The book that changed food culture — Anthony Bourdain’s electrifying memoir of life in professional kitchens. Funny, shocking, and alive on every page, Kitchen Confidential remains one of the great American memoirs. Now in a special 25th anniversary edition from Bloomsbury.

An oral history of Anthony Bourdain assembled from the recollections of chefs, writers, friends, and collaborators — a fuller, more human portrait than any single author could provide. Laurie Woolever’s compilation captures his contradictions and his greatness with honesty and love.

Patti Smith’s dreamlike memoir set during an extraordinary 2016 — a year of personal loss and political upheaval. Moving between real events and dream-vision with characteristic poetic intensity, Smith meditates on grief, time, and the strange experience of living through history.

Bread of Angels by Patti Smith (Bloomsbury) — Smith’s most recent prose work: meditations on the figures who have shaped her world, written in her characteristic style combining the directness of a diary with the imagistic precision of poetry. Moving with complete freedom between the personal and the universal, between the specific and the transcendent — one of the most genuinely original literary voices of the past fifty years at her most distilled. Published by Bloomsbury.

Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert (Bloomsbury) — four months in Italy eating pasta, three months in India meditating, three months in Bali with a medicine man: the memoir of a year of deliberate transformation that became one of the bestselling books of the twenty-first century. More complicated, more self-aware, and more genuinely searching than its reputation suggests — honest about its contradictions and the specific quality of presence it discovered. Published by Bloomsbury.