Food Essays

Longlisted for the 2023 PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award A lively exploration of animal behavior in all its glorious complexity, whether in tiny wasps, lumbering elephants, or ourselves. For centuries, people have been returning to the same tired nature-versus-nurture debate...

Chanakya's Arthashastra is an unrivalled political treatise that has been used by scholars, academics and leaders across the world. In Chanakya and the Art of Getting Rich, Radhakrishnan Pillai brings out the inherent lessons from Arthashastra to present a strategic and practical way of...

A young girl forced to work in a Queens sweatshop calls child services on her mother in this powerful debut memoir about labor and self-worth that traces a Chinese immigrant’s journey to an American future. As a teen, Anna Qu is sent by her mother to work in her family’s garment factory in...

A captivating exploration of the remarkable ways our DNA mutates over the course of our lives, with radical implications for the future of medicine Our DNA is the indispensable set of instructions that guides our growth and vitality. The common misconception is that this molecular blueprint...

A collection of the year’s top food and travel writing, selected by the trailblazing New York Times bestselling author and Emmy-nominated host of Taste the Nation and Top Chef Padma Lakshmi. “Food and travel are natural companions,” writes guest editor Padma Lakshmi. From this pairing...

An intimate memoir portraying a life spent trying to describe the indescribable—from the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist of The Hours and Day Go ahead. Try using language to slit the skin of mortality to see what’s on the other side. At the age of three, Michael Cunningham began obsessively...

‘You shouldn't be with a Chinese girl…that should be my girl,’ a man in Singapore allegedly said this to a Chinese-Indian couple as he spat towards them. In a world brimming with such prejudice and cultural tensions, a remarkable phenomenon emerges: nearly one in five marriages in the USA...

In this witty, absurd, and surprisingly moving memoir-in-essays, comedian Alison Leiby unpacks the multitudes women are told to be—and the joy of refusing to pick just one. Have you ever frozen when someone asks, "So, tell me about yourself?" If so, take a page from I'm a Lot. Alison Leiby...

An undocumented activist and a social scientist come together to tally of the structural costs of undocumented life An inhumane math pervades this country: even as our government extracts labor and often taxes from undocumented workers, it excludes these same workers from its social safety net...

Around 2500 years ago a thirty-five-year-old man named Siddhartha had a mystical insight under a peepul tree in north-eastern India, in a place now revered as Bodhgaya. Today, more than 300 million people across the globe consider themselves beneficiaries of Gautama Buddha’s insight, and...

"A decidedly skewed, hilarious collection of life reflections and colorful storytelling." — Kirkus Reviews An endlessly entertaining collection of wayward autobiographical tales about a search for a richer life thwarted at every turn by beagles, bureaucrats, and ill-advised love affairs The...

For almost a decade, beloved storyteller E. Lynn Harris has welcomed you into his family with his passionate, warm and trail-blazing novels. Now, he invites you into the most intimate world ever--his own. Since his first book Invisible Life was published in the early 1990s, New York Times...

“I was raised Lutheran: Bible-believing, Jesus-loving Lutheran. But as an adult I tried everything: Pentecostals, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Rock ‘n’ Roll Slackers 4 Jesus, Actors for Yahweh. Then I said, ‘Screw it’ and became a drunk and a slut. Well, a Lutheran slut–I slept with...

Stories of hope, love and compassion from a bygone era of Singapore's historyLittle Drops: Cherished Children of Singapore’s Past is a compilation of biographies based on historical fact about the pain of separation and the lure of love, and how these themes constantly collide. These...

Exploring issues from the #MeToo movement, gender bias in division of labor and the workplace, and the underrepresentation of women of color in leadership, to cultural trends including food and travel shows, the intersection of fashion and food, and the evolution of food writing in the last few decades, Women on Food brings together food's most vital female voices.

A collection of hilarious essays about how food became one man’s obsession and coping mechanism, and how it came to rule—and sometimes ruin—his relationships, from the Cobra Kai actor, stand-up comic, and host of Food Network’s Raid the Fridge “When most people say they have an...

Helen Thorpe, author of a trio of award-winning books about the experiences of immigrants, refugees, and veterans, has turned her writerly lens on her own family, neighborhood, and ethnicity. In Finding Motherland, Thorpe shares seven essays she has written on the related themes of family, food, and migration, sharing observations about race and privilege.

The first-ever Black history to center queer voices, this landmark study traces the lives of LGBTQ+ Black Americans from slavery to present day Gender and sexual expression have always been part of the Black freedom struggle In this latest book in Beacon’s award-winning ReVisioning History...

From New York Times reporter Jazmine Ulloa, a sweeping human history of El Paso, revealing violence, power, and privilege at play in America's most famous border town. El Paso has been called the “Ellis Island” of America’s southern border, a mountain pass cum border town cum bifurcated...

Brad Fox takes us on a wild exploration of plants and people, imagination and matter, over an unexpected year-long waylay in the high jungle of northeastern Peru. "Brad Fox has traveled to the center of many worlds and here records a visit to the 'passionate nada' in his disarming, beautifully...