés to experience the food and drink on offer. With 40 typical French recipes, from breakfast right through to dinner and dessert, as well as information on what to do and where to go, this is a cookbook like no other. Discover the best green spaces to enjoy a picnic and feel inspired by time spent at the city’s famous bistros to whip up your own version of Moules Frites, Coq Au Vin, or Crème Brûlée. At the Table in Paris celebrates all this city has to offer when it comes to food, drink, and must-see places.

Florida Keys Cookbook by Victoria Shearer

The Florida Keys Cookbook is known for its fascinating combination of food history, local lore, and over 175 mouth-watering recipes showcasing the Florida Keys’ bounty from Keys restaurant chefs, and home cooks. Archival photographs and informative sidebars elevated the second edition of this beautiful and treasured book that is a celebration of the paradise that is the Florida Keys.

Now in its third edition, Victoria Shearer’s successful cookbook is being taken to the next level with over 60 new recipes and even more archival photos. A perfect guide for home cooks of all levels of cooking, Florida Keys Cookbook invites readers to experience the culinary excellence and cultural wonder that embodies the Florida Keys.

Islas: A Celebration of Tropical Cooking—125 Recipes from the Indian, Atlantic, and Pacific Ocean Islands by Von Diaz

The islands spanning the Indian, Atlantic, and Pacific Oceans are remarkable places, sharing dozens of ingredients and cooking techniques, including marinating, pickling and fermentation, braising and stewing, frying, grilling and smoking, and steaming and in-ground roasting. Bold flavors drip from the edges of each dish with tastes that represent stories of resistance, persistence, and wisdom passed down from generation to generation.

This narrative cookbook by writer, documentary producer, and author Von Diaz travels across oceans and nations to uplift the shared ancestral cooking techniques of these islands in more than 125 recipes, including intimate profiles of the historical context of each technique, stories from islanders, and step-by-step guides for recreating them at home.

Crave: Bold Recipes That Make You Want Seconds by Karen Akunowicz

Spicy, sour, salty-sweet-crunchy, cold and creamy—100 recipes from award-winning chef Karen Akunowicz capture what you crave!

Ask anyone what foods they crave, and most people will be able to reel off a list without hesitation. Cravings almost always have an emotional component, and in every case, there is a flavor, texture, or temperature combination that gives each dish what Akunowicz calls the “wow” factor. It’s what she strives for every time she creates new dishes for her restaurants, and it’s reflected in each of the recipes in Crave.

As a chef with experience cooking many different cuisines—Italian, Middle Eastern, Chinese, Taiwanese, and Southeast Asian—Akunowicz has a unique take on cooking. Her recipes, organized by flavor and texture cravings, from Crispy & Crunchy or Hearty & Homey to Sweet & Luscious, include Tomato Salad with Toasted Sesame Vinaigrette, Chicken Cacciatore, Ginger Scallion Lobster, Smoky Eggplant Dip, and more. She’s a great teacher and makes it easy to bring the vibrancy of her cooking into your own home.

Sweet Enough: A Dessert Cookbook by Alison Roman

Casual, effortless, chic: These are not words you’d use to describe most desserts. But before Alison Roman made recipes so perfect that they go by one name—The Cookie, The Pasta, The Lemon Cake—she was a restaurant pastry chef who spent most of her time learning to make things the hard way. She studied flavor, technique, and precision, then distilled her knowledge to pare it all down to create dessert recipes that feel special and approachable, impressive and doable. In Sweet Enough, Alison has written the book for people who think they don’t have the time or skill to pull off dessert. Here, the desserts you want to make right away, you can make right away.

Gastro Obscura: A Food Adventurer’s Guide by Cecily Wong, Dylan Thuras, & Atlas Obscura

Created by the ever-curious minds behind Atlas Obscura, this breathtaking guide transforms our sense of what people around the world eat and drink. Covering all seven continents, Gastro Obscura serves up a loaded plate of incredible ingredients, food adventures, and edible wonders. Ready for a beer made from fog in Chile? Sardinia’s “Threads of God” pasta? Egypt’s 2000-year-old egg ovens? But far more than a menu of curious minds delicacies and unexpected dishes, Gastro Obscura reveals food’s central place in our lives as well as our bellies, touching on history–trace the network of ancient Roman fish sauce factories. Culture–picture four million women gathering to make rice pudding. Travel–scale China’s sacred Mount Hua to reach a tea house. Festivals–feed wild macaques pyramid of fruit at Thailand’s Monkey Buffet Festival. And hidden gems that might be right around the corner, like the vending machine in Texas dispensing full sized pecan pies. Dig in and feed your sense of wonder.

