OK, we’ve still got until Labor Day (or forever, for that matter) to invite friends over to eat indoors, outside or at your favorite neighborhood bistro, and as easy as that sounds, and might have been in the past, a little refresher on how and what to serve is in order.

First, the homework.

An unforgettably charming memoir, Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer is full of hilarious moments, fascinating farmer’s tips, and a great deal of heart. When Novella Carpenter—captivated by the idea of backyard self-sufficiency—moved to inner city Oakland and discovered a weed-choked, garbage-strewn abandoned lot next door to her house, she closed her eyes and pictured heirloom tomatoes and a chicken coop. The story of how her urban farm grew from a few chickens to one populated with turkeys, geese, rabbits, ducks, and two three-hundred-pound pigs will capture the imagination of anyone who has ever considered leaving the city behind for a more natural lifestyle.

Farmer Jane: Women Changing the Way We Eat profiles 30 women in the sustainable food industry, describing their agriculture and business models and illustrating the amazing changes they are making in how we connect with food. These advocates for creating a more holistic and nurturing food and agriculture system also answer questions on starting a community-supported agriculture program, how to get involved in policy at local and national levels, and how to address the different types of renewable energy and finance them. Sustainable food activist Temra Costa shows how you can join these women, whether you want to start a farm, open a food business, found an organization, or simply become a sustainable-food consumer.

Food safety is a matter of intense public concern, and for good reason. Millions of annual cases of food “poisonings” raise alarm not only about the food served in restaurants and fast-food outlets but also about foods bought in supermarkets. The introduction of genetically modified foods only adds to the general sense of unease. Finally, the events of September 11, 2001, heightened fears by exposing the vulnerability of food and water supplies to attacks by bioterrorists. How concerned should we be about such problems? Who is responsible for preventing them? Who benefits from ignoring them? Who decides? Marion Nestle argues in Safe Food: The Politics of Food Safety that ensuring safe food involves more than washing hands or cooking food to higher temperatures. It involves politics. When it comes to food safety, billions of dollars are at stake, and industry, government, and consumers collide over issues of values, economics, and political power–and not always in the public interest. Although the debates may appear to be about science, Nestle maintains that they really are about control: Who decides when a food is safe?

Nearly all invitations begin with steak (though many if not most will not end there). Fed up with one too many mediocre steaks, journalist Mark Schatzker set out to track down, define, and eat the perfect specimen. His journey described in Steak takes him to all the legendary sites of steak excellence-Texas, France, Scotland, Italy, Japan, Argentina, and Idaho’s Pahsimeroi Valley-where he discovers the lunatic lengths steak lovers will go to consume the perfect cut. After contemplating the merits of Black Angus, Kobe, Chianina, and the prehistoric aurochs—a breed revived by the Nazis after 400years of extinction—Schatzker adopts his own heifer, fattens her on fruit, acorns, and Persian walnuts, and then grapples with ambivalence when this near-pet appears on his plate.

So where do we go from there? The Lost Art of Real Cooking heralds a new old-fashioned approach to food-laborious and inconvenient, yet extraordinarily rewarding and worth bragging about. From jam, yogurt, and fresh pasta to salami, smoked meat, and strudel, Ken Albala and Rosanna Nafziger arm you with the knowledge and skills that let you connect on a deeper level with what goes into your body. Ken and Rosanna celebrate the patience it takes to make your own sauerkraut and pickles. They divulge the mysteries of capturing wild sourdoughs and culturing butter, the beauty of rendering lard, making cheese, and brewing beer, all without the fancy toys that take away from the adventure of truly experiencing your food.

Eating for Beginners: An Education in the Pleasures of Food from Chefs, Farmers and One Picky Kid details the year Melanie Rehak spent discovering what how to be an eater and a parent in today’s increasingly complicated world. She joined the kitchen staff at Applewood, a small restaurant owned by a young couple committed to using locally grown food, and worked on some of the farms that supplied it. Between prepping the nightly menu, milking goats, and sorting beans, the author gained an understanding of her own about what to eat and why. (It didn’t hurt that, along the way, even the most dedicated organic farmers admitted that their children sometimes ate McDonald’s.) And as we follow her on her quest to find the pleasure in doing the right thing–and become a better cook in the bargain–we too will make our peace with food.

