That Sounds So Good: 100 Real-Life Recipes for Every Day of the Week by Carla Lalli Music ’94 (Clarkson Potter)

Following up on Where Cooking Begins, this warm and accommodating collection should easily earn a place on plenty of cookbook shelves. Music has sorted the recipes into two main camps: quick weeknight, stove-top, and big salad suggestions, like steamed lemongrass mussels or wild rice with pomelo, coconut, and cashews; and slower weekend fare, like pork and beef stew with ginger, tomato, and kimchi. All recipes include a list of substitutions, meant to avoid that extra missing-ingredient run to the store. And if you look up Carla’s Cooking Show on YouTube you can see how she puts many of these dishes together.
 

The Home-Scale Forest Garden: How to Plan, Plant and Tend a Resilient Edible Landscape by Dani Baker ’70 (Chelsea Green Publishing)

This is both the story of Baker’s quest to create her Enchanted Edible Forest, with fruit trees forming the canopy, berry bushes in the middle, and wild strawberries for ground cover, and a practical guide on how to launch your own edible landscape. The idea is to take the principles of permaculture—where nature handles the watering, weeding, fertilizing, and pest management—and apply those to what might otherwise just be a regular garden. Baker’s edible forest, on one of the Thousand Islands in upstate New York, began as a 100-by-200-foot plot and has grown to a half acre. But she also has ideas for starting with something much smaller, like an edible hedge.
 

The Complete Cookbook for Teen Chefs: 70+ Teen-Tested and Teen-Approved Recipes to Cook, Eat and Share (America’s Test Kitchen Kids, Editor-In-Chief Molly Birnbaum ’05)

This lively, deeply illustrated collection will likely be a hit with not just teens but also pre-teens and even a few parents looking to tweak their repertoires. The recipes here go from breakfast to dessert and include dishes like steak tacos with charred corn salsa, Chana Makhani (Indian butter chickpeas), and Onigiri (Japanese rice balls). The book is also layered with quick and handy how-tos—like how to dredge chicken or prep a mango or cut tofu—as well as plenty of demystifying step-by-step sequences. Readers will pick up fresh kitchen skills without even noticing.

Alumni Fiction

Love Chronicles of the Octopodes: a Novel by Karen An-Hwei Lee ’95, ’97 MFA (Ellipsis)

The Hanmoji Handbook: Your Guide to the Chinese Language through Emoji by Jason Li ’07 (MITeen)

Confessions of a Knight Errant: Drifters, Thieves, and Ali Baba’s Treasure by Gretchen McCullough ’84 (Cune)

Alumni Nonfiction

The Alignment Problem: Machine Learning and Human Values by Brian Christian ’06 (W.W. Norton)

Stories between Christianity and Islam by Reyhan Durmaz ’19 PhD (Univ. of California)

Aphasia and Other Acquired Neurogenic Language Disorders: A Guide for Clinical Excellence by Brooke Hallowell ’83 (Plural Publishing)

The Tuskegee Student Uprising: A History by Brian Jones ’95 (NYU)

Launchpad Republic: America’s Entrepreneurial Edge and Why It Matters by John Landry ’88 AM, ’95 PhD and Howard Wolk (Wiley)

The Gift of Rumi: Experiencing the Wisdom of the Sufi Master by Emily Jane O'Dell ’01, ’03 MFA, ’06 AM, ’08 PhD (St. Martin’s)

Honest Answers, Interview and Negotiation Skills to Get to the Truth by Lena Sisco ’97 AM (HarperCollins)

Pathogenesis of Neuropathic Pain: Diagnosis and Treatment, 1st ed. by Daryl I. Smith ’80, ’84 MD (Springer)

Liberty Road: Black Middle-Class Suburbs and the Battle Between Civil Rights and Neoliberalism by Gregory Smithsimon ’94 (NYU)

Trans Talmud: Eunuchs and Androgynes in Rabbinic Literature by Max K. Strassfeld ’98 (Univ. of California)

A Reader in Biblical Greek by Richard A. Wright ’94 PhD (Eerdmans Publishing)
 

Alumni Poetry

Sound Fury: Poems by Mark Levine ’87 (Univ. of Iowa)
 

Independently Published

Belonging in Healthcare by Karen Catlin ’85

What Nature Friends Surround Me? By Ainsley MacLean ’01, ’05 MD