Gabrielle Hamilton, owner of Prune restaurant in New York City, is interviewed in the Dining & Wine section of today’s New York Times. Her memoir, Blood, Bones & Butter, which was released yesterday, is already in its third printing and received a rare near-rave from NYT critic Michiko Kakutani last week. Libraries are showing heavy holds on light ordering (who would expect a book by the owner of a restaurant that few people in the country have been to — it has only 30 seats — to be a hit?)

Says the interviewer,

On the page and in the kitchen, Ms. Hamilton can be charming, tempestuous, persnickety, vulgar, poetic, provocative and mothering, sometimes all in the course of a single flurry of sentences. Whatever scars she has, she is not inclined to cover them.

The prepub reviews back up that observation; Booklist calls it a “lusty, rollicking, engaging-from-page-one memoir.”

Blood, Bones & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef Gabrielle Hamilton Retail Price: $26.00 Hardcover: 304 pages Publisher: Random House – (2011-03-01) ISBN / EAN: 140006872X / 9781400068722

Audio: Books on Tape; narrated by the author; 3/1/11

The memoir category continues to grow, as proved by the large selection coming next week.

Already making headlines is Tiger, Tiger by Margaux Fragoso (FSG), the memoir of the author’s seduction and molestation, beginning at age 7, by a serial child rapist in his 50s, it follows their 15-year relationship. New York magazine reviewed it this week, calling  it “an unstable mixture of bildungsroman, dirty realism, and child pornography” and calls it “beautiful and appalling.”

Andre Dubus‘smemoir of his childhood, Townie (Norton), an EarlyWord favorite since his appearance at ALA Midwinter, has already garnered admiring reviews.

A natural outgrowth of the public fascination with celebrity chefs and their cookbooks is the celebrity chef memoir. Next week brings two with strong backing from their publishers:

Gabrielle Hamilton recently confirmed her chops as a writer with an excerpt in the New Yorker from Blood, Bones and Butter, which recounts her trajectory from a 1970s Pennsylvania childhood that disintegrated in divorce to opening her acclaimed New York restaurant Prune.

The memoir has also wrested rare praise from New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani, who says,

…the book is hardly just for foodies. Ms. Hamilton, who has an M.F.A. in fiction writing from the University of Michigan, is as evocative writing about people and places as she is at writing about cooking, and her memoir does as dazzling a job of summoning her lost childhood as Mary Karr’s “Liars’ Club” and Andre Aciman’s “Out of Egypt” did with theirs.

Blood, Bones & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef Gabrielle Hamilton Retail Price: $26.00 Hardcover: 304 pages Publisher: Random House – (2011-03-01) ISBN / EAN: 140006872X / 9781400068722

Grant Achatz, whose Chicago restaurant Alinea was crowned the best in America by Gourmet magazine, also delivers Life, on the Line: A Chef’s Story of Chasing Greatness, Facing Death, and Redefining the Way We Eat. Co-written by Nick Kokonas, the book has a 75,000 copy first printing. An excerpt in the new issue of People (March 7) chronicles Achatz’s struggle with tongue cancer.

Life, on the Line: A Chef’s Story of Chasing Greatness, Facing Death, and Redefining the Way We Eat Grant Achatz, Nick Kokonas Retail Price: $27.50 Hardcover: 400 pages Publisher: Gotham/Penguin – (2011-03-03) ISBN / EAN: 1592406017 / 9781592406012

Other Notable Nonfiction On Sale Next Week

Getting to Heaven: Departing Instructions for Your Life Now by Don Piper and Cecil Murphey (Berkley) is an “instruction book” regarding the Christian idea of the afterlife by the author of the multimillion-selling 90 Minutes in Heaven.

Bringing Adam Home: The Abduction That Changed America by Les Standiford and Joe Matthews (Ecco) is the story of the 1981 kidnapping and murder of six-year-old Adam Walsh—son of John Walsh, host of the Fox TV series America’s Most Wanted—which went unsolved for a quarter of a century. It will get a major round of publicity, including a March 1 Q&A with the authors in USA Today, a March 2 appearance by Joe Matthews and the Walshes on the Today show; and a March 3 segment on Nightline.