Husbands and Lovers by Beatriz Williams

Two women—separated by decades and continents, and united by an exotic family heirloom—reclaim secrets and lost loves in this sweeping novel from the New York Times bestselling author of The Summer Wives.

New England, 2022. Three years ago, single mother Mallory Dunne received the telephone call every parent dreads—her ten-year-old son, Sam, had been airlifted from summer camp with acute poisoning from a toxic death cap mushroom, leaving him fighting for his life. Now, searching for the donor kidney that will give her son a chance for a normal life, Mallory’s forced to confront two harrowing secrets from her past: her mother’s adoption from an infamous Irish orphanage in 1952, and her own all-consuming summer romance fourteen years earlier with her childhood best friend, Monk Adams— one of the world’s most beloved singer-songwriters—a fairy tale cut short by a devastating betrayal.

Cairo, 1951. After suffering tragedy beyond comprehension in the war, Hungarian refugee Hannah Ainsworth has forged a respectable new life for herself—marriage to a wealthy British diplomat with a coveted posting in glamorous Cairo. But a fateful encounter with the enigmatic manager of a hotel bristling with spies leads to a passionate affair that will reawaken Hannah’s longing for everything she once lost. As revolution simmers in the Egyptian streets, a pregnant Hannah finds herself snared in a game of intrigue between two men . . . and an act of sacrifice that will echo down the generations.

Timeless and bittersweet, Husbands & Lovers takes readers on an unforgettable journey of heartbreak and redemption, from the revolutionary fires of midcentury Egypt to the moneyed beaches of contemporary New England. Acclaimed author Beatriz Williams has written a poignant and beautifully voiced novel of deeply human characters entangled by morally complex issues—of privilege, class, and the female experience—inside worlds brought shimmeringly to life.

The Garden Against Time by Olivia Laing

Named one of the most anticipated books of 2024 by the BBC, The Observer, Irish Times, The Guardian, and The Millions.
Inspired by the restoration of her own garden, “imaginative and empathetic critic” (NPR) Olivia Laing embarks on an exhilarating investigation of paradise.

In 2020, Olivia Laing began to restore an 18th century walled garden in Suffolk, an overgrown Eden of unusual plants. The work brought to light a crucial question for our age: Who gets to live in paradise, and how can we share it while there’s still time? Moving between real and imagined gardens, from Milton’s Paradise Lost to John Clare’s enclosure elegies, from a wartime sanctuary in Italy to a grotesque aristocratic pleasure ground funded by slavery, Laing interrogates the sometimes shocking cost of making paradise on earth.

But the story of the garden doesn’t always enact larger patterns of privilege and exclusion. It’s also a place of rebel outposts and communal dreams. From the improbable queer utopia conjured by Derek Jarman on the beach at Dungeness to the fertile vision of a common Eden propagated by William Morris, new modes of living can and have been attempted amidst the flower beds, experiments that could prove vital in the coming era of climate change. The result is a humming, glowing tapestry, a beautiful and exacting account of the abundant pleasures and possibilities of gardens: not as a place to hide from the world but as a site of encounter and discovery, bee-loud and pollen-laden.

The Midnight Feast by Lucy Foley

“Sharp, stylish and stunning…Foley’s best yet.” — Chris Whitaker, New York Times bestselling author of We Begin at the End

“Everything you want in a thriller.” — Harper’s Bazaar

The deliciously twisty new locked room murder mystery from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Guest List and The Paris Apartment

It’s the opening night of The Manor, and no expense, small or large, has been spared. The infinity pool sparkles; crystal pouches for guests’ healing have been placed in the Seaside Cottages and Woodland Hutches; the “Manor Mule” cocktail (grapefruit, ginger, vodka, and a dash of CBD oil) is being poured with a heavy hand. Everyone is wearing linen.

And yet, just outside the Manor’s immaculately kept grounds, an ancient forest bristles with secrets. The local community resents what they see as the Manor’s intrusion into the local woods and attempts to privatize the beach, and small skirmishes have erupted on the edges of the property between locals and the staff. And the whispers keep coming, about an old piece of pagan folklore – it must be folklore?? — the Night Birds, an avenging force that can be called upon to make right wrongs that elude the law. Though surely everything at the Manor has been done above board.

