For food lovers, the next best thing to eating is reading about it. Best Food Writing 2001, compiled by Holly Hughes, offers these and other readers the year's most memorable food writing from books, magazines, newspapers, newsletters, and Web sites. Like its predecessor, Best Food Writing 2000, the book is a banquet—51 pieces on food in all its nutritional, gustatory, psychological, sociological, and, in short, personal glory. Dip into the book anywhere and enjoy, for example, Jeffrey Steingarten on bluefin tuna, Molly O'Neill discussing the glories of soup, William Grimes on comfort food, and Coleman Andrews on eating in Rome. Readers also journey to Paris (of course) in the form of Michael Lewis's wonderfully cranky paean to cassoulet (with recipe), and with John T. Edge in his search for the best Parisian Southern fried chicken (it exists); they also follow humorist Calvin Trillin as he seeks desperately for superior ceviche in Peru, Ecuador, and Queens, New York. Also included are excerpts from Ruth Reichl's bestselling Comfort Me with Apples and Patric Kuh's The Last Days of Haute Cuisine. There's more, of course, on topics as diverse as the agonies of dinner-party hosting, a chef's-eye view of dining out, and preparing perfect rice. Ideal for bedtime reading, the book also makes a great gift for fellow foodaholics who can't get enough of their favorite passion. —Arthur Boehm

The 9th edition of the annual food writing anthology contains writing from established and rising stars, including Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall, Madhur Jaffrey and Anthony Bourdain. "Best Food Writing 2008" authoritatively and appealingly assembles the finest culinary prose from the past year's books, magazines, newspapers, newsletters, and Web sites. This anthology features both established food writers and rising stars on everything from celebrated chefs to the travails of the home cook, from erudite culinary history to food-inspired memoirs. By turns opinionated, evocative, nostalgic, sensuous, and just plain funny, it's a tasty sampler platter to dip into time and again, whether you're in the mood for foie gras, or fruit cake.Like previous collections, "Best Food Writing 2008" will include writers such as Anthony Bourdain, Frank Bruni, Bill Buford, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Barbara Kingsolver, Madhur Jaffrey, Jeffrey Steingarten, and many others.

Ted Hughes's Birthday Letters—88 tantalizing responses to Sylvia Plath and the furies she left behind—emerge from an echo chamber of art and memory, rage and representation. In the decades following his wife's 1963 suicide, Hughes kept silent, a stance many have seen as guilty, few as dignified. While an industry grew out of Plath's life and art, and even her afterlife, he continued to compose his own dark, unconfessional verses, and edited her Collected Poems, Letters Home: Correspondence 1950-1963, and Journals. But Hughes's conservancy (and his sister Olwyn's power as Plath's executrix) laid him open to yet more blame. Biographers and critics found his cuts to her letters self-interested, and decried his destruction of the journals of her final years—undertaken, he insisted, for the sake of their children.

In Birthday Letters we now have Hughes's response to Plath's white-hot mythologizing. Lost happiness intensifies present pain, but so does old despair: "Your ghost," he acknowledges, "inseparable from my shadow." Ranging from accessible short-story-like verses to tightly wound, allusive lyrics, the poems push forward from initial encounters to key moments long after Plath's death. In "Visit," he writes, "I look up—as if to meet your voice / With all its urgent future / that has burst in on me. Then look back / At the book of the printed words. / You are ten years dead. It is only a story. / Your story. My story." These poems are filled with conditionals and might-have-beens, Hughes never letting us forget forces in motion before their seven-year marriage and final separation. When he first sees Plath, she is both scarred (from her earlier suicide attempt) and radiant: "Your eyes / Squeezed in your face, a crush of diamonds, / Incredibly bright, bright as a crush of tears..." But Fate and Plath's father, Otto, will not let them be. In the very next poem, "The Shot," her trajectory is already plotted. Though Hughes is her victim, her real target is her dead father——"the god with the smoking gun."

