Tag Archives: Books

Best New Fiction Books: 57-Year Old Author Lily King’s “Writers & Lovers” – On The Road To Happiness

Writers & Lovers Lily King March 2020Writers & Lovers follows Casey―a smart and achingly vulnerable protagonist―in the last days of a long youth, a time when every element of her life comes to a crisis. Written with King’s trademark humor, heart, and intelligence, Writers & Lovers is a transfixing novel that explores the terrifying and exhilarating leap between the end of one phase of life and the beginning of another.

Following the breakout success of her critically acclaimed and award-winning novel Euphoria, Euphoria Lily KingLily King returns with another instant New York Times bestseller: an unforgettable portrait of an artist as a young woman.

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Lily King is the author of five award-winning novels. Her most recent novel, Writers & Lovers, will be published on March 3rd, 2020. Her 2014 novel Euphoria won the Kirkus Award, The New England Book Award, The Maine Fiction Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Award. Euphoria was named one of the 10 Best Books of 2014 by The New York Times Book Review. It was included in TIME’s Top 10 Fiction Books of 2014, as well as on Amazon, NPR, Entertainment Weekly, Publishers Weekly, and Salon’s Best Books of 2014.

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Interviews: Top Irish Chef JP McMahon On Ireland’s “Real Food” Culture

Monocle 24 The Menu podcastGalway’s top chef, JP McMahon, on what the world doesn’t understand about Ireland’s food culture.

JP McMahon Aniari Restaurant Ireland

Jp McMahon is a chef, restaurateur, and author. He is culinary director of the EatGalway Restaurant Group and runs the Aniar Boutique Cookery School. Founding chair and director of the Galway Food Festival, Jp is an ambassador for Irish food. He organises an annual international chef symposium entitled ‘Food on the Edge’ in Galway and writes a weekly column for the Irish Times.

The Irish Cook Book JP McMahon Phaidon Book

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Design Books: “Architizer – The World’s Best Architecture” (Phaidon)

Architizer The World's Best Architecture Phaidon April 2020The Architizer A+Awards represent 2019’s best architecture and products, celebrated by a diverse group of influencers within and outside the architectural community. Entries are judged by more than 400 luminaries from fields as diverse as fashion, publishing, product design, real-estate development, and technology, and voted on by the public, culminating in a collection of the world’s finest buildings.

Each year, winners are honored in this fully illustrated compendium, and on Architizer.com, the largest online architecture community on the planet. Featuring select A+Award winners, this is the definitive guide to the year’s best buildings and spaces.

Architizer is the leading online resource for architecture. Through its vast building database, daily content, ‘Source’ marketplace, and A+Awards, it is revolutionizing the way architects connect with building-product manufacturers and the world beyond.

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New Wine Books: “The 100 Burgundy” – Building A “Dream Cellar” (Assouline)

The 100 Burgundy Jeannie Cho Lee AssoulineAn exceptional Burgundy is not only well crafted and well balanced, it also must have essential qualities reflecting its own terroir as well as those unique to the particular vintage, distilling the very essence of the vine itself and the earth from which it springs.

Essential reading for all fine wine aficionados, whether curating a dream cellar or selecting the best Burgundy wines to experience with friends and family, The 100 Burgundy: offers a fresh perspective by a dedicated professional who visits the region regularly and recognizes the best it has to offer.

For wine enthusiasts discovering Burgundy—and those already smitten with the region’s seductive wines—The 100 Burgundy: is the first guide of its kind to the region’s best wines and makers, detailing the domaines and highlighting each chosen wine with tasting notes. Considering factors such as a wine’s quality, its ability to evolve and improve over time, and its ability to evoke emotion, Master of Wine Jeannie Cho Lee invites readers to explore 100 memorable Burgundy wines of the Côte d’Or, from benchmark domaines to rising stars.

The 100 Burgundy Exceptional Wines to Build a Dream Cellar Jeannie Cho Lee Assouline 2020

With a foreword by Lalou Bize-Leroy, owner of Domaine Leroy and co-owner of Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, this enlightening volume is a journey through the countryside of Burgundy, capturing the context, people, and history that inspire the creation of these masterful wines.

Jeannie Cho Lee is the first Asian Master of Wine (MW), an award-winning author, wine critic, judge, and educator. Currently a professor at Hong Kong Polytechnic University, where she helped launch the Master of Science program in International Wine Management, she is also a consultant for Singapore Airlines since 2009.

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New Culture & Food Books: “Cooking In Marfa” – Fine Dining “In The West Texas Desert” (Phaidon)

The Capri Restaurant in Marfa TexasCooking in Marfa introduces an unusual small town in the West Texas desert and, within it, a fine-dining oasis in a most unlikely place. The Capri excels at serving the spectrum of guests that Marfa draws, from locals and ranchers to artists, museum-board members, and discerning tourists.

Featuring more than 80 recipes inspired by local products, this is the story of this unique community told through the lens of food, sharing the cuisine and characters that make The Capri a destination unto itself.

Cooking In Marfa Book Phaidon April 2020

Marfa, the remote desert town in West Texas, might be small, but its cultural capital is far greater than its city limits suggest. “There are multigenerational families that were here when this was still Mexico, ranchers of European descent, artists, patrons, collectors, railroad workers, border patrol, fashion designers, builders, social workers, photographers, tomato factory workers, cultural travelers, intrepid travelers, and transient hipsters all existing in 1.6 square miles, at ‘about a mile high’ [elevation] with a population of 1,800 people, more or less,” writes the entrepreneur, philanthropist, restaurateur and Texas native Virginia Lebermann in our new book, Cooking in Marfa: Welcome, We’ve Been Expecting You.