Revolt!: How to Defeat Obama and Repeal His Socialist Programs by Dick Morris and Eileen McGann (Broadside Books) advocates no tax increases, weakening federal regulations and cutting social programs in the name of deficit reduction.

Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything by Joshua Foer (Penguin Press) chronicles the training process of a once forgetful U.S. Memory Champion. The author was interviewed on All Things Considered on Wednesday.

In today’s New York Times, Dwight Garner offers a review of Andre Dubus’s memoir, Townie, that is nearly a love letter,

Townie is a better, harder book than anything the younger Mr. Dubus has yet written; it pays off on every bet that’s been placed on him. It’s a sleek muscle car of a memoir that — until it loses traction in clichés about redemption at its very end — growls like an amalgam of the best work by Richard Price, Stephen King, Ron Kovic, Breece D’J Pancake and Dennis Lehane, set to the desolate thumping of Bruce Springsteen’s “Darkness on the Edge of Town.”

Laura Miller gives it an equally strong review, but for different reasons, in Salon, underscoring that there are many things readers will take away from this book.

Since the book offers an insightful look at the male perspective on growing up (Dubus makes you understand why some boys are drawn to brawling and weight lifting), it would be a great choice for a male/female and father/son book clubs.

Dubus will appear on NPR’s Diane Rehm Show on 2/28, the book’s official publication date.

Libraries we checked are showing heavy holds on modest orders.

Townie: A Memoir Andre Dubus III Retail Price: $25.95 Hardcover: 400 pages Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company – (2011-02-28) ISBN / EAN: 0393064662 / 9780393064667

Audio: Blackstone; UNABR, simultaneous; read by the author

Joyce Carol Oates’ memoir, A Widow’s Story, shares the cover of the new NYT BR, following on the heels of much media attention (fetures in USA Today, and Time magazine this week). More attention will be coming, including an interview with Charlie Rose and a feaure in Newsweek.

It is now at #55 on Amazon sales rankings.

A Widow’s Story: A Memoir Joyce Carol Oates Retail Price: $27.99 Hardcover: 432 pages Publisher: Ecco – (2011-03-01) ISBN / EAN: 0062015532 / 9780062015532

In An Exclusive Love, Johanna Adjoran tries to understand her grandparents, survivors of the Holocaust, who committed double-suicide in 1991. On the NPR Web site, Heller McAlpin calls it, a “haunting, beautifully composed book” and likens it to Francine du Plessix Gray’s Them, and Edmund de Waal’s The Hare With Amber Eyes (a Nancy Pearl favorite).

An Exclusive Love: A Memoir Johanna Adorján Retail Price: $24.95 Hardcover: 192 pages Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company – (2011-01-31) ISBN / EAN: 0393080013 / 9780393080018

Appropriately, there are a torrent of leaks from Inside WikiLeaks: My Time with Julian Assange at the World’s Most Dangerous Website by former WikiLeaks spokesperson Daniel Domscheit-Berg, which goes on sale today (Friday, February 11).

Among the revelations: Wired magazine reports that “when Domscheit-Berg left WikiLeaks, he took the organization’s encrypted submissions system with him, and Assange’s site has been unable to accept new material since.”

And Gawker says the book claims that Assange has fathered at least four “love children” around the world.

Libraries we checked had modest holds on modest orders.

Inside WikiLeaks: My Time with Julian Assange at the World’s Most Dangerous Website Daniel Domscheit-Berg Retail Price: $23.00 Hardcover: 304 pages Publisher: Crown – (2011-02-15) ISBN / EAN: 030795191X / 9780307951915

Other Notable Nonfiction On Sale Next Week

A Widow’s Story by Joyce Carol Oates (Ecco) gets an “A” from Entertainment Weekly: “In a narrative as searing as the best of her fiction, Oates describes the aftermath of her husband Ray’s unexpected death from pneumonia.” Oates has already appeared on NewsHour, and a raft of features are due next week everywhere from the USA Today to Newsweek. It will also be featured on the cover of the New York Times Book Review on February 20.