Of course, "The Shot" and the accusatory "The Dogs Are Eating Your Mother" are an incitement to those who side (as if there is a side!) with Plath. Newsweek has already chalked up the reaction of poet and feminist Robin Morgan to the book: "My teeth began to grind uncontrollably." But Hughes makes it clear that his poems are written for his dead wife and living children, not her acolytes' bloodsport. He has also, of course, written them for himself and the reader. Pieces such as "Epiphany," "The 59th Bear," and "Life After Death" are masterful mixes of memory and image. In "Epiphany," for instance, the young Hughes, walking in London, suddenly spots a man carrying a fox inside his jacket. Offered the cub for a pound, he hesitates, knowing he and Plath couldn't handle the animal—not with a new baby, not in the city. But in an instant, his potent vision extends beyond the animal, perhaps to his and Plath's children: Already past the kittenish
But the eyes still small,
Round, orphaned-looking, woebegone
As if with weeping. Bereft
Of the blue milk, the toys of feather and fur,
The den life's happy dark. And the huge whisper
Of the constellations
Out of which Mother had always returned. Other poems are more influenced by Plath's "terrible, hypersensitive fingers," including "The Bee God" and "Dreamers," which is apparently a record of Plath's one encounter with Hughes's mistress: "She fascinated you. Her eyes caressed you, / Melted a weeping glitter at you. / Her German the dark undercurrent / In her Kensington jeweller's elocution / Was your ancestral Black Forest whisper——" This exotic woman, "slightly filthy with erotic mystery," seems a close relation to Plath's own Lady Lazarus, and the poem would be equally powerful without any biographical information. This is the one paradoxical pity of this superb collection. These poems require no prior knowledge—but for better or worse, we possess it.

A girl dresses in a bunny costume to earn her dad's approval. . . . A boy bakes a cake and takes out his dad in the same afternoon. . . . These are just two of the offbeat and utterly captivating scenarios readers will find in this collection of stories inspired by narrative artwork. Nine charcoal drawings, each one hauntingly surreal, were the creative spur for eighteen different authors. Pairs of writers were sent the same image and asked to write a story to accompany it. The results are fascinating: some of the couplings are strikingly similar; others couldn't be more different, and all make terrific reading.

Named a Top Ten Art Book for Youth by ALA Booklist.

A Hollywood millionaire with a terror of death, whose personal physician happens to be working on a theory of longevity—these are the elements of Huxley's caustic and entertaining satire on man's desire to live indefinitely.

"Community, Identity, Stability" is the motto of Aldous Huxley's utopian World State. Here everyone consumes daily grams of soma, to fight depression, babies are born in laboratories, and the most popular form of entertainment is a "Feelie," a movie that stimulates the senses of sight, hearing, and touch. Though there is no violence and everyone is provided for, Bernard Marx feels something is missing and senses his relationship with a young women has the potential to be much more than the confines of their existence allow. Huxley foreshadowed many of the practices and gadgets we take for granted today—let—let's hope the sterility and absence of individuality he predicted aren't yet to come.

Flush those boring old gifts and give your friends and family something they can really sit down and digest! The Uncle John's Bathroom Reader series is one of the longest-running, most popular humor collections in the publishing industry. It taps into a vast resource of forgotten readers — the 66 percent of North Americans who admit to reading in the bathroom. It's our 15th year and we're still going strong!

Yep! These high-demand editions are finally back in print! This lighthearted, easy-to-read collection of facts, quotes, history, science, word origins, pop culture, gossip, humor, and more is organized by length: Readers can spend a minute with the Quickies, relax with Normal-Length articles, or really get cozy with Long Items.

This collection of reprints includes information readers have been patiently awaiting, such as:

*How to start your own country
*How one nuclear bomb can ruin your whole day
*The origin of video games
*The origins of common words and phrases
*The truth about the Bermuda Triangle
*The inside story of Dr. Seuss

And, of course, it offers the more than 100 hot topics that the Bathroom Reader series is known for: movies, education, entertainment, corporate America, celebrities, literature, practical jokes, music, and a host of others.

