Here are 38 books that Stay Hungry fans have personally recommended if you like
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My twin passions in life have always been food and writing. While I chose poetry and creative writing as my primary fields of expertise, my ten-plus years of working in restaurants are just as important to who I am. I’m hungry for food writing that takes a more literary or creative approach. Cooking is a highly creative and meaningful act, and I love to see writing that aspires to do for the reader what the dedicated cook does for the eater: to nourish not only the body but the more metaphysical elements of our being, which is to say, our hearts, and maybe even our souls.
As a transplant to Atlanta from Los Angeles, I’ve been fascinated by the regional cuisines and culinary traditions of the south. But after being caught up in the romance of pimento cheese, mint juleps, and fried chicken, I knew there was so much more to the story that I was missing.
This book tells that untold story, showing us the immeasurable debt southern food owes to Africa and enslaved peoples brought to America. What I love about this book is not just the history being told but how Twitty tells it, combining a mix of genres, from narrative nonfiction to genealogical documentation, historical account to personal memoir.
Just as cooking is a highly creative act that fuses together diverse flavors and ingredients, writing about food needs to be equally creative and equally diverse.
2018 James Beard Foundation Book of the Year | 2018 James Beard Foundation Book Award Winner inWriting | Nominee for the 2018 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in Nonfiction | #75 on The Root100 2018
A renowned culinary historian offers a fresh perspective on our most divisive cultural issue, race, in this illuminating memoir of Southern cuisine and food culture that traces his ancestry—both black and white—through food, from Africa to America and slavery to freedom.
Southern food is integral to the American culinary tradition, yet the question of who "owns" it is one of the most provocative touch points in our…
As a queer speculative fiction writer, I often find myself drawn to themes of identity. Reckoning with identity and defining your own (and redefining, and redefining, and redefining) is a critical part of the queer experience in the cis-hetero norms of the real world. Fantasy and science fiction have always given readers a lens to see themselves through, and many queer readers have found their own definitions between the lines of a book. The protagonists and stories in these books couldn’t be more different, but each offers a unique and compelling vision of discovering—or making—a place for themself in their magical world.
Thirsty for more buff orc lesbians? Legends & Lattes serves up a mug of warm, cozy queer fulfillment. Viv was an adventurer, but she no longer wants to be. Despite her battle scars and intimidating looks, she longs to open her own quiet coffee shop.
The journey to small-business success has challenges, but her determination to live on her own terms brews up a staff of misfits that become a queer-found family. This quiet, low-stakes novel is as sweet as an almond croissant and will leave you hungry for more.
High fantasy, low stakes - with a double-shot of coffee.
After decades of adventuring, Viv the orc barbarian is finally hanging up her sword for good. Now she sets her sights on a new dream - for she plans to open the first coffee shop in the city of Thune. Even though no one there knows what coffee actually is.
If Viv wants to put the past behind her, she can't go it alone. And help might arrive from unexpected quarters. Yet old rivals and new stand in the way of success. And Thune's shady underbelly could make it all…
Food has always been my existential retreat from the world. Whether eating solo or with people, countless meals have been the best hyperbolic time chambers for strengthening relationships with others and with myself. And I’ve always wanted to write, to participate in ageless forums of subject and technique in this great literary tradition of ours. I guess these two art forms and obsessions were bound to lock horns in my aesthetic makeup. In my world, good reading is good eating. It’s that simple. No other qualifications are needed. I inhaled the following books and was made full every time – to eventually take a stab at a couple of recipes also.
If Cooking Gene is the rallying cry, Food: A Love Story is the marching time music.
Gaffigan expands the food observations and shenanigans from his standup routines and this memoir is just as funny as watching the family man on stage. Gaffigan’s food writing maintains a golden dynamic of being approachable and personal at the same time.
It was full of personality and gave me valuable insight into how to shape my character’s food habits as the focal point of literary scrutiny.
“What are my qualifications to write this book? None really. So why should you read it? Here’s why: I’m a little fat. If a thin guy were to write about a love of food and eating I’d highly recommend that you do not read his book.”
