Reseña de New York Review of Books

Sales Spike It's probably no surprise that for the second week in a row, "Kitchen Confidential" - Anthony Bourdain's profane, raunchy, freewheeling memoir about the inner workings of a restaurant kitchen - tops two of our nonfiction best-seller lists: paperback and combined e-book & print. When "Kitchen Confidential" was first published 18 years ago, The Times gave it a rave, saying that "Bourdain gleefully rips through the scenery to reveal private backstage horrors little dreamed of by the trusting public" and describing his style as a mishmash of Hunter S. Thompson, Iggy Pop and Jonathan Swift. Bourdain explained, in frankly unappetizing detail, why diners should never order fish on Monday or ask for well-done meat, and he called the re-use of bread an "industry-wide practice," adding, "once in a while some tubercular hillbilly has been coughing and spraying in the general direction of that bread basket." Though "Kitchen Confidential" (aptly subtitled "Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly") has never gone out of print, demand for it soared after Bourdain's suicide in France on June 8; many bookstores sold out, causing Bourdain's paperback publisher, Ecco, to scramble a bit. "We actually keep quite a bit of stock of this title on hand because it's always been a consistent seller for us week in and week out," Ecco's associate publisher, Miriam Parker, says. "Our inventory team also reacted swiftly and ordered a large reprint immediately upon the unexpected and heartbreaking news." Novel Reading Given the glut of beach reads published every summer, the fiction list is usually in flux by late June. This week, though, it remains largely unchanged, with Bill Clinton and James Patterson's thriller, "The President Is Missing," still lodged at No. 1 - where Knopf and Little, Brown fervently hope it stays, given the size of the advance they shelled out. And Stephen King's "The Outsider" hasn't budged from No. 2. Further down, though, things get more interesting. Christie Golden's "Before the Storm" - a companion to the World of Warcraft videogame - debuts at No. 9. (On Twitter, Golden recently wrote, "Change happens in fandoms. You may not like it. That's your right. But others may love it. Their opinion is just as valid as yours. Let people enjoy things!") Fatima Farheen Mirza's "A Place for Us," the buzzy first novel from Sarah Jessica Parker's eponymous imprint at Hogarth, lands at No. 13; Parker has gotten behind the book in a big way on Instagram. Bourdain exposed 'private backstage horrors' of the restaurant kitchen.