Vertigo

Get Jiro! cover

Over a year after our first glimpse at the Anthony Bourdain/Joel Rose (Kill Kill Faster Faster, The Blackest Bird) comic collaboration, Get Jiro!, the release date is finally set. Amazon is now accepting preorders for the July 3 release of the book once described by one of its authors as "a gourmet slaughter-fest." (Can you guess which one?)

Luckily, they've expanded on that description:

In a not-too-distant future L.A. where master chefs rule the town like crime lords and people literally kill for a seat at the best restaurants, a bloody culinary war is raging.

On one side, the Internationalists, who blend foods from all over the world into exotic delights. On the other, the "Vertical Farm," who prepare nothing but organic, vegetarian, macrobiotic dishes. Into this maelstrom steps Jiro, a renegade and ruthless sushi chef, known to decapitate patrons who dare request a California Roll, or who stir wasabi into their soy sauce. Both sides want Jiro to join their factions. Jiro, however has bigger ideas, and in the end, no chef may be left alive!

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Photo courtesy of Bravo

Ruth Reichl with fellow Top Chef Masters judges Curtis Stone and James Oseland

When Gourmet suddenly folded in 2009, one of the biggest surprises was that Ruth Reichl -- then editor-in-chief of the magazine and previously Los Angeles Times food editor and restaurant critic for The New York Times -- would be out of a job. These days she's as busy as ever, writing three new books: a memoir, a novel and a Twitter-based recipe book.

In speaking with Israeli publication Haaretz, Reichl recently divulged some unexpected details about her memoirs, comparing her time at magazine publisher Condé Nast to "Sex and the City" and "Gossip Girl," a "world of luxury and possibility [she] didn't know existed."

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Jo Stougaard/My Last Bite

Fish kidney curry from Jitlada. We bet neither Leo Bloom nor James Joyce ever tried this.

It's 8 a.m., June 16th, 1904, and at 7 Eccles Street in Dublin, Leopold Bloom, the wandering hero of Ulysses, is contemplating a breakfast of offal, which we know all about thanks to James Joyce's piquant description:

Mr. Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods' roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine.

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currentlysavvy!/flickr

carne en su sugo

Innovative Portland-based publishing model Publication Studio is putting out a new novel by its founder, Matthew Stadler. A murder mystery set in the mountain city of Guanajuato, Mexico, the plot of Chloe Jarren's La Cucaracha unfolds at sumptuous dinner parties and gritty bars. According to the author, "the deluded optimism of 21st century neo-liberal politics" is a central theme. How fitting then that, this month and next, the author will be promoting the book on Publication Studio's 12-city "NAFTA" tour of North America at which local chefs at each stop will prepare a variation of carne en su sugo to soothe the tequila-addled bellies of attendees.

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(c) http://www.westeros.org/

2006 WorldCon, Glasgow, Scotland, with haggis in the foreground.

Until we read Laura Miller's April 11th New Yorker piece on fantasy, horror and sci-fi writer George RR Martin, we didn't know much about HBO's new Game of Thrones, except that it's an American medieval fantasy TV show based on Martin's series A Song of Fire And Ice about seven kingdoms, a battle for a throne, and warring noble families (and that while many TV critics loved it, at least one one was spit-roasted for the crime of categorizing it as strictly boy TV).

Then something in Miller's excellent piece -- which was primarily an exploration of the fantasy fiction writer's sometimes turbulent relationship with parts of his fan base -- jumped out at us. At annual gatherings in various cities, Martin sends his followers -- more often than not people who have traveled from elsewhere and therefore are unfamiliar with their surroundings -- out to locate and bring back food for which in return they are officially knighted. The way Miller described the "quests," they sounded like a fun, low-tech, one night version of Amazing Race, or maybe a scavenger hunt that also involves eating, lots of beer, bragging rights to a crazy evening well spent, and getting a nickname bequeathed from a hero. We wanted to know more!

In our interview, we speak to David M. McCaman, a San Francisco-based marketing executive, founder of the George RR Martin internet forum, Brotherhood without Banners and a long-time Martin-anointed knight himself. Turn the page.

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Writer Beth M. Howard has signed a book deal for Making Piece: A Memoir about Love, Loss and Pie, her story of traveling the country seeking pie stories after her husband's death.

The book is scheduled for publication in June 2012. Howard hopes to have it finished within two months. On her blog, The World Needs More Pie, she writes:

I should be ecstatic, I know. And a huge part of me is. But it is not lost on me that a) it took Marcus' death for me to have a story compelling enough to interest a publisher (or a subject bone-crushingly tragic enough to force my writing to go deeper), and b) I still have to finish writing the manuscript. (So far I'm one-third of the way done.)

Have another slice, on us.