On the Sunday morning of opening weekend, the local police are called. There’s been a fire. A body’s been discovered. Something’s not right with the guests. What happened on the grounds of the Manor the past 36 hours? And who – or what – is the cause?

THE FOUNDER

THE HUSBAND

THE MYSTERY GUEST

THE KITCHEN HELP

Everyone has an agenda. Everyone has a past. But not everyone will survive…The Midnight Feast.

On Call by Anthony Fauci, M.D.

The memoir by the doctor who became a beacon of hope for millions through the COVID pandemic, and whose six-decade career in high-level public service put him in the room with seven presidents.

Anthony Fauci is arguably the most famous – and most revered – doctor in the world today. His role guiding America sanely and calmly through Covid (and through the torrents of Trump) earned him the trust of millions during one of the most terrifying periods in modern American history, but this was only the most recent of the global epidemics in which Dr. Fauci played a major role. His crucial role in researching HIV and bringing AIDS into sympathetic public view and his leadership in navigating the Ebola, SARS, West Nile, and anthrax crises, make him truly an American hero.

Lula Dean’s Little Library of Banned Books by Kirsten Miller

Lula Dean’s Little Library of Banned Books is shaping up to be this summer’s Big Read. Kirsten Miller has that rare ability to take a serious subject and make it very, very funny. I enjoyed this novel and you will too.”–James Patterson

The provocative and hilarious summer read that will have book lovers cheering and everyone talking! Kirsten Miller, author of The Change, brings us a bracing, wildly entertaining satire about a small Southern town, a pitched battle over banned books, and a little lending library that changes everything.

Beverly Underwood and her arch enemy, Lula Dean, live in the tiny town of Troy, Georgia, where they were born and raised. Now Beverly is on the school board, and Lula has become a local celebrity by embarking on mission to rid the public libraries of all inappropriate books—none of which she’s actually read. To replace the “pornographic” books she’s challenged at the local public library, Lula starts her own lending library in front of her home: a cute wooden hutch with glass doors and neat rows of the worthy literature that she’s sure the town’s readers need.

What Lula doesn’t know is that a local troublemaker has stolen her wholesome books, removed their dust jackets, and restocked Lula’s library with banned books: literary classics, gay romances, Black history, witchy spell books, Judy Blume novels, and more. One by one, neighbors who borrow books from Lula Dean’s library find their lives changed in unexpected ways. Finally, one of Lula Dean’s enemies discovers the library and decides to turn the tables on her, just as Lula and Beverly are running against each other to replace the town’s disgraced mayor.

That’s when all the townspeople who’ve been borrowing from Lula’s library begin to reveal themselves. That’s when the showdown that’s been brewing between Beverly and Lula will roil the whole town…and change it forever.

Night Flyer: Harriet Tubman and the Faith Dreams of a Free People by Tiya Miles


From the National Book Award–winning author of All That She Carried, an intimate and revelatory reckoning with the myth and the truth behind an American everyone knows and few really understand

Harriet Tubman is among the most famous Americans ever born and soon to be the face of the twenty-dollar bill. Yet often she’s a figure more out of myth than history, almost a comic-book superhero. Despite being barely five feet tall, unable to read, and suffering from a brain injury, she managed to escape from her own enslavement, return again and again to lead others north to freedom without loss of life, speak out powerfully against slavery, and then become the first American woman in history to lead a military raid, freeing some seven hundred people. You could almost say she’s America’s Robin Hood, a miraculous vision, often rightly celebrated but seldom understood.

Tiya Miles’s extraordinary Night Flyer changes all that. With her characteristic tenderness and imaginative genius, Miles explores beyond the stock historical grid to weave Tubman’s life into the fabric of her world. She probes the ecological reality of Tubman’s surroundings and examines her kinship with other enslaved women who similarly passed through a spiritual wilderness and recorded those travels in profound and moving memoirs. What emerges, uncannily, is a human being whose mysticism becomes more palpable the more we understand it—a story that offers us powerful inspiration for our own time of troubles. Harriet Tubman traversed many boundaries, inner and outer. Now, thanks to Tiya Miles, she becomes an even clearer and sharper signal from the past, one that can help us to echolocate a more just and sustainable path.

