The effect of Wes Anderson’s films on the world of interior decorating “cannot be overstated,” writes debut author Atkinson in her charming guide to drawing design inspiration from the director’s movies. Anderson’s sets are known for their bright colors and retro, hyper-stylized look, explains Atkinson, who draws decor inspiration from movies such as The Darjeeling Limited, The French Dispatch, and Moonrise Kingdom. Each chapter breaks down how to imitate an Anderson film’s aesthetic in one’s own home as well as in themed dinner parties and DIY projects. For readers hoping to recreate the charming cottage-core kitchen featured in Fantastic Mr. Fox, Atkinson recommends small tweaks, like hanging curtains under the sink and vintage country landscape paintings on the walls, as well as big projects, such as parquet wood flooring and Afghan rugs. To host a Grand Budapest Hotel–inspired dinner party, Atkinson recommends bringing out fancy glassware, fine china, and frilly, embroidered napkins, as well as serving an olive-roasted duck and “lashings of champagne.” Instructions are included for DIY projects, like a gallery wall inspired by The Royal Tenenbaums, crocheted coasters inspired by The French Dispatch, and a condiment organizer inspired by Asteroid City. Pairing mesmerizing photography with creative how-tos, Atkinson captures the kitschy nostalgia that captivates Anderson fans. Design-minded cinephiles will be delighted. (Jan.)

Reviewed on 12/12/2025 | Details & Permalink

Thorisson (Old World Italian) serves up a sumptuous collection of 100 classic and personal favorite Italian dishes perfected over six years of living in Torino. Noting in the epilogue that “if you want to know how to make a Milanese veal cutlet you can just google it,” she aims to “put recipes in context” with “somewhere [you’d] like to be.” To do so, she sets the recipes against personal essays about her culinary journey and approach to hosting and includes striking photographs of family life. The four chapters follow the seasons, each offering a range of antipasti, primi, secondi, and dolci from simple to elaborate. A raw lemon salad leads off in the spring, followed by grilled fish with lemon and herbs in summer. In autumn, there’s tagliolini with white truffles and butter, “the most luxurious and simple pasta dish on earth,” while classic penne alla vodka will warm a winter night. More involved dishes include eggplant timballo, lasagna with meatballs, stuffed Easter bread, and tiramisu. Holiday fare culminates with a Christmas Eve feast featuring fried spaghetti-wrapped shrimp, lobster soufflé, and vanilla chestnut cake. Instructions assume such technical knowledge as how to wrestle the heart out of an artichoke, blanch fava beans, or flake salmon. The author’s personal approach and gorgeous presentation make this a giftable collection. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 12/05/2025 | Details & Permalink

“I’m on a mission to synonymize salad with abundance, energy, and hefty portions of nothing but goodness,” writes debut author Haxby, culinary director of the U.K.’s Salad Project restaurant chain, in this practical guide. A thorough introduction explains Haxby’s dressing-forward approach (“It’s the dressing that pulls you toward a salad in the first place”) and provides winning ratios for flavor-packed bowls and tips for stocking one’s pantry. After a chapter on “crunches and kicks”—toppings like maple-coated walnuts and pickled onions that can be premade in bulk—salad recipes are organized by dressing type, whether “creamy, zingy, spicy, or herby.” Coconut-curry and lime dressing tops a butter bean salad with mango, avocado, parsley, and pistachios, while “super versatile” spiced tahini and date molasses dressing adorns roasted eggplant with quinoa. “Green + crunch” salad is made up of “a little bit of everything,” including broccolini and avocado, and finished with a classic apple cider vinaigrette. “The GOAT,” the Salad Project’s herbaceous bestseller, is doused with green goddess dressing, while a salad of shredded cabbage with garlic-thyme chicken thighs gets its kick from miso-mustard dressing. Haxby offers helpful tips throughout (“The best way to taste whether your dressing packs enough punch is to dip a lettuce leaf in and give it a taste”). Home cooks looking to up their salad game are sure to be inspired. (Jan.)

