COOKING IN THE WRONG CENTURY, Austrian woman's storyteller reaches Anglophones at last

COOKING IN THE WRONG CENTURY
TERESA PRÄAUER (tr. Eleanor Updergraff)
Pushkin Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: An irresistibly witty satire about a dinner party where the foodie guests have a grand amount of taste but no social clue at all.

For the hostess, food has always been about growing up. From the pancakes your grandmother made, dolloped with jam, to the salty glug of your very first oyster. Now, poised at the brink of midlife, the hostess prepares for a dinner party in her new apartment, desperate for the envy of her cultured friends. With a hunger for the finer things in life, she folds linen napkins into neat triangles, arranges wildflowers for the table and puts on a playlist that projects effortless cool.

But her composure begins to falter when her guests arrive drunk and late, downing bottles of her perfectly cooled wine and trailing water over the floor. Here comes the chain-smoking professor who never says the right thing, the husband glued to his smartphone, the wife who makes a secret pass at your boyfriend.

As small talk and social preening give way to sexual tension and lost inhibitions, the hostess struggles to maintain control over an evening far beyond her wildest imaginings. Outrageously funny and keenly observed, this is the first novel by Austrian powerhouse Teresa Präauer to be translated into English, and a delectable feast of social satire for readers of Perfection and The Anthropologists.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Maybe it's just me relating to "the hostess" so deeply and personally...maybe I'm feeling a little wistful for the times when asking people to your home for a home-cooked meal was not weird or unexpected.

That, however, is not remotely what's on Author Präauer's mind. This is a super-sarcastic snarkfest of skewered bourgeois pretensions. She gets after every conceibable subset of our brittlest chit-chat, puts a big ol' flensing knife under the scrotal skin of her (formerly) male characters, spraying narrative mace in their eyes since they weren't using them to see what's in front of their faces anyway.

The women! ZOMG What a collection of prunes, determined to out-smug each other in their certainty of opinions...most especially about food. In its deeply felt rage, it was Babette's Feast for the dining discourse of Ibnstagram meets The Women for the self-conscious class skewering.

It's not clear to me there is not only one dinner party, though it seems the characters aren't the same people...? But believe you me, they're indistinguishable...examining more closely than is comfortable people from the same background so I was left with one idea of what we-the-reader are supposed to think and feel about them. Our narrator occasionally addresses us through the broken fourth wall on the subject of how we perceive food; how food as a cultural touchstone came to exist in our minds.

So you know I was right there. I was fully engaged in every bit of this admittedly slight narrative. I don't think the story being told quite merits the 176-page count...It feels more like a 150pp novella would've done better justice to the exploration of the hostess's purpose in feeding her friends (only her friends) and her new Swiss...fella, let's say. Maybe I didn't really need the oddly angled ending, but rather a simpler one of a door just closing...?

Whatever my cavils, this introduction to Author Präauer, well-known and established in Austria, and her interests and writing style, was a genuine pleasure. I was entertained, amused, and drawn in to this social commentary on Instagrammable foodies, women with axes to grind but no courage to let loose and do it already, and the men who completely misunderstand them.

Very much a "give this one a try" shove to your bookstore from me.

A YEAR OF GARDEN-INSPIRED LIVING: Season by Season, inspirational as well as aspirational

A YEAR OF GARDEN-INSPIRED LIVING: Season by Season
LINDA VATER
Cool Springs Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$30.00 all editions, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A Year of Garden-Inspired Living is a giftable homage to living seasonally and is filled with inspiration for creating a garden-inspired life of grace and abundance. Bring simplicity and grace into your life, garden, home, and community with this treasured collection of ideas and daily inspiration from garden lifestyle guru Linda Vater.

Whether it’s connecting with a neighbor over a bowl of homemade soup, displaying a much-adored collection of books, creating personalized seed packets, setting a beautiful seasonal tablescape, or compiling a basket of comforts for someone in need, author Linda Vater (@potagerblog) has gathered a wealth of reflections on how to make the ordinary extraordinary and bring the joy of the garden’s seasons back into your life.

Each page features a narrative story about a special life moment, followed by an idea for bringing that moment to fruition in your own life, all organized by the season. Beautiful watercolor illustrations add further inspiration and a spark of creativity to the notion on each page.

A small sampling of the guidance found inside includes:

Giving a house blessing to a brand-new homeowner

Picking a seasonal wardrobe “piece” and letting it shine

Spreading seeds in an old spice jar

Being intentionally inefficient

Wearing your garden boots with a flouncy dress

Welcoming friends and neighbors to cut bouquets from your garden

Having a “ladybug party” for the children in your life

Creating herbal bouquets for cooking

Making and displaying decorative fall leaf bouquets

And so much more!

