The Spice Merchant’s Daughter: Recipes and Simple Spice Blends for the American Kitchen

by Christina Arokiasamy

Hardcover $29.95 - 10%

Clarkson Potter - Random House / Cooking

It was the aroma. The exotic scent of spices: rich, alluring, and almost magical. A scent that would sometimes overpower the freshness in the air and sometimes subtly mingle with it to create a tantalizing bouquet. A scent that would always bring me back to my childhood.

Growing up enveloped in the aromas of her mother’s spice stall in Kuala Lumpur, Christina Arokiasamy developed an artist’s sense of how to combine and use spices in traditional and innovative ways. In The Spice Merchant’s Daughter, she shares her family’s spice secrets, expertly guiding and enticing home cooks to enliven their repertoires.

Christina weaves evocative stories of cooking at her mother’s side with real-world practical advice gleaned not only from working in professional kitchens but also from tackling the nightly task of getting a home-cooked dinner on the table for her family of four using American ingredients. She shows how easy it is to build layers of complex flavor to create 100 tempting Southeast Asian–inspired recipes, including Lemon Pepper Wings, Spicy Beef Salad, Steamed Snapper with Tamarind-Ginger Sauce, Cardamom Butter Rice with Sultanas, and Coconut Flan Infused with Star Anise. She unlocks the transformative power of homemade spice rubs, curry pastes, and sauces, as well as chutneys and pickles, enabling home cooks to bring new depth and dimension to their favorite dishes.

With lush photography and a chapter identifying and defining key pantry ingredients and aromatics, The Spice Merchant’s Daughter both inspires and empowers, awakening the senses and unlocking the alluring world of spices.

My Fantoms

by Theophile Gautier, translated by Richard Holmes

Paperback $14.00

NYRB Classics / Fiction

Romantic provocateur, flamboyant bohemian, precocious novelist, perfect poet—not to mention an inexhaustible journalist, critic, and man-about-town—Théophile Gautier is one of the major figures, and great characters, of French literature.

In My Fantoms Richard Holmes, the celebrated biographer of Shelley and Coleridge, has found a brilliantly effective new way to bring this great bu too-little-known writer into English. My Fantoms assembles seven stories spanning the whole of Gautier’s career into a unified work that captures the essence of his adventurous life and subtle art. From the erotic awakening of “The Adolescent” through “The Poet,” a piercing recollection of the mad genius Gérard de Nerval, the great friend of Gautier’s youth, My Fantoms celebrates the senses and illuminates the strange disguises of the spirit, while taking readers on a tour of modernity at its most mysterious. ”What ever would the Devil find to do in Paris?” Gautier wonders. “He would meet people just as diabolical as he, and find himself taken for some naïve provincial…”

Tapestries, statues, and corpses come to life; young men dream their way into ruin; and Gautier keeps his faith in the power of imagination: “No one is truly dead, until they are no longer loved.”

Stones of Aran: Pilgrimage

by Tim Robinson, introduction by Robert Macfarlane

Paperback $18.95

NYRB Classics / Travelogue

From Publishers Weekly:
An exquisitely detailed portrait of a special landscape, this is a gem-like addition to the travel genre. Robinson, an artist and cartographer, has made prize-winning maps of southwest Ireland and adjacent islands. Describing himself as “self-appointed resident scientific busybody,” he walks the coastline of Arainn, largest of the three Aran Islands, clockwise from the western edge, in an exploration of geology, topography, history, language and folklore. Arainn is limestone, and its natural forms are rectilinear. We see storm beaches-mile after mile of huge boulders stripped from the rim of cliffs and moved inland by wind. Robinson recounts hazardous sports once practiced by the natives-birdcatching and fishing from clifftops; he calls our attention to prehistoric sites and to abandoned forts. He takes a side trip by curragh to the Brannock Islands and meditates on the origins of placenames. Arainn’s north coast was a center for kelp factories producing iodine and fertilizer in the 19th century; Robinson offers a vivid picture of that period as well.

The Complete Book of Raw Food, Second Edition: Healthy, Delicious Vegetarian Cuisine Made with Living Foods * Includes More Than 400 Recipes from the World’s Top Raw Food Chefs

by Victoria Boutenko, Juliano Brotman, Nomi Shannon, Matt Amsden, edited by Julie Rodwell

Hardcover $30.00 - 10%

Hatherleigh Press - Random House / Cooking *2nd Edition

Whether you’re a raw food devotee, a curious vegetarian, or just an adventurous chef, The Complete Book of Raw Food is the essential handbook for raw food preparation and dining pleasure.

In addition to its more than 400 nutritious and healthy recipes–from “Walnut Burgers” to “Thai Coconut Curry Soup” to “Raw Apple Pie”–The Complete Book of Raw Food includes step-by-step instructions on how to set up the raw pantry, easy-to-follow techniques for handling and preserving raw food through sprouting and dehydrating, and expert advice on how to choose ingredients and equipment.

The 19th Wife: A Novel

by David Ebershoff

Hardcover $26.00 - 10%

Random House / New Hardcover Fiction

Faith, I tell them, is a mystery, elusive to many, and never easy to explain.

Sweeping and lyrical, spellbinding and unforgettable, David Ebershoff’s The 19th Wife combines epic historical fiction with a modern murder mystery to create a brilliant novel of literary suspense.