Reviewed on 12/05/2025 | Details & Permalink

Novelist and memoirist Yuknavitch (Reading the Waves) presents moving essays on the many shades of menopause from a blockbuster lineup of writers, including Julia Alvarez, Roxane Gay, and Cheryl Strayed. The pieces highlight the secrecy and shame typically associated with the end of one’s reproductive years, position the biological transition as a rite of passage that signals a new stage of life, and critique the pressure put on women to keep the signs of aging at bay. Strayed delivers a meditation on living longer than her mother, who died at 45, reflecting that, throughout the hot flashes, brain fog, and insomnia brought on by perimenopause, “I never forgot my luck. What a gift it was, to simply be there.” In “Finding Meno: Little Clowns,” Monica Drake juxtaposes the indignities of divorce court with the discomforts of menopausal symptoms to illustrate how patriarchal systems cause women to loathe their bodies and themselves. Yuknavitch caps off the collection with “Transmogrify,” in which she compares aging to the magical transformations that happen to characters in fairy tales, encouraging readers to view menopause as a “portal” to a place where “we can be anything.” These penetrating and lyrical reflections bring serious cultural analysis to a historically taboo subject. Readers experiencing menopause will find solidarity and hope. (Jan.)

Reviewed on 11/28/2025 | Details & Permalink

This delightful debut guide from gardening influencer Mao demonstrates how to grow and harvest a variety of vegetables in one’s backyard. Cultivating a colorful garden, Mao explains, is not only pleasing aesthetically but also provides a variety of nutrient-rich foods. She begins by outlining cool-season crops (rainbow beets, purple asparagus, and yellow snap peas) and warm-season crops (multicolored potatoes, pink celery, purple basil, and blue corn), explaining how to best plant, harvest, and store them. Then, she delves into the factors one should consider when building a garden, like ensuring the location gets plenty of sunlight and has good drainage. Readers learn the different types of gardens they can create; those working with small outdoor spaces, for example, can create container gardens with pots or plastic buckets. Elsewhere, Mao shares insights for selecting a color palette, as well as tips for improving soil and preventing pests. Eye-catching photographs of Mao’s garden and recipes for mixed pickled vegetables and homemade tomato sauce round things out. Home gardeners would do well to seek this out. (Dec.)

Reviewed on 11/14/2025 | Details & Permalink

Designer Fitzpatrick (Meditations for Makers) offers a charming guide to creating landscape-inspired hooked rugs. Rug hooking, in which strips of yarn or fabric are pulled through a base material like burlap or linen, can be used to make wall hangings or floor rugs. Fitzpatrick demonstrates how to find inspiration in nature, encouraging readers to take photos or mental notes of landscapes when on walks and draw them on a sketch pad. To give the design a sense of depth, the image should have a foreground (like bushes or a house), a middle ground (like a field), and a background (like trees or mountains). Then, crafters can transfer their design onto their preferred rug backing using pencil or a marker, outline each object in the landscape using a dark-colored yarn, and fill in the designs with the colors of their choice. Fitzpatrick mostly covers design techniques, but she includes basic instructions for rug hooking at the end, showing beginners how to hold their hook and complete stitches. Color photographs of her beautiful finished pieces—from a rustic barn in a field of flowers to rugged cliffs along a bay—appear throughout. Crafters will be inspired. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 11/14/2025 | Details & Permalink

Chef Pickowicz (More Than Cake) demonstrates in this exciting guide how to prepare hot pot meals at home. She shares a detailed list of equipment, noting that a Dutch oven on top of an induction cooktop works just as well as an electric hot pot. While strainers are essential for starchy vegetables that need to cook for a longer time in the broth, a pair of oversize chopsticks are perfect for quickly cooking thinly sliced meat. The recipes are organized by each hot pot component, with a mixture of traditional and playful offerings. Broth options include mushroom dashi, mildly spicy beef, and ginseng and pork bone, while sauces range from sesame chile crunch to cashew-lime salsa macha. For a starchy element, Pickowicz offers “not-just-scallion” pancakes made with whatever herbs one has on hand, caramelized mushroom and cabbage dumplings, and garden wontons. For crunchy sides, there’s Thai basil and eggplant agrodolce, cucumber and peanut pyramids, and chile crisp snack mix. Drinks and desserts, such as watermelon shiso slushies and raspberry and coconut ice cream, nicely round out the meals. Throughout, Pickowicz offers helpful substitution suggestions: if calamansi juice is unavailable, for instance, a mixture of equal parts lime juice and orange juice will work. This is a must for hot pot aficionados. Agent: Katherine Cowles, Cowles Agency. (Jan.)

