The downside of an enchanting revelry comes at waking to realize it was all a dream. This was the feeling on learning Nedra Talley, the final nightingale of that inimitable trio, The Ronettes, had emitted her last sigh.
Hello. You know the drill. It’s May; we have some books we’d like to recommend. Some fiction, some nonfiction, some poetry. In other words, here’s what we’re excited about this month.
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.
What does it mean to translate the work of a Nobel laureate? That’s a task that writer and translator Adrian Nathan West has had to consider: among his body of work are translations of two novels by the late Mario Vargas Llosa. The two books — Harsh Times and I Give You My Silence — are tonally very different: one is a grim look at an inflection point in Latin American history, while the other follows one musicologist’s Quixotic quest to tell the story of a reclusive instrumentalist. I spoke with West about his experience with both books, and what he learned along the way.
This week brings with it the release of Twin Lotuses, a graphic novel from Xiaoyu. In their review, Publishers Weekly had plenty of good things to say: “The sweeping English-language debut from Chinese creator Xiaoyu brings the florid, raucous spirit of Peking opera, with a touch of Frankenstein, to the comics page.” We’re pleased to present this excerpt from the graphic novel.
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.
We’re happy to present a preview of the sixth and concluding volume of Stephan Franck’s noir comic series Palomino, for which a Kickstarter campaign is now live. Previous volumes in the series are available from Dark Planet Comics, which tell a decades-long storyline involving unsettling crimes against the backdrop of Los Angeles’s country music scene.