Bacon. McDonalds. Cinnabon. Hot Pockets. Kale. Stand-up comedian and author Jim Gaffigan has made his career rhapsodizing over the most treasured dishes of the American diet (“choking on bacon is like getting murdered by your lover”) and decrying the worst offenders (“kale is the early morning of foods”). Fans flocked to his New York…
Tap Dancing on Everest, part coming-of-age memoir, part true-survival adventure story, is about a young medical student, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor raised in N.Y.C., who battles self-doubt to serve as the doctor—and only woman—on a remote Everest climb in Tibet.
Food has always been my existential retreat from the world. Whether eating solo or with people, countless meals have been the best hyperbolic time chambers for strengthening relationships with others and with myself. And I’ve always wanted to write, to participate in ageless forums of subject and technique in this great literary tradition of ours. I guess these two art forms and obsessions were bound to lock horns in my aesthetic makeup. In my world, good reading is good eating. It’s that simple. No other qualifications are needed. I inhaled the following books and was made full every time – to eventually take a stab at a couple of recipes also.
Digestate is probably the original spark point for my short story collection. I discovered this graphic anthology during my writing MFA program in the Bay Area.
It was such a strong and artful reminder to keep what would eventually become my book, years later, a diverse series of stories from different characters’ points of view. Diverse - in a variety of meaningful ways that are visible to everyone else in the diegetic, literary universe between Digestate’s covers.
It’s weird. It’s funny. It has great visual, narrative takes on food, style, and choice.
Over 50 indie comic artists contribute their interpretations of the theme "food and eating" in this gigantic telephone-book sized anthology. A wide range of subject and tone including autobio, fiction, nonfiction and essays (and everything in-between). Contributors: Jeffrey Brown, Renée French, Alex Robinson, James Kochalka, Marc Bell, Box Brown, Kevin Cannon, Noah Van Sciver, Josh Bayer, Danny Hellman, Sam Henderson, Josh Burggraf, L. Nichols, Al Ortiz, Sophia Wiedeman, Paul Hoppe, C.M. Butzer, Victor Kerlow, John Kerschbaum, Dan Piraro, Jess Ruliffson, Ben Snakepit, Cha, Adam Hines, Sungyoon Choi, Nate Doyle, Minty Lewis, Hawk Krall, Aaron Mew, Jonas Madden-Connor, Keith Knight, Pranas…
I’m a senior writer at Rolling Stone, where I cover a wide range of music-related topics. But as a child of the Seventies, I was shaped by the defining and enthralling pop culture of that era, from singer-songwriters, Southern rock, and disco records to Norman Lear sitcoms. In some of my work, I’ve chronicled the highs and lows of that era, perhaps as a way to answer a question that haunted me during my youth: Why did my older sisters and their friends keep telling me that the Sixties were the most incredible decade ever and the Seventies were awful? What did I miss? And how and where did it all go wrong?
Even though they weren’t musicians, the original cast members of Saturday Night Live were among the biggest rock stars of the Seventies. Their journey from underground comics and performers to crossover superstardom, via TV, albums, and movies, is the story of the rise of the counterculture in the Seventies. And, sadly, Belushi’s flameout was the dark side of that tale.
I read this book not long after I had graduated from NYU with a degree in journalism, and Woodward’s peerless reporting—including a chilling, nearly hour-by-hour chronicle of Belushi’s last few weeks before his death in 1982—made me realize the power of narrative, research, and detail. If I were stymied while writing a story of my own in the early days of my career, I’d grab my increasingly beaten-up Wired paperback and be inspired anew.
This reissue of Bob Woodword’s classic book about John Belushi—one of the most interesting performers and personalities in show business history—“is told with the same narrative style that Woodward employed so effectively in All the President’s Men and The Final Days” (Chicago Tribune).