True You: A Journey to Finding and Loving Yourself by Janet Jackson and David Ritz (Pocket Books/Karen Hunter) reveals that Jackson’s brothers verbally abused her and her father beat her, according to a Los Angeles Times report on Meredith Viera’s interview with the singer, which will air on NBC’s Today on Friday, February 11 and Monday, February 14, and on “Dateline” on Sunday February 13.

33 Men: Inside the Miraculous Survival and Dramatic Rescue of the Chilean Miners by Jonathan Franklin (Putnam) is an inside (though above-ground) account of the Chilean mine collapse and rescue operation last year, based on more than 110 interviews with the miners, their families, and the rescue team.

Worth Watching:

History of a Suicide: My Sister’s Unfinished Life by Jill Bialosky (Simon & Schuster) is the poet, novelist and Norton editor’s account of her sister’s early death at age 21, in 1990. PW calls it “a beautifully composed, deeply reflective work, [drawing] from literary and psychological examples to honor her sister through a thoroughly examined life.”

Inconceivable: A Medical Mistake, the Baby We Couldn’t Keep, and Our Choice to Deliver the Ultimate Gift by Carolyn Savage and Sean Savage (HarperOne) chronicles a couple’s spiritual struggle after learning a fertility clinic implanted the wrong embryo. Booklist says, “The story is compelling and well told, although the Savages come across as martyrs more than saints.”

We’re struck that two reviews this week expressed their love for sentences.

The lead review in the new issue of Entertainment Weekly singles out several favorite phrases from the memoir, House of Prayer No. 2 by Mark Richard, who, says the reviewer, writes “effortlessly killer prose.”

Earlier this week, Dwight Garner, threatened to fill his review of another memoir, Day of Honey, with the author’s “sensual, smart, wired-up” sentences.

Maybe Stanley Fish has made reviewers more attuned to sentences, with his book How to Write a Sentence and his contest for readers favorites.

It seems to work; both reviews make you want to get your hands on the books as soon as possible.

House of Prayer No. 2: A Writer’s Journey Home Mark Richard Retail Price: $23.95 Hardcover: 224 pages Publisher: Nan A. Talese – (2011-02-15) ISBN / EAN: 038551302X / 9780385513029

…………………………

Day of Honey: A Memoir of Food, Love, and War Annia Ciezadlo Retail Price: $26.00 Hardcover: 400 pages Publisher: Free Press – (2011-02-01) ISBN / EAN: 1416583939 / 9781416583936

The New York Times critic Dwight Garner is so smitten with Day of Honey by Annia Ciezadlo that he ends up quoting several of the “sensual, smart, wired-up” sentences from the book and says he “could fill the rest of this space with the [book’s] resonant lines.”

Libraries have ordered modest quantities of this memoir about living in the Middle East and particularly about the region’s food.

Garner says to not be put off by the book’s “feeble cover…[that] looks like the cover of some mediocre nonprofit group’s annual report, or of Guideposts magazine.”

Not everyone would agree.

Day of Honey: A Memoir of Food, Love, and War Annia Ciezadlo Retail Price: $26.00 Hardcover: 400 pages Publisher: Free Press – (2011-02-01) ISBN / EAN: 1416583939 / 9781416583936

Michael Oher, the offensive tackle for the Baltimore Ravens, finally tells his side of his adoption story, which is central to Michael Lewis’s bestseller The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game and the subsequent film starring Sandra Bullock. He explains on the Huffington Post that he wrote his memoir, I Beat the Odds: From Homelessness to the Blind Side and Beyond (with Don Yeager) because “I wanted to talk about some of the questions people have about how I was portrayed in the movie and about my life before I came to live with the Tuohys.”

Kirkus says: “The book is strongest when Oher conveys his hard-won wisdom through specific examples and anecdotes from his life. When he dispenses more generalized advice, the narrative reads like a generic public-service announcement.”

At libraries we checked, orders were in line with modest reserves.

