You’re in all probability not stunned to listen to that the Bon Appétit and Epicurious employees is stuffed with bookworms. Now that it’s fall, we like to cozy up with a heat snack and a brand new e-book—and should you’re identical to us, we’re right here to suggest what you have to be studying subsequent.
Particularly now, as we slither towards Halloween, our e-book picks look eerie but delectable: We’re leaning into meals and horror, whether or not that’s cannibalism in A Sure Starvation by Chelsea G. Summers, the postapocalyptic finish of eating places in Land of Milk and Honey by C Pam Zhang, witchcraft and mysterious “treatments” in All’s Effectively by Mona Awad, or the ever-present fears that meals would possibly manifest about our our bodies in The Thick and the Lean by Chana Porter.
If you happen to’re not feeling the spooky temper, we’ve additionally bought some extra modern reads about discovering function in a dorayaki store and discovering household in a Houston bakery. Plus, essays about consolation meals, kids’s books about runaway dosas and Filipino desserts, and memoirs about heartbreak and restaurant openings—so there’s possible one thing on this record that conjures up you to twist up with a mug of one thing scrumptious and begin your subsequent learn.
Fiction
Similar Mattress Totally different Desires by Ed Park
Random Home, November 7, 2023
Ed Park’s upcoming novel follows a free theme of unfinished enterprise—desires, books, chess tournaments, wars, pc video games—to think about a metafictional alternate historical past about post-colonial Korea. He mixes surreal particulars from the final decade of historical past (Kim Jong-il’s obsession with Friday the thirteenth, or the time The Buffalo Information ran the headline “A-bomb Destroys Downtown Buffalo” on its entrance web page) with literary particulars concerning the work of Korean writers like Yi Sang, Kim Sowol, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha.
Memorable and sometimes humorous meals moments are peppered all through. As an example, there’s the scene the place Canadian hockey star Tim Horton stops right into a Buffalo Tim Hortons for some superstar therapy, a powdered French braid, and a cup of espresso that “might have been the home mix for a series of Japanese bloc cafeterias.” One other scene, set nearer to the current, finds the narrator strolling right into a restaurant in Manhattan’s Koreatown to commerce New York publishing gossip with a bunch of previous mates all of the whereas downing bowls of makgeolli, bottles of soju, and piles of pajeon and jjajangmyeon. Good meals, it appears, will discover you wherever you’re within the multiverse. —Anna Hezel, Epicurious senior editor
Household Meal by Bryan Washington
Riverhead Books, October 10, 2023
In Household Meal, Bryan Washington asks a heart-wrenching query: If love makes you are feeling splendidly full, how do you are feeling when that love is all of a sudden gone? Cam, a bartender, is grieving the loss of life of his companion, Kai, whereas making an attempt to restore his tattered relationship together with his estranged greatest buddy, TJ. Recognized for his cooking, Cam recurrently makes the individuals in his life scrambled eggs coated in Cholula and omelets loaded with bean sprouts and chili garlic sauce, however since Kai’s loss of life, he struggles to feed himself or settle for meals from others. It’s a e-book that tenderly traces the tangled relationship between grief, need, and starvation. Every meal within the e-book, whether or not a burnt biscuit or a platter of smothered rooster, has a lot heft and significance. —Karen Yuan, tradition editor