Celebrate Juneteenth

Happy Freedom Day! Here are a few books we recommend about Juneteenth and Black history, as well as some celebrating contemporary Black culture in the United States.

Juneteenth Is by Natasha Tripplett & illustrated by Daniel J. O’Brien

An intimate look at Juneteenth, this story is a warm exploration of a family and a community.

Juneteenth is the smell of brisket filling the air. Juneteenth is the sounds of music, dancing, and cheering ringing from the parade outside. It is love. It is prayer. It is friends and relatives coming together to commemorate freedom, hope for tomorrow, and one another.

This book is an ode to the history of the Black community in the United States, a tribute to Black joy, and a portrait of familial love. With poignant text and vivid illustrations, Juneteenth Is offers a window and a mirror for readers, resonating with kids who will see themselves reflected in its pages and those who hope to understand experiences beyond their own.

What Is Juneteenth? by Kirsti Jewel, Who HQ, & illustrated by Manuel Gutierrez

Discover more about Juneteenth, the important holiday that celebrates the end of chattel slavery in the United States.

On June 19, 1865, a group of enslaved men, women, and children in Texas gathered around a Union solder and listened as he read the most remarkable words they would ever hear. They were no longer enslaved: they were free. The inhumane practice of forced labor with no pay was now illegal in all of the United States. This news was cause for celebration, so the group of people jumped in excitement, danced, and wept tears of joy. They did not know it at the time, but their joyous celebration of freedom would become a holiday–Juneteenth–that is observed each year by more and more Americans.

Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019 edited by Ibram X. Kendi & Keisha N. Blain

Four Hundred Souls is a unique one-volume “community” history of African Americans. The editors, Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain, have assembled ninety brilliant writers, each of whom takes on a five-year period of that four-hundred-year span. The writers explore their periods through a variety of techniques: historical essays, short stories, personal vignettes, and fiery polemics. They approach history from various perspectives: through the eyes of towering historical icons or the untold stories of ordinary people; through places, laws, and objects. While themes of resistance and struggle, of hope and reinvention, course through the book, this collection of diverse pieces from ninety different minds, reflecting ninety different perspectives, fundamentally deconstructs the idea that Africans in America are a monolith—instead it unlocks the startling range of experiences and ideas that have always existed within the community of Blackness. 

The New Negro Aesthetic by Alain Locke, edited by Jeffrey C. Stewart

For months, the philosopher Alain Locke wrestled with the idea of the Negro as America’s most vexing problem. He asked how shall Negroes think of themselves as he considered the new crop of poets, novelists, and short story writers who, in 1924, wrote about their experiences as Black people in America. He did not want to frame Harlem and Black writing as yet another protest against racism, nor did he want to focus on the sociological perspective on the “Negro problem” and Harlem as a site of crime, poverty, and dysfunction. He wanted to find new language and a new way for Black people to think of themselves.

The essays and articles collected in this volume, by Locke’s Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer, are the result of that new attitude and the struggle to instill the New Negro aesthetics, as Stewart calls it here, into the mind of the twentieth century. To be a New Negro poet, novelist, actor, musician, dancer, or filmmaker was to commit oneself to an arc of self-discovery of what and who the Negro was—would be—without fear that one would disappoint the white or Black bystander. In committing to that path, Locke asserted, one would uncover a “being-in-the-world” that was rich and bountiful in its creative possibilities, if Black people could turn off the noise of racism and see themselves for who they really are: a world of creative people who have transformed, powerfully and perpetually, the culture of wherever history or social forces landed them.

This Is the Honey: An Anthology of Contemporary Black Poets edited by Kwame Alexander

In this comprehensive and vibrant poetry anthology, bestselling author and poet Kwame Alexander curates a collection of contemporary anthems at turns tender and piercing and deeply inspiring throughout. Featuring work from well-loved poets such as Rita Dove, Jericho Brown, Warsan Shire, Ross Gay, Tracy K. Smith, Terrance Hayes, Morgan Parker, and Nikki Giovanni, This Is the Honey is a rich and abundant offering of language from the poets giving voice to generations of resilient joy, “each incantation,” as Mahogany L. Browne puts it in her titular poem, is “a jubilee of a people dreaming wildly.”

