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The Hunger and the Feast

Ten books about eating — and about not eating. Not one comes from a Big Five publisher: eight are from independent houses and two from university presses, and four arrive in translation. Half are feasts: Elizabeth David smuggling the Mediterranean into rationed Britain, Fuchsia Dunlop on why texture beats flavour in Chinese cooking, a Japanese novelist eating her way across colonial Taiwan by rail. Half are hungers: a Soviet labour camp, a Korean mother in a white American town, a culinary school that turns boys into something worse. Most of these have a few hundred ratings between them. Food turns out to be the subject writers do their most honest work on, and the small presses have quietly cornered it.

10 booksSeptember 2026

01
Vibration Cooking
Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor
The University of Georgia Press brought this back in 2011 with a foreword by Psyche Williams-Forson, and it is the best-looking book on this list — that cover earns its shelf space on its own. Smart-Grosvenor danced with Sun Ra and reported for NPR, and she was a far better writer than the shelf she got filed under.
02
Taiwan Travelogue
Yáng Shuāng-zǐ
Graywolf Press, translated from the Mandarin by Lin King — it won the National Book Award for Translated Literature and then the 2026 International Booker. Yáng frames the whole novel as a rediscovered translation of a lost Japanese book, footnotes and all, a joke that keeps paying off for 320 pages.
03
The Cook
Wayne Macauley
Text Publishing in Melbourne, 2011, and still barely read outside Australia — a few hundred ratings in fifteen years. A satire of food worship that turns genuinely frightening. The cover is a butcher's diagram, which is not a coincidence.
04
Invitation to a Banquet
Fuchsia Dunlop
W. W. Norton — employee-owned, and one of the last genuinely independent houses left in New York. Dunlop trained as a chef in Sichuan; if you only know her cookbooks, this is the one where she stops giving instructions and makes the argument.
05
Tastes Like War
Grace M. Cho
The Feminist Press at CUNY, and a National Book Award finalist. Cho is a sociologist and it shows in the best possible way: she keeps widening the frame until a family kitchen turns out to contain the Korean War.
06
Gourmet Rhapsody
Muriel Barbery
Europa Editions, translated from the French by Alison Anderson. Barbery wrote this before The Elegance of the Hedgehog and almost nobody went back for it afterwards — it is shorter, meaner and a good deal funnier than the book that made her famous.
07
Honey from a Weed
Patience Gray
Alan Davidson's Prospect Books, which publishes almost nothing but food history and anthropology — which is why this 1986 masterpiece has never had a mainstream edition. A cult book among cooks, and a real piece of literature: the André Simon judges had to invent a special award for it.
08
A Book of Mediterranean Food
Elizabeth David
The NYRB Classics edition, with a foreword by Clarissa Dickson Wright. Two hundred pages, and barely a wasted sentence in it — she is one of the few cookery writers who is simply a great English prose stylist who happened to write about food.
09
The Belly of Paris
Émile Zola
Oxford World's Classics, in Brian Nelson's translation, which is a great deal livelier than the Victorian versions that put people off Zola in the first place. The cheese symphony alone is worth the cover price.
10
The Hunger Angel
Herta Müller
Portobello Books, translated from the German by Philip Boehm. The far end of this list: not a book about eating but about its absence, written in a language so compressed that every sentence feels weighed out on a scale.