Bodrug, the author of the new book "PlantYou: Scrappy Cooking: 140+ Plant-Based Zero-Waste Recipes That Are Good For You, Your Wallet, and the Planet,” believes that entering the zero-waste space does not have to be very challenging at all — and, in most cases, can be both fun and imaginative, too. And, as inflation, “shrinkflation” and “greedflation” continue to cause food prices to skyrocket, this practice is something we all could get better at adapting.
José Andrés spends much of his time contemplating the unifying nature of food, both in and out of the world’s most dangerous conflict and disaster zones.
Her first standalone fantasy and her first historical novel, The Familiar is a rich and lyrical mix of genres and tropes. A tale set in 16th-century Madrid during the height of the Spanish Inquisition, it is one part political thriller, one part slow-burn romance, and one survival saga, with a dash of fairytale magic on top. A back-handed love letter to the power of language, the novel’s prose is lyrical and lovely, its story precisely plotted, and its characters richly and fully realized. This is not a book I suspect many of us would have expected Bardugo to write—the magical elements, while important, are not truly the story’s primary focus—but its absorbing mix of real-life history, complex female characters, entertaining wordplay, and generational resilience makes for a genuinely enchanting whole. Yes, it’s a quieter, more deliberate book than its author is normally known for, but it’s haunting in a way that will stay with you well after the last page.
Messud came closer to the true function of literature when she told Publishers Weekly: “We read to find life, in all its possibilities.”
“Crooked Seeds” leaves us reeling, trying to get Deidre’s voice out of our heads: “I’m the one that needs help,” she screams. “Me. Look at me. I’m the one!”
Finding a Likeness, the title of Baker’s new memoir, is suggestive of his career-spanning analogical concern. What’s Baker been doing all this time, if not finding tender, outré likenesses everywhere he looks? Now he has tried out a different kind of looking: Finding a Likeness chronicles two years in which Baker took a break from fiction and literary journalism to teach himself “how to draw and paint on the far side of sixty,” recasting his interest in figurative language as a new focus on figurative art. The mechanics of getting “somewhat better at art”—the mimetic skill that drawing demands, the “erasefully slow” temporality imposed by shading a landscape or still life, the robust universe of instruments and tools (longtime Bakerian subjects) available to the amateur artist—echo many of his lifelong literary concerns. But the essential irony of the book—one Baker is way too humble to name—is that we spend much of it watching one of the best describers alive struggle with the basics of representation.