High on the Hog: A Culinary Journey from Africa to America by Jessica B. Harris

Acclaimed cookbook author Jessica B. Harris has spent much of her life researching the food and foodways of the African Diaspora. High on the Hog is the culmination of years of her work, and the result is a most engaging history of African American cuisine. Harris takes the reader on a harrowing journey from Africa across the Atlantic to America, tracking the trials that the people and the food have undergone along the way.

From chitlins and ham hocks to fried chicken and vegan soul, Harris celebrates the delicious and restorative foods of the African American experience and details how each came to form such an important part of African American culture, history, and identity. Although the story of African cuisine in America begins with slavery, High on the Hog ultimately chronicles a thrilling history of triumph and survival. The work of a masterful storyteller and an acclaimed scholar, Jessica B. Harris’s High on the Hog fills an important gap in our culinary history.

Juneteenth by Ralph Ellison

Here is Ellison, the master of American vernacular—the preacher’s hyperbole and the politician’s rhetoric, the rhythms of jazz and gospel and ordinary speech—at the height of his powers, telling a powerful, evocative tale of a prodigal of the twentieth century.

“Tell me what happened while there’s still time,” demands the dying senator Adam Sunraider to the Reverend A. Z. Hickman, the itinerant Negro preacher whom he calls Daddy Hickman. As a young man, Sunraider was Bliss, an orphan taken in by Hickman and raised to be a preacher like himself. His history encompasses camp meetings where he became the risen Lazarus to inspire the faithful; the more ordinary joys of Southern boyhood; bucolic days as a filmmaker; lovemaking with a young woman in a field in the Oklahoma sun. And behind it all lies a mystery: how did this chosen child become the man who would deny everything to achieve his goals?

One of Our Kind by Nicola Yoon

Get Out meets The Stepford Wives in #1 New York Times best-selling author Nicola Yoon’s first adult novel • A terrifying and thought-provoking look at what it means to be truly free in America as a woman uncovers a secret about her new home in a utopian community • “Brilliant, provocative, seminal…Your book club will be discussing this one for DAYS.”—Jodi Picoult, #1 New York Times best-selling author

Jasmyn and King Williams move their family to the planned Black utopia of Liberty, California hoping to find a community of like-minded people, a place where their growing family can thrive. King settles in at once, embracing the Liberty ethos, including the luxe wellness center at the top of the hill, which proves to be the heart of the community. But Jasmyn struggles to find her place. She expected to find liberals and social justice activists striving for racial equality, but Liberty residents seem more focused on booking spa treatments and ignoring the world’s troubles. 

Jasmyn’s only friends in the community are equally perplexed and frustrated by most residents’ outlook. Then Jasmyn discovers a terrible secret about Liberty and its founders. Frustration turns to dread as their loved ones start embracing the Liberty way of life. 

Will the truth destroy her world in ways she never could have imagined?

Thrilling with insightful social commentary, One of Our Kind explores the ways in which freedom is complicated by the presumptions we make about ourselves and each other.

The Great River by Boyce Upholt

A sweeping history of the Mississippi River—and the centuries of human meddling that have transformed both it and America.

The Mississippi River lies at the heart of America, an undeniable life force that is intertwined with the nation’s culture and history. Its watershed spans almost half the country, Mark Twain’s travels on the river inspired our first national literature, and jazz and blues were born in its floodplains and carried upstream.

In this landmark work of natural history, Boyce Upholt tells the epic story of this wild and unruly river, and the centuries of efforts to control it. Over thousands of years, the Mississippi watershed was home to millions of Indigenous people who regarded “the great river” with awe and respect, adorning its banks with astonishing spiritual earthworks. The river was ever-changing, and Indigenous tribes embraced and even depended on its regular flooding. But the expanse of the watershed and the rich soils of its floodplain lured European settlers and American pioneers, who had a different vision: the river was a foe to conquer.

Centuries of human attempts to own, contain, and rework the Mississippi River, from Thomas Jefferson’s expansionist land hunger through today’s era of environmental concern, have now transformed its landscape. Upholt reveals how an ambitious and sometimes contentious program of engineering—government-built levees, jetties, dikes, and dams—has not only damaged once-vibrant ecosystems but may not work much longer. Carrying readers along the river’s last remaining backchannels, he explores how scientists are now hoping to restore what has been lost.

Rich and powerful, The Great River delivers a startling account of what happens when we try to fight against nature instead of acknowledging and embracing its power—a lesson that is all too relevant in our rapidly changing world.