John Birdsall

1 week ago | altaonline.com | Elizabeth Casillas |Maisie Hurwitz |John Birdsall

1WHAT IS QUEER FOOD? HOW WE SERVED A REVOLUTION, BY JOHN BIRDSALLW.W. Norton and CompanyCritic Birdsall’s most recent endeavor into food culture enlivens the history of dishes like quiche, potlucks, and rainbow icebox cake with narratives about the people who created them and the culture that they were liberating themselves from in the process.

1 month ago | publishersweekly.com | Alice Bolin |John Birdsall |Caroline Darian |Prabal Gurung

Essayist Bolin (Dead Girls) probes the intersection of technology, culture, and feminism in this ferociously smart collection. In “Enumerated Woman,” she argues that using Fitbits or other devices to track steps, calorie intake, and other data is a manifestation of a “postfeminist” ideal that uses notions of bodily autonomy to uphold traditional standards of beauty while fueling capitalist consumption.

2 months ago | publishersweekly.com | John Birdsall |Caroline Darian |Prabal Gurung |Philip Kadish

Jeff Weiss. MCD, $19 trade paper (400p) ISBN 978-0-374-60613-8Music journalist Weiss (Passion of the Weiss) takes an exhilarating trip through the ups and downs of Britney Spears’s career in this no-holds-barred account. He traces his infatuation with the pop star from crashing the filming of her “Baby... One More Time” music video as a 16-year-old through to his coverage of Spears for the tabloid magazine Nova.

2 months ago | publishersweekly.com | Catherine Lacey |John Birdsall |Caroline Darian |Prabal Gurung

Catherine Lacey. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $27 (240p) ISBN 978-0-374-61540-6Novelist Lacey (Biography of X) reflects on love, faith, and loss in this ambitious genre-bender. Reeling after a breakup, Lacey set out to process it with a “Möbius strip of narrative”: the book’s first half is fiction, and the second—printed backwards and upside-down, requiring readers to physically turn the book over—is memoir. In the first, a woman named Edie visits her friend Marie near Christmas.

2 months ago | publishersweekly.com | James Syhabout |John Birdsall |Miranda Spivack |Eli Erlick

What Is Queer Food?: How We Served a RevolutionJames Beard Award winner Birdsall (The Man Who Ate Too Much) provides an eye-opening exploration of how food has helped shape “the queer arc of survival” in American life. Moving from the mid-19th century to the early 1990s, he covers how restaurants like the Paper Doll in San Francisco (which opened in 1944 as arguably “the first queer restaurant in America”) demanded “respect for gays, lesbians, and those whose...