It is 1875, and Ann Eliza Young has recently separated from her powerful husband, Brigham Young, prophet and leader of the Mormon Church. Expelled and an outcast, Ann Eliza embarks on a crusade to end polygamy in the United States. A rich account of a family’s polygamous history is revealed, including how a young woman became a plural wife.

Soon after Ann Eliza’s story begins, a second exquisite narrative unfolds–a tale of murder involving a polygamist family in present-day Utah. Jordan Scott, a young man who was thrown out of his fundamentalist sect years earlier, must reenter the world that cast him aside in order to discover the truth behind his father’s death.

And as Ann Eliza’s narrative intertwines with that of Jordan’s search, readers are pulled deeper into the mysteries of love and faith.

The Man in the Blizzard: A Novel

by Bart Schneider

Paperback $14.95

Three Rivers Press - Random House / Fiction

Private eye Augie Boyer is out of sorts. He’s been smoking too much Pontchartrain Pootie, his favorite varietal herb, and scarfing down an excess of fried food. He can’t stop thinking of his ­therapist wife, who left him for another therapist, and despite his new girlfriend’s best efforts, Augie’s testosterone levels have sunk lower than the winter temperatures of Minneapolis.

On the eve of the Republican National Convention, a beautiful, blond violinist with multiple personalities walks into Augie’s office. She draws him into a complex case that involves neo-Nazi violin collectors, mind-control specialists, and thousands of antiabortion activists who’ve come to the Twin Cities for a rally that will bring new meaning to Labor Day. But when Augie uncovers an assassination plot, he must scramble to prevent a deranged act of political violence that strikes dangerously close to home.

With wit, compassion, and plenty of laugh-out-loud moments, Bart Schneider creates a lovable yet flawed character and delivers a thrilling contemporary tale.

The Pirate’s Daughter: A Novel

by Margaret Cezair-Thompson

Paperback $15.00

Random House / Fiction

From Publishers Weekly:
Cezair-Thompson conjures the tragic glamour of golden age Hollywood against the backdrop of lusty, turbulent Jamaica in her dual generational coming-of-age saga. Ida Joseph is 13 years old when Errol Flynn is nearly shipwrecked off the coast of her hometown of Port Antonio in 1946. Flynn instantly loves Jamaica and, eager to find a refuge from stateside scandal, purchases an island across from the port. Navy Island becomes the setting for his glittering parties, movie projects and affair with Ida in her senior year of high school. Flynn refuses to take responsibility for the resulting child, May, and after trying to make a go of it in Jamaica, Ida leaves May and heads to New York City, where she marries a wealthy baron friend of Flynn’s who purchases the island after Flynn dies. May grows to adulthood on Navy Island, develops something more than a crush on a married family friend 40 years her senior and indulges in drugs and free love. Jamaica’s tumultuous progression toward self-governance—with the violent chaos it unleashes on Navy Island—reveals certain hidden truths about the baron. For all the high drama, the reader never feels fully privy to Ida or May, but Cezair-Thompson otherwise succeeds magnificently in evoking a world distant in both time and place.

So Sexy So Soon: The New Sexualized Childhood and What Parents Can Do to Protect Their Kids

by Diane E. Levin & Jean Kilbourne

Hardcover $25.00 - 10%

Ballantine Books / Childcare

Thong panties, padded bras, and risqué Halloween costumes for young girls. T-shirts that boast “Chick Magnet” for toddler boys. Sexy content on almost every television channel, as well as in books, movies, video games, and even cartoons. Hot young female pop stars wearing provocative clothing and dancing suggestively while singing songs with sexual and sometimes violent lyrics. These products are marketed aggressively to our children; these stars are held up for our young daughters to emulate–and for our sons to see as objects of desire.

Popular culture and technology inundate our children with an onslaught of mixed messages at earlier ages than ever before. Corporations capitalize on this disturbing trend, and without the emotional sophistication to understand what they are doing and seeing, kids are getting into increasing trouble emotionally and socially; some may even to engage in precocious sexual behavior. Parents are left shaking their heads, wondering: How did this happen? What can we do?

So Sexy So Soon is an invaluable and practical guide for parents who are fed up, confused, and even scared by what their kids–or their kids’ friends–do and say. Diane E. Levin, Ph.D., and Jean Kilbourne, Ed.D., internationally recognized experts in early childhood development and the impact of the media on children and teens, understand that saying no to commercial culture–TV, movies, toys, Internet access, and video games–isn’t a realistic or viable option for most families. Instead, they offer parents essential, age-appropriate strategies to counter the assault. For instance:

• Help your children expand their imaginations by suggesting new ways for them to play with toys–for example, instead of “playing house” with dolls, they might send their toys on a backyard archeological adventure.
• Counteract the narrow gender stereotypes in today’s media: ask your son to help you cook; get your daughter outside to play ball.
• Share your values and concerns with other adults–relatives, parents of your children’s friends–and agree on how you’ll deal with TV and other media when your children are at one another’s houses.

Filled with savvy suggestions, helpful sample dialogues, and poignant true stories from families dealing with these issues, So Sexy So Soon provides parents with the information, skills, and confidence they need to discuss sensitive topics openly and effectively so their kids can just be kids.

Babylon Rolling: A Novel

by Amanda Boyden

Hardcover $23.95 - 10%

Pantheon / New Hardcover Fiction