John Belushi was found dead of a drug overdose March 5, 1982, in a seedy hotel bungalow off Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. Belushi’s death was the beginning of a trail that led Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward on an investigation that examines the dark side of American show business—TV, rock and roll, and the movie industry. From…
I’m a chronic over-achiever. As a high school senior, I produced our school play, started a school newspaper, took Advanced Placement classes, and worked with our social justice club. In university, I was the co-president of the English society and decided to pursue double honours, all while working part-time. Now that I’m a teacher, I recognise the over-achievers in my classes, usually on day one when they show up with highlighters in multiple colours. I want to help them let go of perfectionism and take time to laugh. These books have helped me do just that and I hope The Year Shakespeare Ruined My Life can do that for others.
If you’re an over-achiever, you may have been accused of taking things too seriously. (I wouldn’t know anything about that, of course.) Tina Fey proves that the academic goody-two-shoes can also be the funniest person in the room. This autobiography is written as a series of stories from Fey’s life, as well as short reflections on issues like the objectification of women’s bodies. Reading this book made me feel like I too could be a funny person and that hard work doesn’t make me any less creative.
Once in a generation a woman comes along who changes everything. Tina Fey is not that woman, but she met that woman once and acted weird around her. Before 30 Rock, Mean Girls and 'Sarah Palin', Tina Fey was just a young girl with a dream: a recurring stress dream that she was being chased through a local airport by her middle-school gym teacher. She also had a dream that one day she would be a comedian on TV. She has seen both these dreams come true. At last, Tina Fey's story can be told. From her youthful days as…
When Lara was four years old, her father moved from Rochester, New York, to Anchorage, Alaska, a distance of over 4,000 miles. She spent her childhood chasing after him, flying a quarter of the way around the world to tug at the hem of his jacket.
I’m a classic Hollywood fanatic. I can name you every Best Picture Oscar Winner on command. I’ve written screenplays and seen the industry firsthand, but if I had my choice, I’d go live through the Hollywood Golden Age. I've published numerous non-fiction film history books and have a whole lot more classic-film-inspired novels coming. And I do it all simply for the single reason that writing a book is the closest thing to time travel that I can find. Immersing myself in this world with actors that have lived, and even a few that I’ve made up, is pure heaven that transports me back to the days of the silver screen.
Half of the brother duo behindDumb and Dumber and There’s Something About Mary, Farrelly studied writing in the 1980s and penned a fairly forgotten novel called Outside Providence. He followed it with his second fiction work in the late-1990s, serving as a fictionalized account of himself broke, starving, and trying to break into Hollywood. I can listen to Peter talk all day on podcasts and interviews because he’s so natural and honest. Those traits translate here, with a story centering around a sympathetic protagonist trying to find his way. With real stories like how Farrelly wrote for Seinfeldand was introduced to Los Angeles by someone trying to leap from a building, any writer will instantly connect with this breezy human story about creativity in your twenties.
A Confederacy of Dunces meets The Player in an offbeat, sidesplittingly hilarious novel about making it against all odds in 1990s' Hollywood, by the co-writer/director of Dumb and Dumber.
When Henry Halloran's girlfriend dumped him, his Boston-based life suddenly seemed pointless. He was thirty-two with a dead-end job, and nothing on the horizon. There was obviously only one place to go: Hollywood.
The Comedy Writer is the story of how Henry—armed with nothing more than a few ideas, a nothing-to-lose attitude, and the desire to be a screenwriter—joins myriad hopefuls in the City of Angels and achieves an L.A. kind…
Raised by activist feminist parents and schooled by Quakers, I am surprisingly amusing. Eartha Kitt once held my left hand for five minutes. I work primarily as a playwright; Not a Cat is my first children’s book! Now when I show up at a little kid’s birthday instead of bringing a play I wrote, I can give the tot age-appropriate reading material. For me, reading a memoir is this intimate exchange with a writer where they’ve shared everything, and I’ve revealed nothing. What’s better than a good story beautifully curated? Okay, a cookie, but that’s it. I hope my book reaches all the kids out there who are told: be less this and more that.
