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An exclusive look at The Folio Society’s deluxe edition of Kitchen Confidential

Cover design by Kishan Rajani, photo by Jake Chessum, courtesy of Folio Society

The Folio Society has launched a deluxe collectible edition of the book that made Anthony Bourdain a star.

Available today, the Folio Society edition of Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the the Culinary Underbelly includes:

• A cover, slipcase, and endpapers designed by Kishan Rajani
• An adapted food list in Bourdain’s handwriting on the slipcase
• 12 rare photos from a 2-day shoot in 2008 with photographer Jake Chessum, including these:

The edition also includes an all-new preface from Bourdain’s friend and collaborator Joel Rose and a portrait by legendary artist Paul Pope.

Gilded edges, blocked cloth binding, and a generous cookbook-style format round out the packaging.

The limited edition, a perfect gift for the Bourdain fan in your life (or yourself!) is exclusively available at The Folio Society and retails for £85 / US $130.

Get a deep dive on Bourdain’s impact and legacy in the Kitchen Confidential episode of Zero to Well-Read.

The vibes are high.

This is the last Really Big Release Week of the year. There are still loads of exciting titles to come, but we won’t see another Tuesday with so many major names again until 2027. Among the highlights:

• Psychologist Adam Grant offers science-backed guidance for making and keeping strong relationships.
• Stephen Graham Jones delivers a history-infused horror story set in the world of his 2020 blockbuster The Only Good Indians.
• Pulitzer winner Yiyun Li kicks off a new trilogy with a meditation on art, ambition, grief, and connection.

Also hitting shelves:

• A dysfunctional poetry journal in 1980s New York is at the heart of the follow-up novel from 2022’s breakout author.
• Here’s a comprehensive history of bookselling.
• A three-term US Poet Laureate’s new collection focuses on grief, loss, and the healing power of art.
• One of the best crime writers working today tries his hand at Marvel Comics.
• ‘Tis the season for holiday romances.

More on the new releases.

Unlock Book Riot’s New Release Index when you join All Access. Annual memberships are 15% for a limited time.

Horror for the internet age

It’s happened. We’ve gotten to the point where the internet has existed long enough to have its own lore that has been passed down through the years.

• The specific pieces of lore I’m talking about are called “creepypastas” (a play on “copy and paste”), which are often presented as being real. Creepypastas are kind of like a fusion of campfire stories and urban legends, but for the internet age.
• And they’ve broken containment. Previously only found on sites like Reddit—specifically the subreddit r/NoSleep—they’ve now made it to popular movies, very sad court cases, and, of course, books.

If you’re already a fan of creepypastas, or are curious about them, Book Riot writer Alex Luppens-Dale has a few book recs for you:

• We Used to Live Here by Marcus Kliewer – Eve and Rachel are partners who flip houses. One day, a family shows up to their latest fixer-upper, claiming to have lived there before. Once they’re let in, though, the daughter disappears somewhere in the basement, and it just all goes downhill from there.
• Penpal by Dathan Auerbach – Here’s an OG creepypasta that was first born on r/NoSleep. In it, a man looks back on childhood memories…which get weirder and more sinister the longer he reminisces.
• Jawbone by Mónica Ojeda, translated by Sarah Booker – Besties Fernanda and Annelise are inseparable—they even worship the perfumed drag-queen god Annelise made up together. But then there’s a dare, which both binds and separates the girls through a horrible secret.

Get spooked by even more creepypasta-adjacent horror. —EE

The best short story of all time

It won’t take you an entire afternoon to read one of the great short stories of our time. All you need is an hour and a little curiosity—and if that curiosity is even the slightest bit entomological, even better for you.  

Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis is the brief but impactful tale of a traveling salesman who awakes one morning to find he’s been transformed into a giant insect.

• Kafka uses this literal dehumanization as a vehicle to explore some of the thorniest parts of the human condition: rejection, betrayal, social isolation, and emotional dehumanization.  

So profound is Kafka’s footprint that he’s one of the few authors whose name is used as an adjective. And were it not for the man who famously chose to defy Kafka’s wishes by not burning every piece of his unpublished work, we wouldn’t be talking about him the same way today.