Reviewed on 11/28/2025 | Details & Permalink

Professional blacksmith Fire debuts with a comprehensive guide to shaping metal into a wide range of objects, from spoons and bottle openers to door knockers and wall hooks. Noting that blacksmithing has been a source of support and fulfillment in her life, Fire sets out to make the craft accessible to everyone. She begins by walking readers through the basic tools, such as the forge (a furnace for heating metals) and anvil (a heavy block used as a stable surface for hammering and shaping hot metal), and outlines safety practices, like the importance of wearing protective glasses and clothing made of natural fibers, as synthetic materials in contact with heat will melt to one’s skin. She also guides readers through how to move their bodies when blacksmithing, including how to stand and swing a hammer. Step-by-step instructions are included for a range of projects, such as a simple S hook or the more complicated potted plant hanger. Photos clearly capture what pieces should look like at each stage, but Fire also encourages crafters to make projects their own, offering such sage reminders as “you must build up your innovative ability at the same time as your physical techniques.” Readers will feel equipped and motivated to start putting irons in the fire. (Jan.)

Reviewed on 11/28/2025 | Details & Permalink

Bosch, a flower farm owner in Colorado, debuts with an accessible guide to small-scale regenerative farming. This sustainable and cost-effective method requires gardeners to eschew expensive store-bought products like fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides, and instead rely on natural mulches like leaves and compost, and restorative techniques such as cover cropping (growing crops, like wheat, for soil protection, not harvesting), no-till farming, and livestock integration. Regenerative gardening, she explains, not only provides nutritious food and exquisite landscapes but also supports cleaner air and water and enables plants, insects, birds, and other organisms to thrive. Throughout, she offers step-by-step guidance for creating such gardens, including how to identify different types of soil (look at it, touch it, and smell it) and determine what it needs (clayey soil, for example, drains poorly and thus benefits from adding organic matter); how to plan a new garden (create a map); and how to make a closed-loop, or self-sustaining, system by upcycling garden waste and bringing in animals like sheep or goats, which offer natural fertilizers and aid in pest control. Providing lucid explanations and anecdotes drawn from her own experiences, Bosch makes regenerative farming approachable and enticing. Readers will be inspired to make gardens that are good for their health and the planet’s. (Jan.)

Reviewed on 11/28/2025 | Details & Permalink

In this gorgeous volume, designer Frazer (Empowered Embroidery) showcases in-the-hoop embroidery designs inspired by birth flowers, the blooms associated with each month, similar to birthstones. The concept of birth flowers dates back to ancient Rome, Frazer explains. Some get their association based on the timing of when they bloom, while others are paired with a month because their color matches that month’s birthstone. Frazer offers patterns for each month’s birth flower and describes the symbolism of each. For June, crafters learn how to stitch a classic red rose, which symbolizes love and passion, and for November, they’re shown how to stitch golden chrysanthemums, which connote friendship and happiness. Other designs include morning glories for September, hollies for December, and daisies for April. Each is labeled with its difficulty level and contains a diagram of required stitches. Frazer also includes bonus designs that complement the floral patterns, such as butterflies, snails, and ladybugs. There is a section devoted to reviewing basic stitches, from backstitches and satin stitches to chain stitches and French knots, but the written instructions and illustrations may be confusing for novices. Still, this appealing collection will suit embroiderers who’ve mastered the basics. (Dec.)

Reviewed on 11/28/2025 | Details & Permalink