First thing, even if she weren’t my best friend, I would choose Samantha Bee’s memoir. I read it years ago and I still have flashes of it come to me when I’m watering plants or whatever, descriptions of her life with her grandmother, like how she made Sam wear a one-piece cashmere sweat suit with a patent-leather belt to gym class and tell Sam she shouldn’t sweat in it because it was dry-clean only. As an atheist, I loved her fealty to Jesus Christ, and her vision that they would of course “listen to my disco records and eat Tang straight from the package, just like lovers did.” Yes obviously I’m her friend because I think she’s gorgeous. That’s the theme here, pure aesthetics and good with wordings.
Candid, outspoken, laugh-out-loud funny essays from much-loved Samantha Bee, host of TBS's uproarious late-night show Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, executive producer and writer of TBS's comedy television series The Detour, and former The Daily Show with Jon Stewart’s Most Senior Correspondent.
In I Know I Am, But What Are You? she shares her unique and irreverent viewpoint on subjects as wide-ranging as:
BARBIE’S DREAM HOUSE There were six main players in my coterie: G.I. Joe (macho, good-looking), Wonder Woman (hot, carpet-munching neighbor, busy with athletics), Marie Osmond (career gal, smart), Ken (gay, obviously), regular Barbie (slutty, dumb, eternally single),…
As a young girl, I thought I was a tomboy—or I wanted to be one, because the image of a “normal” girl was far too pink and frothy and shallow for my tastes. For me, being a tomboy was less about being boy-like than being unable to claim the markers of femininity. As a historian of women and girls, I wondered how young women saw their futures in this modernizing America, with its True Women and New Women and the opening of advanced education. Did tomboys grow into the rebels who changed the world? Or, like the tomboys in so many fictional stories, did they renounce their assertive sense of self upon marriage and motherhood?
Comedian Jessi Klein explores the nexus of American femininity and female masculinity in this hilarious memoir. I particularly love her pithy statements on how commercial culture sells a somewhat toxic form of femininity that can make even the most female-identified person reconsider their gender. She cuts to the heart of the tensions of growing up in a culture that places gender on a spectrum but continues to market it as an extreme binary.
Jessi Klein is not a girl's girl, or a woman's woman. Raised in Greenwich Village by parents who didn't notice if she wore the same pair of pants for months on end, she later learned that there were some essential lessons in femininity she'd been missing: how to get your butt to look like two round tennis balls (barre class); how to wait patiently for an engagement (get drunk by yourself at Logan Airport); and how to get over an ex in the age of Google (use the World Wide Web to discover everything about his new girlfriend). In this…
Me and The Times offers a fresh perspective on those pre-internet days when the Sunday sections of The New York Times shaped the country’s political and cultural conversation. Starting in 1967, Robert Stock edited seven of those sections over 30 years, innovating and troublemaking all the way.
These books are all by or about comic geniuses. I have always expressed myself through humor. I never felt I was pretty, so making people laugh was another way of seducing people. I started out by doing improvisational theater on the streets of New York, went on to have a recurring role on Seinfeld, and performed my solo shows on three continents. One of my greatest thrills has been to share the stage with other storytellers while touring with The Moth. When I used my storytelling skills on TikTok, I was amazed at the response. Eleven million Likes is a lot of love. I hope I deserve it.
I always relate to stories about outsiders, because I have often felt like one myself.
This hilarious, poignant memoir is about a fat, gay kid growing up in a poor, isolated farm town where he stayed home reading while the other kids played football and tortured animals. He is still fat and gay, but he is no longer a sad little outsider: he ended up being a highly respected comedy writer.
Have you ever noticed that it’s the lonely, nerdy kids who often grow up to be the successful ones?
In the vein of New York Times bestsellers Why Not Me? by Mindy Kaling and We Are Never Meeting in Real Life by Samantha Irby, a collection of side-splitting and illuminating essays by the popular stand-up comedian, alum of Chelsea Lately and The Mindy Project, and host of truTV's Talk Show the Game Show.
From a young age, Guy Branum always felt as if he were on the outside looking in.
Self-taught, introspective, and from a stiflingly boring farm town, he couldn't relate to his neighbors. While other boys played outside, he stayed indoors reading Greek mythology. And being gay…