I Beat the Odds: From Homelessness, to The Blind Side, and Beyond Michael Oher Retail Price: $26.00 Hardcover: 272 pages Publisher: Gotham – (2011-02-08) ISBN / EAN: 1592406122 / 9781592406128

Other Notable Titles on Sale Next Week

Known and Unknown: A Memoir by Donald Rumsfeld (Sentinel) chronicles the career of the Secretary of Defense during 9/11 and the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. In the New York Times, Michiko Kakutani calls it: “tedious, self-serving. . .  [and] filled with efforts to blame others — most notably the C.I.A., the State Department and the Coalition Provisional Authority (in particular George Tenet, Colin L. Powell, Condoleezza Rice and L. Paul Bremer III) — for misjudgments made in the invasion and occupation of Iraq, and the failure to contain an insurgency there that metastasized for years.” On Monday, February 7, Rumsfeld will appear on “World News” with Diane Sawyer at 6:30 p.m. ET and on “Nightline” at 11:35 p.m. ET. On Tuesday, February 8, he will appear on “Good Morning America” at 7 am ET.

Spousonomics: Using Economics To Master Love, Marriage, and Dirty Dishes by Paula Szuchman and Jenny Anderson (Random) is a quirky and practical look at relationships by, respectively, a front-page editor for the Wall Street Journal and an award-winning New York Times reporter who’s covered Wall Street. Based on the authors’ survey of 1,000 couples, Szuchman explains that the key to a good sex life is to keep it “affordable.” If couples are tired, “they make it quick. Maybe they don’t even bother to take their shirts off. When one of them is in the mood, they say so,” she says in an essay on the Daily Beast.

The Foremost Good Fortune by Susan Conley (Knopf)  is a memoir of family’s move from Maine to Beijing, only to find that the cultural differences between their two homes pale when the author gets a cancer diagnosis. Booklist calls it, “Beautifully written and insightful on many levels.”

Radio Shangri-La: What I Learned in the Happiest Kingdom on Earth by Lisa Napoli is a memoir of an ex-journalist’s search for wholeness and spiritual renewal in Bhutan, while helping to launch Kuzoo FM, the nation’s fledgling radio station. Kirkus says, “the author’s authentic voice and light, pleasant cultural insights make for a refreshingly uplifting book.”

The Washington Post reviews former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s memoir, Known and Unknown, which releases on Tuesday. As a result, the book rose to #8 on Amazon sales rankings (library holds, however, are modest for now).

The book is published by Sentinel, Penguin’s conservative imprint.

Known and Unknown: A Memoir Donald Rumsfeld Retail Price: $36.00 Hardcover: 832 pages Publisher: Sentinel HC – (2011-02-08) ISBN / EAN: 159523067X / 9781595230676

Penguin Audio; UNABR; 24 CDs; ISBN 9780142428382

Yesterday’s GalleyChat was like readers advisory for readers advisers and raised several titles to the top of participants’ TBR piles.

Debuts

Among the debut novels, The Tiger’s Wife, by Téa Obreht, won a prediction that it will be one of the biggest books of the year. At 25, Obreht’s the youngest of the New Yorker’s 20 Under 40 fiction writers, as well as the National Book Foundation’s 5 under 35 (selected by no less than Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin). The Village Voice said what many of us were thinking when they called her the “Best New York Writer Young Enough to Make You Slit Your Wrists.”

All of that acclaim arrived months before her first book, coming in March (a chapter was published in The New Yorker in 2009 and another story, “Blue Water Djinn” in Aug — subscription required for both).

The Tiger’s Wife: A Novel Tea Obreht Retail Price: $25.00 Hardcover: 352 pages Publisher: Random House – (2011-03-08) ISBN / EAN: 0385343833 / 9780385343831

Another debut getting several nods is So Much Pretty, which also comes with a rave from Booklist, and an unlikely comparison, “A mixture of The Lovely Bones and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.”

So Much Pretty: A Novel Cara Hoffman Retail Price: $25.00 Hardcover: 304 pages Publisher: Simon & Schuster – (2011-03-15) ISBN / EAN: 1451616759 / 9781451616750

The debut psychological thriller, Before I Go To Sleep, is about a woman who has lost her memory. The husband she wakes up with each morning is thus a perplexing stranger, as is the face in the mirror. One GalleyChatter warns, “you’ll never see the end coming!” Be sure to check out HarperCollins Director of Library Marketing, Virginia Stanley, presenting it at the HarperCollins Spring Summer Buzz session.

