Stirring Things Up
Food editor, recipe developer, and Instagram star (638K followers) Molly Baz has the #6 book in the country with Cook This Book, which our review called “an exciting crash course in cooking fundamentals.” QR codes peppered throughout link to video tutorials, and lively photos harken to a pre- (and, one hopes, post-) Covid era, when inviting friends over is the norm. Crowd-pleasers include shrimp cocktail with dilled horseradish cream (“and a martini so cold it hurts your fingers”), and smoked trout dip with potato chips and salmon roe—which, she writes, “takes all of five minutes to pull together.”
Food for Thought
Musician Michelle Zauner, who performs under the name Japanese Breakfast, debuts at #7 in hardcover nonfiction with the memoir Crying in H Mart, rooted in her 2018 viral New Yorker essay of the same name. It’s “an earnest account of her Korean-American upbringing, musical career, and the aftermath of her mother’s death,” our review said. Zauner’s virtual tour has included a chat and demo cohosted by L.A.’s Now Serving and Seattle’s Book Larder with YouTuber Maangchi, whose Korean cooking videos she turned to after her mother died. At r., the author, who lives in Brooklyn, signed copies for Books Are Magic in Cobble Hill.
Spring Emergence
Even after the success of Richard Wright’s seminal 1940 work, Native Son, publishers rejected his proposed follow-up novel, in which a Black man is beaten and tortured by white police officers who frame him for a double murder. “The publishers of the day were discounting Black readership and they didn’t want to unsettle white readership,” the author’s daughter Julia Wright told the Guardian in an April interview. “I think they were afraid of what they read in those pages.” Eight decades later,
Library of America has released the book, The Man Who Lived Underground, and it debuts at #14 in hardcover fiction. “The power and pain of Wright’s writing are evident,” our review said, and the author “makes the impact of racist policing palpable as the story builds to a gut-punch ending.”
NEW & NOTABLE
WORLD TRAVEL
Anthony Bourdain and Laurie Woolever
#1 Hardcover Nonfiction, #1 overall
Woolever, the late Bourdain’s longtime collaborator and coauthor of 2016’s Appetites, put together “this gloriously messy miscellany of off-kilter observations and lightning-in-a-bottle insights,” our review said, which “will make one want to read, eat, and experience the world the way Bourdain did.”
THE MAKING OF BIBLICAL WOMANHOOD
Beth Allison Barr
#6 Trade Paperback
“In this trenchant blend of memoir and analysis, historian Barr challenges the Christian evangelical belief that male dominance and female submission are required of the faithful,” our review said. The author “argues that, far from being a part of God’s plan, patriarchy is a sin, and the notion of ‘biblical womanhood’ is a 20th-century artifact.”
