Culinary dystopias, heart-warming cult classics, and gripping tales about personal hunger and desire: these books have it all. Whether you’re looking for a summer beach read, a sweet literary escape, or a foodie novel, we got you covered.
Many would argue that summer and reading are a perfect pairing – like gelato after dinner on a humid evening. For all our fellow foodies, here are 8 books that delve into the culinary world in one way or another, to give your summer the literary backdrop it deserves.
Exploring vegetarianism as a rebellious act in modern-day Seoul, 2024 Nobel Prize laureate Han Kang’s novel “The Vegetarian” is a gripping tale of power, violence, and obsession.
Before the nightmares began, Yeong-hye and her husband lived an ordinary, controlled life. But the dreams—invasive images of blood and brutality—torture her, driving Yeong-hye to purge her mind and renounce eating meat altogether. It’s a small act of independence, but it interrupts her marriage and sets into motion an increasingly grotesque chain of events at home. As her husband, her brother-in-law and sister each fight to reassert their control, Yeong-hye obsessively defends the choice that’s become sacred to her. Soon their attempts turn desperate, subjecting first her mind, and then her body, to ever more intrusive and perverse violations, sending Yeong-hye spiraling into a dangerous, bizarre estrangement, not only from those closest to her, but also from herself.
For anyone who ever dreamt of moving to a charming old villa in the South of France, Peter Mayle’s hear-warming novel, “A Year in Provence”, is replete with the trials and tribulations of what it means to transform a fantasy into reality. Want to go on a little literary escape so well written that you can practically smell the lavender and pine cones off the pages? This is the book for you!
…He endures January’s frosty mistral as it comes howling down the Rhône Valley, discovers the secrets of goat racing through the middle of town, and delights in the glorious regional cuisine. “A Year in Provence” transports us into all the earthy pleasures of Provençal life and lets us live vicariously at a tempo governed by seasons, not by days.
First published in 1942 during wartime shortages, M.F.K. Fisher’s cookbook “How to Cook a Wolf” is a seminal work on what cooking is truly about. Combining recipes and explanations of cooking techniques with her witty commentary, this book not only provides a fascinating historical account of culinary expertise, it will also have you laughing out loud, inspiring you to look at cooking from a different angle.
M.F.K. Fisher knew that the last thing hungry people needed were hints on cutting back and making do. Instead, she gives her readers license to dream, to experiment, to construct adventurous and delicious meals as a bulwark against a dreary, meager present. Her fine prose provides reason in itself to draw our chairs close to the hearth; we can still enjoy her company and her exhortations to celebrate life by eating well.
In her Pulitzer Prize-winning collection of short stories, the Indian American author Jhumpa Lahiri writes on the intergenerational experience of immigrants straddling a cultural divide. Time and again, these stories center on culinary mores and family life around the dinner table, offering a passionate and moving account full of wisdom and sensory details of Indian culture.
…A blackout forces a young Indian American couple to make confessions that unravel their tattered domestic peace. An Indian American girl recognizes her cultural identity during a Halloween celebration while the Pakastani civil war rages on television in the background. A latchkey kid with a single working mother finds affinity with a woman from Calcutta. In the title story, an interpreter guides an American family through the India of their ancestors and hears an astonishing confession.
A meditation on the Jewish immigrant experience in New York’s Lower East Side, this collection of short stories by Anzia Yezierska explores what it means to be full of hunger for a better life.
In stories that draw heavily on her own life, Anzia Yezierska portrays the immigrant’s struggle to become a “real” American, in such stories as “Yekl,” “Hunger,” “The Fat of the Land,” and “How I Found America.” Set mostly in New York’s Lower East Side, the stories brilliantly evoke the oppressive atmosphere of crowded streets and shabby tenements and lay bare the despair of families trapped in unspeakable poverty, working at demeaning jobs, and coping with the barely hidden prejudices of their new land.
A gripping dystopian read, C Pam Zhang’s “Land of Milk and Honey” provocatively exposes the implications of desiring pleasure and excess in a world characterized by scarcity. Packaged as a love letter to food and cooking, this novel is a bitingly sharp ode to discovering one’s appetite.
…A smog has spread. Food crops are rapidly disappearing. A chef escapes her dying career in a dreary city to take a job at a decadent mountaintop colony seemingly free of the world’s troubles.
There, the sky is clear again. Rare ingredients abound. Her enigmatic employer and his visionary daughter have built a lush new life for the global elite, one that reawakens the chef to the pleasures of taste, touch, and her own body.
In this atmosphere of hidden wonders and cool, seductive violence, the chef’s boundaries undergo a thrilling erosion. Soon she is pushed to the center of a startling attempt to reshape the world far beyond the plate.
What better book to dive into the world of culinary non-fiction with than Anthony Bourdain’s cult classic “Kitchen Confidential.” A memoir of Bourdain’s time in high-end kitchens, spawned by his 1999 essay “Don’t Eat Before Reading This” in The New Yorker, Kitchen Confidential is a witty collection of anecdotes that are as insightful as they are entertaining.
…Fans will love to return to this deliciously funny, delectably shocking banquet of wild-but-true tales of life in the culinary trade from Chef Anthony Bourdain, laying out his more than a quarter-century of drugs, sex, and haute cuisine—this time with never-before-published material.
Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly (updated edition)
Anthony Bourdain
352 pages
$ 18.99
Set in eighteenth-century France, “Perfume: The Story of a Murderer” by Patrick Süskind is a historical fantasy novel exploring the dimensions of the protagonist’s unusual olfactory abilities and his concomitant involvement in murder.
In the slums of eighteenth-century France, the infant Jean-Baptiste Grenouille is born with one sublime gift—an absolute sense of smell. As a boy, he lives to decipher the odors of Paris, and apprentices himself to a prominent perfumer who teaches him the ancient art of mixing precious oils and herbs. But Grenouille’s genius is such that he is not satisfied to stop there, and he becomes obsessed with capturing the smells of objects such as brass doorknobs and fresh-cut wood. Then one day he catches a hint of a scent that will drive him on an ever-more-terrifying quest to create the “ultimate perfume”—the scent of a beautiful young virgin. Told with dazzling narrative brilliance, “Perfume” is a hauntingly powerful tale of murder and sensual depravity.