Join us as we unpack the best short story of all time, and consider this unhinged collection of quotes from the episode a teaser.

• “Guess I’m a bug now, well shit!”

• “No haiku is gonna get you out of being a cockroach if you’re actually a cockroach!”

• “I would have done much poorer as a giant dung beetle over the course of four months in this condition.”
• “Somewhere between 15 minutes and all night is your problem…for how long you have to take care of your brother cockroach.”

And is non-bug musings:

• “What’s your relationship to smelling salts?”

• “Half a Xanny on Tuesdays and Kafka is a completely different guy.”

Campus mystery novels

Campus mystery novels—a subcategory of dark academia—are such an enduring trend because of their seasonal flair. Windswept campuses covered in leaves are great settings for mysteries, so spooky campus mystery novels are perfect fall reading.

• From creepy high school boarding schools to magical institutions of higher learning, these books provide the perfect backdrop for diving headfirst into research in musty libraries and sorting through the clues.

Ace of Spades by Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé – At an elite private school, a Gossip Girl-like scandal causes students’ lives to spin out of control. Chiamaka and Devon are the targets of an anonymous texter who sends their private material to the whole school. It’s hard enough being Black in an elite white space, but now they have to figure out who is ruining their lives and restore their reputations. It’s twisty and the main two are compellingly real as driven teenagers.

Catherine House by Elisabeth Thomas  – I read this book back during the doldrums of 2020, and it broke my anxiety-induced reading slump, so I still highly recommend it. A secretive institution called Catherine House only takes and produces the best of the best. When Ines arrives, she expects rigorous academia, but gets a much more exploratory, experimental, hippie-ish education. The longer Indes spends there, the darker the school becomes.

The Examiner by Janice Hallett – This on-campus mystery has a great method of storytelling: clues, alibis, and motivations reveal themselves through homework. As the head of a Multimedia Art course at Royal Hastings University, Gela Nathaniel is responsible for both teaching and ensuring the success of the program. The rag-tag group of six students all cause aggravation and vexation for Gela, but when someone turns up dead, she has to look at their coursework with fresh eyes.

More picks here. — JR

Classics of Mexican lit

Editor Erica Ezeifedi recently asked me what three Mexican books I would recommend for a series about classics from around the world. I was delighted to be asked in these last few days of Latine History Month (yes, it’s still going until October 15), because as Erica reminds us, too many of us don’t know about the rich literary traditions of even nearby places, as is the case with Mexico and the U.S.

I wanted to give readers a sampler plate of the best of Mexican lit: dynamic storytelling, lyricism reminiscent of an oral storytelling tradition, reflections on national identity, and, of course, magical realism. Erica clearly picked up what I was putting down

“Through Mexican literature, you can hear the rhythm of the pre-Colombian Nahuatl poets, feel the consequences of war and colonialism, and see what happens as a land and a people are forced to forget their language and learn a new one. And, how that new language is bent and woven through ancestral stories to make something wholly new, such as the magical realism genre, as is the case with Latin America.”

Here are three Mexican books I recommend:

• A classic of magical realism that packs in a history lesson with meditations on generational trauma and familial obligation, along with romance and mouthwatering recipes
• A young man’s quest to find his father lands him in a haunted village in this highly influential novel, one that inspired Gabriel García Márquez and that Jorge Luis Borges called one of the greatest literary works of all time.
• An iconic writer and poet reflects on Mexico’s identity and how that identity interacts with the United States in this collection of essays.

Dive deeper into each book here. —VD

Paul Simon, born October 13th, 1941

Did you know? Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel first performed together in a 6th grade production of Alice in Wonderland.

You are now free to roam about the internet

A bunch of Truman Capote’s stuff is up for auction.

Sadie Sink is in talks to star in an adaptation of The Guest by Emma Cline.

Pick up the best new YA novels, including botanical body horror, paranormal romance, and Indigenous contemporary fiction.

Stephen King’s wife saved Carrie from the trash bin.

How about a moratorium on articles declaring the death of books?

Written by Rebecca Schinsky, Erica Ezeifedi, Jeff O’Neal, Vanessa Diaz, and Julia Rittenberg. Thanks to Vanessa Diaz for copy editing.

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