Around My French Table / Dorie Greenspan

A good cookbook is more than just interesting recipes and pretty pictures; it seduces you into the mindset of a great culinary magician at work. Dorie Greenspan's charming, gorgeously crafted book Around My French Table (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $40.00) manages to do just that: she lures you into her kitchen, into her perspective on French cuisine, and you immediately find your mouth watering.

After getting the French fundamentals right—gougères and crème brûlée make requisite appearances—Greenspan explores the French flavor pantheon, incorporating African, Vietnamese, Spanish, and Middle Eastern influences. She describes each recipe as if it were gastronomically predestined: on a mozzarella, tomato, and strawberry salad, "As ripe and sweet as they should be, the fruits should retain some of their characteristic acidity. If they're ripe and right, then you won't need even a micro splash of vinegar on the salad." She respects her ingredients, but she’s also got a healthy dose of whimsy--any chef who serves smoked salmon blini on tiny waffles gets extra points from me.

Even if this is French, this isn't the France of Julia Child: Greenspan doesn’t overdo it on the butter and cream. Nevertheless, the food always feels indulgent; after her mustard tart, chicken tagine with sweet potatoes and prunes, endives with apples and grapes, and her “pumpkin stuffed with everything good” (everything good = bread, Gruyère, garlic, bacon, and scallions), you’re not even a little bit deprived. When it comes from Dorie Greenspan, every dish turns out to be a glorious mouthful.

Buy it here: Amazon • Barnes & Noble • Borders • IndieBound • Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self / Danielle Evans

Short story collections get a bad rap. Notoriously bad sellers, even critically acclaimed collections often sit on book stores’ shelves gathering dust. My heart always does a small, happy leap when I see a collection break this curse, because the publishing world would be a sad place without them—I’m a firm believer that the aha moment in perfectly executed short story can blow a reader’s hair back with more gusto than the most epic of literary novels, its quiet efficiency and precision making the emotional payoff all the more remarkable.

And how perfectly executed are the eight tales in Danielle Evans’s Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self (Riverhead, $25.95). A graduate from the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Evans has already garnered some serious review attention (the book was featured in New York Magazine's Fall preview with the claim that it “threatens to become the season’s hot young MFA discovery”). Even before this debut her remarkable talent earned notable accolades for so young a writer—her fiction debuted in The Paris Review when she was only twenty-three and another story in the collection appeared in The Best American Short Stories 2008.

Evans more than lives up to these honors. Her prose is elegant but straightforward and fluid and the points she makes are wise and profound but derived from believably ordinary events. Ostensibly things haven’t changed much during many of these stories’ climaxes, but we can feel the difference in the aftermath as readily as if a tornado had just blown through. Every sigh, every silence, every eye role or snarky comment speaks volumes. Each of the stories has a black or biracial protagonist, and while the non white experience in America is certainly explored here with wit and candor, factors universal to every person’s growing up and finding his or her way in the world prove equally relevant to the stories’ outcomes. There’s as much to learn and experience here as there is to relate to.

Buy it here: Amazon • Barnes & Noble • Borders • IndieBound • Riverhead

The Cookbook Collector / Allegra Goodman

I spent most of Labor Day weekend on a dock on Lake George, leisurely making my way through Allegra Goodman’s The Cookbook Collector (Dial Press, $26.00). This novel is packed with rich detail and has something for everyone—well, for everyone who has an interest in the dot-com boom, rare books, environmentalism, Berkeley, or cooking, to name a few of the many topics that Goodman touches on here.

A few moments—an inevitable but somewhat inappropriate love affair, personal disaster on 9/11, or Goodman's insistence on the beauty and delicacy of her protagonists, sisters named Jess and Emily—might make readers squeamish, but the book’s many pleasures are likely to leave a greater impression. If there’s one thing that Goodman clearly understands, it’s the relationship between passion and material objects. Appreciation for the finer things in life (an elegant house furnished in glowing wood, a perfectly ripe peach, the eponymous cookbook collection and its mysteries) is present throughout, as are the current events and trends of the 90’s and 00’s. These two foci, in fact, parallel the interests of Jess and Emily—the former a graduate student in philosophy, the latter a Silicon Valley CEO.

If you’ve been longing to escape into a beautifully realized material world or the distinctly more harrowing realm of technology and financial growth over the last twenty years, The Cookbook Collector is precisely the novel for you.

Buy it here: Amazon • Barnes & Noble • Borders • IndieBound • Dial Press

The Possessed / Elif Batuman

Smart and very, very funny, Elif Batuman’s The Possessed (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $15.00 paperback original) is well worth a read. Batuman has an ear for dialogue—and the luck to have found herself, repeatedly, in unexpectedly zany situations. While academia doesn’t lack for characters, Batuman seems to have stumbled upon some of the most excessively strange of these.

