This is the story of a notorious cook and a slice of 1900s New York from the author of "Kitchen Confidential".

Anthony Bourdain is a life-long line cook and author of Kitchen Confidential. Here, he sets off to eat his way around the world. He heads out to Saigon where he eats the still-beating heart of a live cobra, and travels deep into landmined Khmer Rouge territory to find the rumoured Wild West of Cambodia (Pailin).

Intended for the fans of Anthony Bourdain, this is a collection of his journalism. Containing stories from his worldwide misadventures, it talks about scrounging for eel in the backstreets of Hanoi, the unglamorous aspects of making television, calling for the head of raw food activist Woody Harrelson, and confessing to lobster-killing guilt.

A lot has changed since 'Kitchen Confidential', for the subculture of chefs and cooks, for the restaurant business, and for Anthony Bourdain. 'Medium Raw' explores these changes, moving back and forth from the author's bad old days to the present.

Ten slices from the life of Bobby Gold: by night, the security chief of a mobbed-up New York City nightclub, by day, a reluctant bonebreaker and enforcer for Eddie Fish - his old college roommate, and best friend. Emerging from the 'gladiator school' environment of an upstate prison with an imposing physique and a reputation for skilled brutality, Bobby's a lonely, guilt-ridden child inside a hulking body. He views the grim work of coercion, assault and even murder as jobs to be done with a craftsman's work ethic and with a minimum of force. However, the technician's pride in a job done...

All is not well at the Dreadnought Grill. The chef has a smack habit, the owner has been set up by the FBI and in the midst of this, the sous-chef Tommy is just trying to do his job. As depraved as it is hilarious, Anthony Bourdain's first novel is street smart and spiced with drugged-up savvy, foul-mouthed feds and salty mob speak. With a cast of unforgettables like the hitman who covers himself in clingfilm to avoid leaving fingerprints and a plot with more twists than a plate of spaghetti, Bone in the Throat rocks through the streets of Manhattan at a blistering pace.

Welcome to the retirement home of Henry and Frances, ex-New Yorkers and professional assassins: a luxury hotel suite in an idyllic, tequila-drenched Caribbean hideaway. It's supposed to be all cocktails and sex on the beach. But when a job icing a Mafioso godfather goes awry, trouble hits paradise . . . in the form of a cross-dressing capo, a debauched Irish hard man and a slew of incompetent but vicious US marshals.