In the winter of 1879, Mark Twain paused during a tour of Europe to compose a fantasy menu of the American dishes he missed the most. He was desperately sick of European hotel cooking, and his menu, made up of some eighty regional specialties, was a true love letter to American food: Lake Trout, from Tahoe. Hot biscuits, Southern style. Canvasback-duck, from Baltimore. Black-bass, from the Mississippi. When food writer Andrew Beahrs first read Twain’s menu in the classic work A Tramp Abroad, he noticed the dishes were regional in the truest sense of the word-drawn fresh from grasslands, woods, and waters in a time before railroads had dissolved the culinary lines between Hannibal, Missouri, and San Francisco. These dishes were all local, all wild, and all, Beahrs feared, had been lost in the shift to industrialized food. In Twain’s Feast, Beahrs sets out to discover whether eight of these forgotten regional specialties can still be found on American tables, tracing Twain’s footsteps as he goes. Twain’s menu, it turns out, was also a memoir and a map. The dishes he yearned for were all connected to cherished moments in his life-from the New Orleans croakers he loved as a young man on the Mississippi to the maple syrup he savored in Connecticut, with his family, during his final, lonely years.

Trevor Corson takes us behind the scenes at America’s first sushi-chef training academy, as eager novices strive to master the elusive art of cooking without cooking. He delves into the biology and natural history of the edible creatures of the sea, and tells the fascinating story of an Indo-Chinese meal reinvented in nineteenth-century Tokyo as a cheap fast food. He reveals the pioneers who brought sushi to the United States and explores how this unlikely meal is exploding into the American heartland just as the long-term future of sushi may be unraveling. The Story of Sushi: An Unlikely Saga of Raw Fish and Rice is at once a compelling tale of human determination and a delectable smorgasbord of surprising food science, intrepid reporting, and provocative cultural history.

The guests are about to arrive, and how to greet them. One part celebration, one part history, two parts manifesto, Bernard DeVoto’s The Hour is a comic and unequivocal treatise on how and why we drink—properly. The Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning author turns his shrewd wit on the spirits and attitudes that cause his stomach to turn and his eyes to roll—warning: this book is not for rum drinkers. DeVoto instructs his readers on how to drink like gentlemen and sheds new light on the simple joys of the cocktail hour. Daniel Handler’s introduction to this reprint of the 1950s classic provides a humorous framework for the modern reader.

A Pint of Plain is Bill Barich’s witty, deeply observant portrait of an Ireland vanishing before our eyes. Drawing on the wit and wisdom of O’Brien, Joyce, Behan, and Synge, Barich explores how Irish culture has become a commodity for export. While Irish pubs in the countryside are closing at the alarming rate of one per day, replicas are being born in foreign countries at the same rate. From the famed watering holes of Dublin to tiny village pubs, Barich introduces a colorful array of characters, and engages in an unvarnished yet affectionate discussion about what it means to be Irish today.

But it’s hot out tonight, and maybe a good novel with food as the theme—albeit tangentially—might be the easiest way out.

On the eve of her ninth birthday, unassuming Rose Edelstein, a girl at the periphery of schoolyard games and her distracted parents’ attention, bites into her mother’s homemade lemon-chocolate cake and discovers she has a magical gift: she can taste her mother’s emotions in the cake. She discovers this gift to her horror, for her mother—her cheerful, good-with-crafts, can-do mother—tastes of despair and desperation. Suddenly, and for the rest of her life, food becomes a peril and a threat to Rose. The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake is a luminous tale about the enormous difficulty of loving someone fully when you know too much about them. It is heartbreaking and funny, wise and sad, and confirms Aimee Bender’s place as “a writer who makes you grateful for the very existence of language.”

David Pepin has been in love with his wife, Alice, since the moment they met in a university seminar on Alfred Hitchcock. After 13 years of marriage, he still can’t imagine a remotely happy life without her—yet he obsessively contemplates her demise. Soon she is dead, and David is both deeply distraught and the prime suspect. The detectives investigating Alice’s suspicious death have plenty of personal experience with conjugal enigmas: Ward Hastroll is happily married until his wife inexplicably becomes voluntarily and militantly bedridden; and Sam Sheppard is especially sensitive to the intricacies of marital guilt and innocence, having decades before been convicted and then exonerated of the brutal murder of his wife. Still, these men are in the business of figuring things out, even as Pepin’s role in Alice’s death grows ever more confounding when they link him to a highly unusual hit man called Mobius. Mesmerizing, exhilarating, and profoundly moving, Mr. Peanut is a police procedural of the soul, a poignant investigation of the relentlessly mysterious human heart—and a first novel of the highest order.

But we still have to eat.  Take out the To Go Box: Takeout Menu Holder, a handy bound portfolio for those of us tired of finding a mass of takeout menus in the  bottom drawer.