Now in its 16th year, The Bathroom Reader — which seems to have replaced the tie as the most popular Father's Day gift idea — has become a movement, with satisfying, easily digested new selections sure to wipe away bathroom boredom. Handily arranged by length — "short" (a quick read), "medium" (1 to 3 pages), and "long" (for those extended visits) — the book covers everything from Americana to The Name Game to Pop Science and Wordplay. Readers can learn the origins of superglue, sample news stories about underwear, read about animals famous for 15 minutes, and learn of unknown heroes of the Wild West. This broad assortment eliminates ennui while wittily educating readers trapped in airports, cars, buses, or lavatories.

At over 800 pages, John Irving's Until I Find You is a daunting proposition at best. Anyone who finishes it will have acquired forearm muscles, sore shoulders, and not much else. The story is self-indulgent, repetitive and, ultimately, boring, that cardinal sin that readers can't forgive. Longtime Irving readers have stayed with him through a few hits and a miss or two, but this is an all-time low. We are accustomed to Irving's work as quirky, bizarre, and off-the-wall and have forgiven all by calling such high-jinks and characters "imaginative" or "absolutely original." The only thing original about this tome is the descent into soft porn.

Jack Burns, the hero of the tale, is four years old when it all begins. He is the illegitimate son of Daughter Alice, a tattoo artist and, guess what, daughter of a tattoo artist. She takes Jack on a pilgrimage to find his womanizing father, William, a church organist and "ink addict." By seeking out church organs and tattoo parlors, she expects to find him. She doesn't, and by now we have spent more than a hundred pages in Northern European cities doing an imitation of Groundhog Day. Same story, different day: a little prostitution for Alice, a few questions asked; alas, no daddy.

Alice and Jack return to Toronto so that Jack may enter a previously all-girls school, which will admit little boys for the first time. There begins another 200 pages of the girls and the teachers abusing Jack, over and over again. By now, he is five and is, for some unfathomable reason, eminently interesting to girls and women. His "friend" Emma keeps careful track of "the little guy," as she calls Jack's penis, looking for signs of life. The worst part of all this is that none of it is funny or sad or even clever. There are wrestling vignettes, of course, and prep school tedium, but no bears. Maybe bears would have saved it. There were funny parts in The World According to Garp and The Cider House Rules as well as poignant, horrific parts in both of those and other Irving novels. This story is flat. The voice never changes; it just drones on.

Jack becomes an actor. First, he is a boy in drag because he is so pretty, then he takes transvestite parts. He and Emma, now a published novelist, live together in LA, which provides endless opportunity for name-dropping. His career eventually takes off and he gets recognition and awards, but still no daddy. Irving, it turns out, never knew his father, either. Perhaps this exercise will exorcise that demon once and for all and Irving's next book will be about something more compelling than a little boy's penis and his trashy mother's antics. If you do make it through to the book's snapper of an ending, you deserve to find out what it is on your own. Call it a reward. —Valerie Ryan

All children should believe they are special. But the students of Hailsham, an elite school in the English countryside, are so special that visitors shun them, and only by rumor and the occasional fleeting remark by a teacher do they discover their unconventional origins and strange destiny. Kazuo Ishiguro's sixth novel, Never Let Me Go, is a masterpiece of indirection. Like the students of Hailsham, readers are "told but not told" what is going on and should be allowed to discover the secrets of Hailsham and the truth about these children on their own.

Offsetting the bizarreness of these revelations is the placid, measured voice of the narrator, Kathy H., a 31-year-old Hailsham alumna who, at the close of the 1990s, is consciously ending one phase of her life and beginning another. She is in a reflective mood, and recounts not only her childhood memories, but her quest in adulthood to find out more about Hailsham and the idealistic women who ran it. Although often poignant, Kathy's matter-of-fact narration blunts the sharper emotional effects you might expect in a novel that deals with illness, self-sacrifice, and the severe restriction of personal freedoms. As in Ishiguro's best-known work, The Remains of the Day, only after closing the book do you absorb the magnitude of what his characters endure. —Regina Marler