The best chapters in the book are the introduction and Batuman’s essays “Babel in California” and “Who Killed Tolstoy?” The introduction sees Batuman teaching English and judging leg contests (read it) in Hungary after her freshman year in college. In the first essay, the Stanford Slavic department finds itself suddenly bound up in the tensions and eccentricities of Isaak Babel’s surviving family; in the latter, Batuman attends a conference at Leo Tolstoy’s estate, weaving through the whole chapter her cast-aside theory that Tolstoy was poisoned and her attempt to regain her lost luggage:

“Oh, it’s you,” sighed the clerk. “Yes, I have your request right here. Address: Yasnaya Polyana, Tolstoy’s house. When we find the suitcase we will send it to you. In the meantime, are you familiar with our Russian phrase resignation of the soul?”

Batuman’s humor, often good-natured, can also be biting at times—it’s then that she seems to prey on the weak—and the final chapter is an unworthy, unfocused conclusion to an otherwise fine book. But these are both small quibbles. The Possessed will make you laugh and read aloud, and when Batuman talks about the literature itself, she does so beautifully.

Buy it here: Amazon • Barnes & Noble • Borders • IndieBound • Farrar, Straus & Giroux

Little Bee / Chris Cleave

Talk about coming late to the party: Chris Cleave's Little Bee (Simon & Schuster, $14.00 paperback) made its resounding critical splash in 2009. When a book is much-hyped my instinct is to avoid it, for reasons I can't always fathom. But I've been watching Little Bee pick up a second wind in paperback this year, and when a copy fell into my hand I decided the gods were sending me a message.

I have not cried this much while reading a book for a very long time. It took me two nights to read Little Bee, during which I entered the early hours of the morning clutching a fistful of tear-sodden tissues. Everything about it -- the cover, the blurb on the back, the glowing praise from People and O Magazine -- suggests a story that will ultimately resolve itself through an affirmation of humanity's innate goodness. But instead of presenting a cleanly wrapped emotional package of love triumphing over sorrow and despair, Chris Cleave ruthlessly, albeit beautifully, skewers your heart.

This is a powerful, genuine novel that more than earns its considerable critical accolades. If you haven't yet considered it seriously, I urge you to pony up for the paperback, but prepare yourself; it is only for the strong of soul, and while quick to read it is difficult to forget.

Buy it here: Amazon • Barnes & Noble • Borders • IndieBound • Simon & Schuster

Wolf Hall / Hilary Mantel

I’m coming late to the party on this one—several months after Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall (Henry Holt & Co., $27.00) won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction, and almost a year after it won the Man Booker Prize, I tackled the lengthy novel.

A friend gave it to me, endorsing it by telling me that she had finished it in a four-day blitz. It took me nearly a month, and although I was admittedly juggling several other books at the time, I’m not surprised it took so long. Wolf Hall was a long, slow journey for this reader. Every step the story took towards the coronation of Anne Boleyn, in the inevitable onward slog of history, felt as incremental and hard-won as it might have felt for Thomas Cromwell, Mantel’s protagonist. And every pronoun with an unclear antecedent—Cromwell is mostly referred to as “he,” and Mantel doesn’t bother to clarify her terms when another male character enters the scene—is as disorienting as the last. You never quite gain your balance when reading Wolf Hall.

But working for Mantel’s novel are her unsentimental, sparse prose, and the immediately sympathetic—nay, lovable—Cromwell. If history is complicated and stripped of its romance here, the orchestrations of Henry VIII overwhelmed by the constant negotiations of his lawyers and courtiers, Cromwell’s rich inner life more than makes up for it. So much so, in fact, that I find myself eagerly awaiting the rumored sequel.

A slow-paced book of subtle, but certainly worthwhile, rewards.

Buy it here: Amazon • Barnes & Noble • Borders • IndieBound • Henry Holt & Co.

The Name of the Nearest River / Alex Taylor

Gritty’s the right word to describe Alex Taylor’s most recent book, The Name of the Nearest River (Sarabande Books, $15.95). The edges here sometimes chafe, as in the moments when the language runs to extremes (on the more poetic end, sometimes spiralling too wildly out of control, and, at other times, seeming almost brutish in its minimalism). But these stories hurtle along and take you with them. It’s a quick read, and a compelling one.

“The Coal Thief” and “Equator Joe’s Famous Nuclear Meltdown Chili” paint stark portraits of poverty-stricken children, and other stories—despite their varying plots, depicting violence and passion, the reader always senses that what’s at stake is life and death—are as desolate and grim as any Cormac McCarthy novel. Still, there’s a humming hope here. For every windy, snowy landscape, and for every drunken punch, there’s a truck on a river on a summer night.

Ideal reading for a sultry evening in a hammock or a night alone by the fire.

Buy it here: Amazon • Barnes & Noble • Borders • IndieBound • Sarabande Books