Penguin's Great Food Series

Great Food is an original series that brings together the sharpest, funniest, most delicious writing about food from the past four hundred years. Featuring twenty authors, the series is a heady mixture of recipes, literature and simple pleasures of hearing from distinctive voices from history. This series celebrates food writing as writing, revives forgotten, inspirational chefs and writers whose works will inspire cooks and readers everywhere.

The Great Food series offers something for every food lover: the enthusiastic cook who bites the bullet and makes their own haschiche fudge or mutton with oysters; the armchair foodie, reading for inspiration and pleasure; the social history lover who relishes the chance to peek inside a Victorian kitchen; and everybody who appreciates evocative, intimate and entertaining writing.

See the rest of the series here.

Rock on

When Sammy Hagar appeared at Left Bank Books in St. Louis in March to autograph copies of his memoir, it was not a typical book signing.

Sammy Hagar's memoir, “Red,” sold at least 61,000 copies in hardcover.

Mr. Hagar, the former Van Halen lead singer, started sipping tequila as soon as the event began. Police officers were hired to provide security. And nervous bookstore employees pleaded with eager female fans not to lift their shirts in front of Mr. Hagar when they reached the signing table.
“Nobody did,” said Kris Kleindienst, the relieved bookstore owner.
Such are the perils of working with the rock ’n’ roll legends who have lined up to write their life stories lately, a group that includes Keith Richards, Ozzy Osbourne, Patti Smith, Pete Townshend, Bob Mould and Gregg Allman.
In a squirrely market for books, the rock memoir has taken off, spurring publishers to pursue more book deals with musicians willing to tell their stories.

- Julie Bosman, New York Times

Read the rest of the article here.

Why Bedtime Will Never Be The Same

The nightly climb up the stairs to Bedfordshire is supposed to be a time of parent-child bonding and sleepy tranquility. The little darlings dress themselves obediently in their pyjamas and clutch hot water bottles dreamily to their chests murmuring: "I love you, Mummy and Daddy."

In reality they want "just one more" repeat of Come Dine With Me. When they have already watched three. And, despite it already being several hours past the time they are supposed to be asleep, they now want you to read to them. You intone the words of Peepo, The Gruffalo or The Smartest Giant in Town as if you were a mass murderer.

Now comes the backlash – in the form of children's bedtime books designed for adults. Goodnight Keith Moon by Bruce Worden and Clare Cross published in the UK this week, is already a cult hit in the US. "Morbidly funny," according to the New Yorker, it's a spoof of the children's classic Goodnight Moon, told through the eyes of the Who's late drummer. A trashed hotel room replaces the sleepy child's bedroom. Instead of the bowl of mush featured in the original, there are pills everywhere: "And some whiskey and fish and some more in a dish, And the ghost of Cass Elliott whispering shhh."

It's already a trend with Go the Fuck to Sleep by Adam Mansbach and Ricardo Cortes, on its third print run in the US.

We can expect more of this stuff. There's already Porn For New Moms: photographs of beefcake guys feeding babies in the style of a children's picture book. And there's the "Baby Be Useful" series: Baby Mix Me a Drink, Baby Fix My Car, Baby Do My Banking. My favourite? All My Friends Are Dead by Avery Monsen: "If you're a dinosaur, all your friends are dead. If you're a pirate, all your friends have scurvy." Genius.

- Viv Groskop, The Guardian

The Tiger's Wife: Orange Prize 2011 winner

Weaving a brilliant latticework of family legend, loss, and love, Obreht, the youngest of "The New Yorker's" 20 best American fiction writers under 40, spins a timeless novel about a young doctor who confronts the inexplicable circumstances surrounding her beloved grandfather's recent death.

"... highly original, funny and frightening ... Her writing is remarkable, but she doesn't show off, nor does she ask too much of our imaginations. Like the characters in the story, we are easily drawn to the unbelievable elements of this tale because they sweep us away from the real world" - The Economist

Paperback is available for only R99 from Pulp Books.

Man with a Pan

“Man With a Pan,” edited by the cartoonist, writer and New Yorker editor John Donohue, is a rangy, toothsome, timely and occasionally wince-inducing collection of essays by kitchen dads, men who do most of the cooking in their families.

“Man With a Pan” contains essays (and recipes) by marquee names including Stephen King — isn’t it time he set a scary novel in a Hardee’s? — and Mario Batali. But the best pieces here, the line-caught beauties, are by people you’ve probably barely heard of.

 "Jesse Sheidlower, editor at large of the Oxford English Dictionary, delivers a piercing essay about his insecure need to give lavish dinner parties, as seen though the prism of his failing marriage. “Cooking had become a distraction and a source of solace in a marriage that no longer offered its own consolations,” he writes. His painful piece is also funny. When he begins dating a vegetarian and becomes one himself, a friend calls this shift a “sexually transmitted eating disorder.” 

 "Wesley Stace is best-known as a singer-songwriter who performs under the name John Wesley Harding, but he’s also written three novels. If his flinty essay here is any indication of what those novels are like, I need to pack one for the lake this summer. He nails the idiotic gender division of labor at some meals, observing about his family: “The men carved what the women cooked (a remarkable piece of last-minute scene-stealing), as though sharp knives were too dangerous for women outside the kitchen.” 

- Dwight Garner, The New York Times

Read the rest of the review here.

Rocking Reads

Do you sometimes feel like taking copious amounts of drugs, drinking whisky with your cornflakes, wearing too much eye makeup and wrecking your hotel room?

You’re not alone. But instead of ruining your health/breakfast/skin/favourite furniture, you can live vicariously through the ones who do it best.

Bringing you the best of the best rock ‘n’ roll biographies ... www.pulpbooks.co.za.  Rock on.

E-readers 'a threat to impressive-looking bookshelves'

ELECTRONIC reading devices are not as good as real books for making you look clever, it was claimed last night.

E-readers like Kindle are rapidly replacing traditional books, but unlike a shelf full of intimidating hardbacks about poetry, string theory and Russian actors who committed suicide, they can never make you look more intelligent than you really are.

Publisher Tom Logan said: "Compared to electronic devices, books have a physicality that is magical and timeless. Plus they can get you blow jobs.

"You go to a coffee shop with a Kindle, intellectual girls don't know whether you're reading Foucault's Pendulum or playing Tetris.

"Tasteful books, especially big thick ones without pictures in, are vital indicators of your brainy sexiness.

"You don't even have to read them, just leave them strewn around the public areas of your house in a seemingly haphazard fashion. It's like having A Levels, but without doing all the essays and shit."

The popularity of electronic reading also threatens the future of high street book shops full of wistful looking young women hoping to strike up a conversation with a sexy stranger who is terribly fond of Balzac.

Logan added: "And without bookshops, pale socially-awkward English Literature graduates will have to work in PR or public sanitation.

"Unable to write florid 'staff reviews' of Alan Moore comics and obscure paperbacks about Japanese sailors with two penises they would be forced to retreat from society altogether, possibly to create a diabolical and short-lived indie music sub-genre."

- from www.thedailymash.co.uk