The Swedish Cookbook by Niklas Ekstedt is a beautifully crafted celebration of Nordic simplicity, balance and flavor — a book that feels both timeless and refreshingly modern. Ekstedt brings his signature philosophy of lagom — “just the right amount” — to every page, offering home cooks a warm, confident guide into the heart of Swedish culinary tradition.
For more than three decades, the literary world has waited for a definitive, fresh examination of one of the 20th century’s most vital voices. In Baldwin: A Love Story, Nicholas Boggs delivers not just a biography, but a literary event. By exploring James Baldwin’s life through the prism of deep, complex love, Boggs offers a mesmerizing, deeply humane portrait of a man whose personal connections shaped the conscience of a generation.
Georgina Hayden has always had a gift for weaving narrative into nutrition, but with MEDesque, she has delivered something far more profound: a luminous, salt-sprayed love letter to the Mediterranean that feels both ancient and startlingly modern.
If there’s a “holy grail” for the home gardener, it is the perfect, sun-warmed, vine-ripened tomato. In The Tomato Growers Handbook, Holly Farrell doesn’t just teach you how to grow a fruit; she provides a masterclass in horticultural joy.
Luke Barr’s The Secret History of French Cooking is an absolute feast—an irresistible blend of culinary archaeology, cultural storytelling, and pure gastronomic joy. Barr has a gift for taking something as familiar as French cuisine and revealing the hidden machinery beneath it: the personalities, the rivalries, the obsessions, and the quiet revolutions that shaped what the world now thinks of as “classic” cooking.
Colm Tóibín has long been a master of the silences that hum beneath the surface of domestic life, and his latest collection, The News from Dublin, finds him operating at the peak of his understated powers. These stories are less about dramatic upheavals and more about the quiet, tectonic shifts in identity, exile, and the persistent weight of the past.
Until earlier this year, the only novel I’d read by the late Todd Grimson was Brand New Cherry Flavor. That book was an absolute headrush, one part bizarre tale of the supernatural, one part cutting Hollywood satire. It was adapted for the small screen a few years ago by Nick Antosca and Lenore Zion; Antosca had long been an advocate for the book, and for Grimson’s work in general. And now there’s a stylish new edition of another one of Grimson’s novels out in the world: Stainless. This is also a story of the uncanny intersecting southern California; it’s also not what you might expect.
Anytime I crack open a fresh Willy Vlautin novel, I brace myself to flip through a rolodex of misfortune. Most reviews of his work dutifully hit the same set of keywords to describe his worlds: downtrodden, fringe, bleak, down-and-out, hardscrabble, underbelly, endlessly sad—and my favorite, because it’s as spare and straightforward as Vlautin’s own prose: depressing. Vlautin himself once admitted in an interview with Oregon Artswatch, “That’s always been kind of a weakness of mine, making stuff too bleak.”