Published in 1981, The Great American Writers Cookbook was a treasure trove of recipes submitted by the country's most celebrated authors. This all-new collection, a fine follow-up for a new era, features recipes that range from peanut butter sandwiches to eggplant caviar, with dishes-and anecdotes-offered by writers of every imaginable stripe, ethnicity, region, and culture in America.

Contemporary novelists such as National Book Award winners Jonathan Franzen and the late, great Bernard Malamud share space with columnists Dave Barry, P. J....

When art reviewers have attempted to pin him down, Mississippi-born artist William Dunlap has called what he does -hypothetical realism.- -These places and situations don't exist, but they could, - he says. As the book Dunlap demonstrates, the artist and his work resist classification. Images of animals, flowers, Old Masters, found objects, and artifacts explode from traditional, pastoral landscapes. On the margins, in the middle ground, or in a dark lowering sky, foggy letters whisper a witty aside or reveal a crucial place name.

Dunlap creates surreal, disturbing, and sometimes...

After fifteen years of living like a vagabond on her reporter's schedule, Julia Reed got married and bought a house in the historic Garden District. Four weeks after she moved in, Hurricane Katrina struck. The House on First Street is the chronicle of Reed's remarkable and often hilarious homecoming, as well as a thoroughly original tribute to our country's most original city.

Southern humorist Julia Reed celebrates Southern food, Southern women, and the Southern penchant for enjoying good times in this collection of her food writing.

Julia Reed spends a lot of time thinking about ham biscuits. And cornbread and casseroles and the surprisingly modern ease of donning a hostess gown for one's own party. In Ham Biscuits, Hostess Gowns and Other Southern Specialties Julia Reed collects her thoughts on good cooking and the lessons of gracious entertaining that pass from one woman to another, and takes the reader on a lively and very personal tour...

In her new book, But Mama Always Put Vodka in Her Sangria , Julia Reed, a master of the art of eating, drinking, and making merry, takes the reader on culinary adventures in places as far flung as Kabul, Afghanistan and as close to home as her native Mississippi Delta and Florida's Gulf Coast. Along the way, Reed discovers the perfect Pimm's Royale at the Paris Ritz, devours delicious chuletons in Madrid, and picks up tips from accomplished hostesses ranging from Pat Buckley to Pearl Bailey and, of course, her own mother. Reed writes about the bounty--and the burden--of a...

For this book, she offers up a feast of options for holiday cocktails, spring...