Living vicariously by reading other peoples’ stories is a rewarding summer pastime, and there is no shortage of entertaining memoir and biography as we begin the warmer season.

• In My Queer War, James Lord tells the story of a young man’s exposure to the terrors, dislocations, and horrors of armed conflict. In 1942, a timid, inexperienced 21-year-old Lord reports to Atlantic City, New Jersey, to enlist in the U.S. Army. His career in the armed forces takes him to Nevada and California, to Boston, to England, and eventually to France and Germany, where he witnesses firsthand the ravages of total war on Europe’s land and on its people. Along the way he comes to terms with his own sexuality, experiences the thrill of first love and the chill of disillusionment with his fellow man, and in a moment of great rashness makes the acquaintance of the world’s most renowned artist, who will show him the way to a new life. Lord’s books include A Giacometti Portrait and Picasso and Dora, both available in paperback.

• From elementary school on, Walter Kirn knew how to stay at the top of his class: He clapped erasers, memorized answer keys, and parroted his teachers’ pet theories. But when he launched himself eastward to an Ivy League university, Kirn discovered that the temple of higher learning he had expected was instead just another arena for more gamesmanship, snobbery, and social climbing. In this whip-smart memoir of kissing-up, cramming, and competition, Lost in the Meritocracy reckons the costs of an educational system where the point is simply to keep accumulating points and never to look back—or within. Walter Kirn is the author of six previous works of fiction, including Thumbsucker, which is available in paperback.

• He was a brilliant teller of tales, one of the most widely read authors of the 20^th century, and at one time the most famous writer in the world, yet W. Somerset Maugham’s own true story has never been fully told. At last, the fascinating truth is revealed in a landmark biography by the award-winning writer Selina Hastings. Granted unprecedented access to Maugham’s personal correspondence and to newly uncovered interviews with his only child, Hastings portrays the secret loves, betrayals, integrity, and passion that inspired Maugham to create such classics as The Razor’s Edge and Of Human Bondage. An epic biography of a hugely talented and hugely conflicted man, The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham is the definitive account of Maugham’s extraordinary life.

• What is it that leads an exceptional young mind want to disappear? Bill Clegg makes stunningly clear the attraction of the drug that had him in its thrall, capturing in scene after scene the drama, tension, and paranoiac nightmare of a secret life—and the exhilarating bliss that came again and again until it was eclipsed almost entirely by doom. He also explores the shape of addiction, how its pattern–not its cause–can be traced to the past. Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man is an utterly compelling narrative—lyrical, irresistible, harsh, honest, and beautifully written–from which you simply cannot look away. Bill Clegg is a literary agent in New York, and this memoir is his first book.

• Whether she is contemplating the history of walking as a cultural and political experience over the past 200 years, as she did in Wanderlust, or using the life of photographer Eadweard Muybridge as a lens to discuss the transformations of space and time in late 19-century America, in River of Shadows, Rebecca Solnit has emerged as an inventive and original writer whose mind is daring in the connections it makes. A Field Guide to Getting Lost draws on emblematic moments and relationships in Solnit’s own life to explore the issues of wandering, being lost, and the uses of the unknown. The result is a distinctive, stimulating, and poignant voyage of discovery.

• Evelyn Waugh was already famous when Brideshead Revisited was published in 1945. Written at the height of the war, the novel was, he admitted, of no “immediate propaganda value.” Instead, it was the story of a household, a family and a journey of religious faith—an elegy for a vanishing world and a testimony to a family he had fallen in love with a decade earlier. The Lygons of Madresfield were every bit as glamorous, eccentric and compelling as their counterparts in Brideshead Revisited. In this engrossing biography, Mad World: Evelyn Waugh and the Secrets of Brideshead, Paula Byrne takes an innovative approach to her subject, setting out to capture Waugh through the friendships that mattered most to him. She uncovers a man who, far from the snobbish misanthrope of popular caricature, was as loving and as complex as the family that inspired him.

• Here, from the incomparable John Waters, is a paean to the power of subversive inspiration that will delight, amuse, enrich—and happily horrify readers everywhere. Role Models is, in fact, a self-portrait told through intimate profiles of favorite personalities—some famous, some unknown, some criminal, some surprisingly middle-of-the-road. From Esther Martin, owner of the scariest bar in Baltimore, to the playwright Tennessee Williams; from the atheist leader Madalyn Murray O’Hair to the insane martyr Saint Catherine of Siena; from the English novelist Denton Welch to the timelessly appealing singer Johnny Mathis—these are the extreme figures who helped the author form his own brand of neurotic happiness. John Waters is an American filmmaker, actor, writer, and visual artist best known for his cult films, including Hairspray, Pink Flamingos, and Cecil B. DeMented.

