Book News
“Best” cookbooks
In an attempt to help its readers “cut through the clutter” of the 24,000 cookbooks published each year, Gourmet magazine is launching the Gourmet Cookbook Club, which will select one book a month. The magazine’s editors will choose books that offer “imaginative insight and delicious results.”
The club’s inaugural selection is “Fish Without a Doubt,” by Rick Moonen and Roy Finamore. Gourmet’s June issue, which went on sale Tuesday announced the selection, and a simultaneous feature runs at .
Gourmet editor-in-chief Ruth Reichl said she and her staff established the club in response to the overwhelming number of cookbooks published in the U.S.
A group of editors winnows each month’s submissions down to four or five books, and then the 30-odd staff members are invited to take the books home and try recipes. The best book becomes that month’s pick.
Reichl said the main criteria are that a book “makes you want to cook, and the recipes really work.” All types of cookbooks will be considered, in all formats — and the club will occasionally choose old books. publishersweekly.com
First Line
Bulls Island by Dorothea Benton Frank
“Trouble. In the charcoal shadows that delivered dawn to day in my Manhattan apartment, trouble lurked like a horrible thief. It would snatch my guilty life out of my pocket. I could sense but not pinpoint the exact location. It did not matter. Trouble would get me anyway. Trouble so practiced and seasoned that I would never know its clammy hand, each fingertip as light as feathers had been there mocking me the whole way to ruination. Except for one telling detail. Before I threw back my bedcovers, before I even glanced at my alarm clock, my left eyelid had begun to twitch in earnest. Always a redoutable warning of approaching and certain disaster. My heart pounded. Was it a dream?”
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Bestsellers
Fiction
1. Water for Elephants, by Sara Gruen
2. Loving Frank, by Nancy Horan
3. The Friday Night Knitting Club, by Kate Jacobs
4. The Gathering, by Anne Enright
5. Nineteen Minutes, by Jodi Picoult
Nonfiction
1. A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose, by Eckhart Tolle
2. Three Cups of Tea, by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver
3. Eat, Pray, Love, by Elizabeth Gilbert
4. The Power of Now, by Eckhart Tolle
5. The Omnivore’s Dilemma, by Michael Pollan
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