While Shambhala Publications’ giveaways at BEA this year include Writing from the Senses by Laura Deutsch, The Authentic Life by Ezra Bayda, and other titles reflecting the heart and soul of the company’s spiritual origins more than 40 years ago, the company is also spotlighting Roost, its three-year-old and newest imprint, dedicated to lifestyle books.

“I call it a creative living imprint,” says Sara Bercholz, Shambhala’s executive vice president, whose father (company founder Samuel Bercholz) encouraged her to create an imprint that she could sink her teeth into. Since the younger Bercholz is interested in cooks and cooking, she took her father literally as she worked with a dedicated staff to create the Roost list.

Five Roost authors will be at BEA with their books: Amy Chaplin (At Home in the Whole Food Kitchen: Celebrating the Art of Eating Well, Oct.), Diana Yen (A Simple Feast: A Year of Stories and Recipes to Savor, May), Robin Cherry (Garlic, an Edible Biography, Nov.), Ben Hewitt (Home Grown, Sept.), and Lynne Brunelle (Mama Gone Geek, Oct.). Chaplin is a celebrity chef who has worked for Liv Tyler and Natalie Portman, but as her editor, Bercholz points out she is a star all by herself.

At Home in the Whole Food Kitchen is a vegetarian cookbook that even carnivores will want, says Bercholz, adding thats working on Chaplin’s book changed her own grocery shopping and thinking about how to feed herself and her family (who are not vegetarians). “I like to call it a desert island cookbook—it has everything you need,” she explains.

Garlic is a Mark Kurlansky Salt-style title and Roost’s first single-ingredient book. Mama Gone Geek is a first memoir by Lynn Brunelle, who wrote for Bill Nye the Science Guy (see interview in Saturday’s Show Daily, p. XX).

Steven Pomije, Shambhala’s marketing and communications manager, describes Roost as “mainstream books with popular appeal” that fit in with the overall Shambhala mission to “be as conscious about our living as we can be.” Home Grown, he points out, is about a family that lives completely off the grid, and the cookbooks are as much about compelling narratives as they are about food.

Bercholz is proud of what has become the Roost aesthetic, gorgeous books about lifestyle topics, which she thinks dovetails nicely with Shambhala’s more spiritual, philosophical, and esoteric titles. “Expressing your creative side is just as important as expressing your spiritual side,” she says. “I’m still working on everything to do with Shambhala, but it’s nice to carve out space in my family’s business.”