Before I Go To Sleep: A Novel S. J. Watson Retail Price: $25.99 Hardcover: 368 pages Publisher: Harper – (2011-06-01) ISBN / EAN: 0062060554 / 9780062060556

Memoirs

Several memoirs were mentioned (it’s probably the sheer number of memoirs that brought about Sunday’s rant about “oversharing” in the NYT BR).

My own favorite is Andre Dubus’s Townie. After his riveting speech at Midwinter (he managed to make you feel that he was not only talking directly to you, but he was actually flirting with you), I knew Townie would be my plane reading. Not only did it live up to my heightened expectations, but it made a cross-country flight in a middle seat almost bearable.

Given the current fascination with both memoirs and  chefs, it’s no surprise that there are several chef memoirs on the horizon.

Grant Achatz, writes about founding Alinea and overcoming tongue cancer in Life, on the Line. (Gotham/Penguin, March)

Season to Taste by Molly Birnbaum (also featured in HarperCollins Book Buzz) is by an aspiring chef who loses her sense of smell (Ecco, June).

Blood, Bones and Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef, by Gabrielle Hamilton (RH, March);  one  GalleyChat participant called it  “amazing” and a book she is still talking about. It also arrives with stellar prepub reviews (Booklist, “lusty, rollicking, engaging-from-page-one memoir”).

Please join us for the next GalleyChat on Tuesday, March 1, 4 to 5 p.m., Eastern (details here).

Here’s an irresistible recommendation; People magazine says Claire Dederer’s new memoir about studying yoga while trying to raise two children and keep a marriage together  “…reads like Eat, Pray, Love for hip but harried moms.”

They also give it four of a possible four stars and designate it a People Pick in the new issue, dated Jan. 10. For other titles reviewed in that issue, check our PEOPLE Book Reviews Archive.

Poser: My Life in Twenty-three Yoga Poses Claire Dederer Retail Price: $26.00 Hardcover: 352 pages Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux – (2010-12-21) ISBN / EAN: 0374236445 / 9780374236441

Blackstone Audio, 9781441781505

On NPR’s Morning Edition today, Nancy Pearl recommended several memoirs. She says that The Hare with Amber Eyes is the best work of nonfiction she read this year.

The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Family’s Century of Art and Loss Edmund de Waal Retail Price: $26.00 Hardcover: 368 pages Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux – (2010-08-31) ISBN / EAN: 0374105979 / 9780374105976

She may have traded in her “black heels for tractor wheels,” but Ree Drummond (who blogs at ThePioneerWoman.com) has not lost any of her L.A. style marketing skills.

After she chucked her career to move to a working Oklahoma cattle ranch (a “rugged and virile cowboy” was involved, of course), she began blogging about her new life. Then she published The Pioneer Woman Cooks (some of you still have holds on it) and became a best selling author (ten week in the top five on the NYT Hardcover Advice list).

Yesterday, she announced on her blog that her next book is coming in February and it jumped to #56 on Amazon’s sales rankings.

Libraries we checked have not ordered it.

The Pioneer Woman: Black Heels to Tractor Wheels–A Love Story Ree Drummond Retail Price: $25.99 Hardcover: 352 pages Publisher: William Morrow – (2011-02-01) ISBN / EAN: 0061997161 / 9780061997167

Running the Books, prison librarian Avi Steinberg’s memoir gets an additional dose of press attention (see earlier stories) from USA Today, which calls it “a smart new memoir” and says it is “about the ways in which the library provided refuge, companionship and solace to the people [Steinberg] met,” and praises the author for “leaven[ing] his often-grim memoir with unexpected bits of comedy and insight, weaving his family’s story into the narrative.”

Running the Books: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian Avi Steinberg Retail Price: $26.00 Hardcover: 416 pages Publisher: Nan A. Talese – (2010-10-19) ISBN / EAN: 0385529090 / 9780385529099