• Pearl Buck in China: Journey to The Good Earth is described by one reviewer as “a compelling study of a woman who tried to make sense of the poverty, violence and suffering she saw as a child in rural China by setting down everything that happened to her, stripping away both the lies of her family and society in her search for self-identity and truth.” Hilary Spurling is the author of The Unknown Matisse, unearths the life and work of the Nobel Prize winner whose novels captured ordinary life in China.

• Gretchen Rubin had an epiphany one rainy afternoon in the unlikeliest of places: a city bus. “The days are long, but the years are short,” she realized. “Time is passing, and I’m not focusing enough on the things that really matter.” In that moment, she decided to dedicate a year to her happiness project. In this lively and compelling account of that year, entitled, appropriately, The Happiness Project, Rubin carves out her place alongside the authors of bestselling memoirs such as Julie and Julia, The Year of Living Biblically, and Eat, Pray, Love. With humor and insight, she chronicles her adventures during the twelve months she spent test-driving the wisdom of the ages, current scientific research, and lessons from popular culture about how to be happier.

• A shy manifesto, an impractical handbook, the true story of a fabulist, an entire life in parts and pieces, Manhood for Amateurs is the first sustained work of personal writing from Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Chabon. In these insightful, provocative, slyly interlinked essays, one of our most brilliant and humane writers addresses with his characteristic warmth and lyric wit the all-important question: What does it mean to be a man today? Chabon is the bestselling author of The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, and several other works of fiction.

• When Michael Lewis became a father, he decided to keep a written record of what actually happened immediately after the birth of each of his three children. This book, Home Game: An Accidental Guide to Fatherhood, is that record. But it is also something else: maybe the funniest, most unsparing account of ordinary daily household life ever recorded, from the point of view of the man inside. The remarkable thing about this story isn’t that Lewis is so unusual. It’s that he is so typical. The only wonder is that his wife has allowed him to publish it. Lewis, is the author of Liar’s Poker, Moneyball, and The Blind Side.

• From the author of the sensational bestseller I Was Told There’d Be Cake comes a new book of personal essays brimming with all the charm and wit that have earned Sloane Crosley widespread acclaim, award nominations, and an ever-growing cadre of loyal fans. In that book, readers were introduced to the foibles of Crosley’s life in New York City-always teetering between the glamour of Manhattan parties, the indignity of entry-level work, and the special joy of suburban nostalgia-and to a literary voice that mixed Dorothy Parker with David Sedaris and became something all its own. As always, Crosley’s voice is fueled by the perfect witticism, buoyant optimism, flair for drama, and easy charm in the face of minor suffering or potential drudgery. But in How Did You Get This Number it has also become increasingly sophisticated, quicker and sharper to the point, more complex and lasting in the emotions it explores. And yet, Crosley remains the unfailingly hilarious young Everywoman, healthily equipped with intelligence and poise to fend off any potential mundanity in maturity.

• In Things I’ve Been Silent About: Memories of a Prodigal Daughter a stunning personal story of growing up in Iran, Azar Nafisi shares her memories of living in thrall to a powerful and complex mother against the backdrop of a country’s political revolution. A girl’s pain over family secrets, a young woman’s discovery of the power of sensuality in literature, the price a family pays for freedom in a country beset by upheaval—these and other threads are woven together in this beautiful memoir as a gifted storyteller once again transforms the way we see the world and “reminds us of why we read in the first place. Azar Nafisi is a visiting professor and the director of the Dialogue Project at the Foreign Policy Institute of Johns Hopkins University.

• Not long after Rhoda Janzen turned 40, her world turned upside down. It was bad enough that her husband of 15 years left her for Bob, a guy he met on Gay.com, but that same week a car accident left her injured. Needing a place to rest and pick up the pieces of her life, Rhoda packed her bags, crossed the country, and returned to her quirky Mennonite family’s home, where she was welcomed back with open arms and offbeat advice. (Rhoda’s good-natured mother suggested she get over her heartbreak by dating her first cousin—he owned a tractor, see.) Written with wry humor and huge personality—and tackling faith, love, family, and aging—Mennonite in a Little Black Dress is an immensely moving memoir of healing, certain to touch anyone who has ever had to look homeward in order to move ahead. Rhoda Janzen teaches English and creative writing at Hope College in Holland, Michigan.other p