A Year of Garden-Inspired Living offers an elegant yet easy way to bring the joys and textures of seasonal living into your daily life, welcoming peace and connection to your days and restoring the balance of nature’s seasons in your home and life.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Charming, gentle anecdotes centered on a woman's garden as she moves through her very aspirationally bourgeois year.

Interesting reading for a resolute urbanite who quails inwardly at the notion of suburbia. I was fascinated by this Junior-League vision of a leisurely life I'd thought was dead. No one I know who isn't retired has this kind of time to putter and potter and coddiwomple hither, thither, and yon to be a willing slave to a bunch of botanical divas.

Absorbing, in a very retro way. Belong to a gardening club? The girls'll love this!

we're going hard on seasonality

This is, I'd guess, a gift item for your older female friends who do the relaxed lifestyle and would enjoy learning how to put some intentionality into the day. Rhythms of the seasons always make life feel purposeful, add that sense of being in a world larger and more...complete...than one's private world.

These samples of the design style might tell you what my review can't:

You get the picture...all very focused, true to an aesthetic, and sharply defined by softness and gentle colors.

MIDDLE SPOON, enjoyable novel of throuplehood's pains and problems

MIDDLE SPOON
ALEJANDRO VARELA
Viking Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

One of Electric Literature’s Best Novels of 2025!

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A whipsmart, blazingly funny novel about heartbreak, unconventional love, and the way society could be, from National Book Award finalist Alejandro Varela

The narrator of Middle Spoon appears to be living the dream: He has a doting husband, two precocious children, all the comforts of a quiet bourgeois life—and a sexy younger boyfriend to accompany him to farmers markets and cocktail parties. But when his boyfriend abruptly dumps him, he spirals into heartbreak for the first time and must confront a world still struggling to understand polyamorous relationships. Faced with the judgment of friends and the sting of rejection, he’s left to wonder if sharing a life with both his family and his lover could ever truly be possible.

With a big heart and just the right dose of the anxieties that define the modern era, Middle Spoon skewers the unspoken rules we still live by—from taboos around intimacy to the shortcomings of Oscar season, pop culture, and gluten-free food—offering a surprising perspective on love, loss, and reinvention. Equal parts heart-wrenching and uproariously funny, Middle Spoon is for anyone who has longed, nursed a broken heart, or grappled with love at its messiest.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: You know that break-up letter you never sent? The one you found a while later when you were calmer? You remember how that felt, reading the minute-by-minute lavage of your just-lanced boil of hurt and anger?

Now it's a récit! A really long one, but that's what it is. Everything, not just the narration but every thought, feeling, event, opinion, is entirely the (unnamed, how much more evidence of it being a récit can one have?) narrator's. This is not entirely a good, or a bad, thing. It's fun when the narrator is processing why the departed party of the third part in the dissolved throuple, Ben, would just...dump him. (I have thoughts on this.) It's fun when he processes his rage at and hatred for the same groups I hate and rage over. Gluten-free food IS a satanic scheme to immiserate the planet further.

It is also, as a result of being so much up the narrator's tailpipe, a longer read than one would first think. I took a week to finish it. The intense angst, the ongoing anxiety issues...all are real, honest, told to us with sensitive thought before presenting them; and I want to shake this self-absorbed yutz until his eyes roll in opposite directions for being clueless and insensitive.

Well done, Author Varela! He evokes a very powerful reaction. Like The Town of Babylon, I had to reach into my reactions to fully experience the events portrayed...no surface-skating will do. Effort put in generates pleasure offered up, though. Ben never responds to these emails, written at the behest of the narrator's therapist but never sent; yet his text suggests he's either spoken to Ben or to his therapist to think through what Ben's reasons might be. I get it. It's the narrator's head, it's not meant to be in shared space. It's a récit!

But it's also the narrator. He is very much the guy you know who really doesn't realize how self-absorbed he is. He writes scathing letters to the Oscars showrunners because of things he doesn't like. Okay, he doesn't send them but—dude! I'm aware it's perceived as a man thing to be self-absorbed, but it's really a cultural universal far as I can see; still, what was Ben thinking? (We never find out.)

What else happens as a result of spending over 300pp in the narrator's head is that it feels like a hundred pages shoulda been condensed out of the count. It's a lot. It's fun, and the ending worked for my grinchly heart, but this is a time when a bit less would've said more.

A story I liked, a narrator I didn't much, and an ending I enjoyed. I call it another win for Author Varela.