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New Exhibitions: “Cézanne – The Rock and Quarry Paintings” (Princeton)

Cézanne The Rock and Quarry Paintings book edited by John Elderfield April 2020Cézanne: The Rock and Quarry Paintings is the first major exhibition to examine an essential but understudied aspect of the revolutionary French painter’s work: his profound interest in rock and geological formations.

Throughout his career, Cézanne made canvases that take rock formations as their principal subjects. Although they are among the artist’s most extraordinary landscapes, such paintings of geological forms have never before been the focus of significant scholarship.

Cézanne: The Rock and Quarry Paintings will feature approximately 15 of the most important of these paintings, as well as selected watercolors and related documentary material. Together, they reveal the artist’s fascination with geology, which helped shape the radical innovations of his artistic practice

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Video Interviews: 58-Year Old Nobel Prize Author Olga Tokarczuk (2020)

In this interview from the Nobel Banquet on 10 December 2019, Literature Laureate Olga Tokarczuk talks about her childhood dream of being a scientist, curiosity as motivation and the importance of translators.

Olga Tokarczuk, (born January 29, 1962, Sulechów, Poland), Polish writer who was known for her wry and complex novels that leap between centuries, places, perspectives, and mythologies. She received the 2018 Nobel Prize for Literature (awarded belatedly in 2019), lauded for her “narrative imagination that with encyclopedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life.” A best-selling author in Poland for decades, Tokarczuk was not well known outside her homeland until she became the country’s first author to win the Man Booker International Prize in 2018 for Flights (2017)—the English translation of her sixth novel, Bieguni (2007).

From Encyclopedia Britannica

Travel & Culture Books: “St. Tropez Soleil” By Simon Liberati (Assouline)

The legend of St. Tropez starts with a dog, a rooster, and a martyr; and it leads to movie stars, world-renowned artists and distinguished writers. Located on the sparkling French Riviera, St. Tropez has enjoyed the spotlight for more than half a century, for better or worse, with celebrities flocking to this idyllic locale for its beaches and a dose of Mediterranean sun.

A picturesque oasis, St. Tropez has served as inspiration for a who’s who of notable writers from Françoise Sagan to Colette; as well as renowned artists Paul Signac and Henri Matisse; and even filmmakers. However, St. Tropez would not be the same without then belle du jour Brigitte Bardot, her films and lovers and many other famous couples including Annabel and Bernard Buffet and Bianca and Mick Jagger.

St. Tropez Soleil Assouline book

St. Tropez Soleil guides the reader through its storied past and ever-evolving present. Featuring annual mainstays such as Les Bravades and the Les Voiles de Saint-Tropez as well as exclusive events like a Chanel fashion show at the quintessentially Tropezian Sénéquier café and the White Party at Nikki Beach begun by Naomi Campbell. But despite all that changes, the spirit of St. Tropez remains the same and this volume is an ode to the unique joie de vivre that keeps everyone coming back.

Simon Liberati is an award-winning French writer and journalist. He has worked for publications such as PurpleNuméro, and 20 Ans and he frequently collaborates with Vogue. He has written ten books including Jayne Mansfield 1967 (2011), which won the prix Femina, and the best-selling Eva (2015).

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Profiles: The “Stylish” Legacy Of British Author Hugo Charteris (1922-1970)

From a New Criterion online article:

Hugo Charteris The LifelineAlan Ross, for forty years The London Magazine’s editor, found Charteris “one of the most original, quirky and shrewd explorers of the behaviour of the landed gentry . . . and at a time when prose was plain, his was idiosyncratically stylish.”

When Hugo Charteris’s first novel, the haunting A Share of the World, was published in 1953 to the praise of Rosamond Lehmann (who helped to get it published), Peter Quennell, Evelyn Waugh, and Francis Wyndham (Charteris’s relation and consistent supporter), the author, just turned thirty-one, seemed set for lasting fame. It hasn’t worked that way in the The New Criterion March 2020almost five decades since his death of cancer in 1970, aged only forty-seven.

Nowadays, few people seem to know his name. This is true among not only the ever-growing majority who pay little attention to novels and novelists, but also the enlightened minority who do.

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New Architecture Books: “The Gardens Of Eden” By Gestalten (April 2020)

THE GARDENS OF EDEN New Residential Garden Concepts & Architecture for a Greener Planet Gestalten bookStep into innovative little gardens of Eden created on small terraces and city rooftops, as well as out in the suburbs and countryside.

As our lifestyles become more sustainable, so does the way we interact with the outdoors. Today’s gardeners aim not only to create decorative outside spaces but also to give something back. No matter what size your patch is, it’s easy to create diverse and rich environments for plants and insects, or grow your own vegetables or fruits. This book presents spaces that are more imaginative, diverse, and sustainable. Learn how to grow food in the city, get creative with native plants, and design The Gardens of Eden New Residential Garden Concepts and Architecture for a Greener Planet Gestalten Book April 2020greener corners within urban areas. The Gardens of Eden looks at fascinating examples around the world, teaching what you can do for nature while revealing what a garden can do for you.

Abbye Churchill was the editorial director of Wilder Quarterly, and her first book, A Wilder Life, was featured in The New York Times Book Review. Her writing has also appeared in The New York Times, Vogue, Food & Wine, and W. She lives in Brooklyn, New York City.

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