The International Association of Culinary Professionals has announced that One Thousand Vines: A New Way to Understand Wine by Pascaline Lepeltier is a finalist for an IACP Award in the “Reference and Technical” category. Recognizing excellence in cookbooks, digital media, food writing, photography, and styling in the culinary industry, the IACP Awards are among the most prestigious and coveted in the field, selecting honorees through rigorous technical testing while adhering to high ethical standards. The winners will be announced November 5 at a ceremony in Brooklyn, New York.
Cocktail Codex Translation Rights Sold in Brazil
Editora Senac in São Paulo has acquired the right to publish a Portuguese edition of Cocktail Codex in Brazil, the eighth foreign territory where translation rights for the book have been claimed. Published by Ten Speed Press with over 250,000 copies sold in English alone, the James Beard 2019 Book of the Year and Spirited Award Winner at the 2019 Tales of the Cocktail festival has already had translation rights sold in Italian (Readrink), Russian (Eksmo), simplified Chinese (Beijing Science & Technology Publishing), traditional Chinese (Cite), French (Éditions First), Korean (Sigongsa), and Spanish (Alfaomega).
Yia Vang Appears in The New York Times
To answer the question “What Is Great Hmong Food?”, last week The New York Times looked to Yia Vang, whose Minneapolis restaurant Vinai was recently named to Time magazine’s World’s Greatest Places of 2025 list after becoming a semifinalist for the year’s James Beard Award’s Best New Restaurant. Vang later won a Beard Media Award for his “Relish” television program on PBS, currently in the middle of its sixth season.
Update, August 26, 2025: The New York Times returned to Minneapolis for a review of Vinai by chief restaurant critic Tejal Rao.
Translation Rights Sold for Canticle
Italian publisher Astoria/Mauri Spagnol has acquired translation rights to Janet Rich Edwards’s Canticle, which is due out from Spiegel & Grau in the United States this December. In the meantime, the novel has been generating plenty of advanced praise from authors such as The Mercies’s Kiran Millwood Hargrave (“Compelling, lyrical, and fresh”), Culpability’s Bruce Holsinger (“a suspenseful page-turner that is also rigorously researched and utterly convincing—a true gem of historical fiction”), and The Birth of Venus’s Sarah Dunant (“a brave, intense novel about the mystical nature of a young woman’s faith and how easily it can find itself in opposition to politics and entrenched power”), among others.
Update, August 28, 2025: French publisher Editions Philippe Rey has acquired translation rights for Canticle.
Pooja Bavishi's MALAI Published by Weldon Owen
Pooja Bavishi, founder and CEO of the artisanal ice cream company Malai, has released a new cookbook of the same name, containing 100 recipes featuring the vibrant flavors of South Asian cuisine. Showcasing such enticing ingredients as cardamom, rose, almond, pepper, mango, chai, orange, lychee, fennel, and saffron, this first-of-its-kind cookbook describes how to prepare ice cream bars, pies, cakes, cookies, and more, all while sharing the personal stories that have shaped Bavishi on a highly fulfilling culinary journey (which she described on a recent episode of NPR’s “Morning Edition”).
Ozoz Sokoh’s CHOP CHOP Published by Artisan and Appetite Canada
Culinary anthropologist and creator of the Kitchen Butterfly website Ozoz Sokoh has published her first cookbook, CHOP CHOP, released in the U.S. by Artisan and in Canada by Appetite, an imprint of Random House Canada. A Warri native and Ontario resident, Sokoh has put together a colorful compendium celebrating classic Nigerian cuisine from all six of the country’s primary regions. She recently discussed this rich diversity on an episode of WNYC’s “The Splendid Table” while earning praise from the Los Angeles Times (“Pages devoted to plantains, grilled meats, leaf wraps, steamed puddings and Nigerian breakfasts are interspersed with historical and cultural context for deeper understanding beyond a delicious meal”) and the Toronto Star (“Both a cookbook and culinary textbook — crafted by a lifelong home cook tracing the roots and stories behind the dishes she makes”), among others.
Molly Yeh’s Sweet Farm! Published by HarperCollins
Molly Yeh kicked off the release of Sweet Farm! last week with national TV appearances on “Today” and “The Drew Barrymore Show.” Her new cookbook showcases more than 100 tantalizing recipes with flavors drawn from her Asian and Jewish backgrounds, as well as food traditions of the local community on the Minnesota / North Dakota border where her husband’s family has been growing sugar beets since the 1930s. Named by Eater as one of The Best Cookbooks of Spring 2025, it prompted Publishers Weekly to proclaim that “Yeh proves a fearless, out-of-the-box baker with a breezy voice. Home cooks who are looking to get creative should check this out.”
Lídia Jorge’s Mercy Sells to Archipelago
Lídia Jorge’s Mercy, translated by Margaret Jull Costa, has sold to Archipelago Books. Originally published in Portuguese as Misericórdia by Dom Quixote in 2022, the novel has also been published in Spanish and French, and has won several awards including the Grand Prize for Fiction from the Associação Portuguesa de Escritores (Portuguese Writers Association), the Urbano Tavares Rodrigues Literary Prize, and the Prix Médicis Étranger (France’s most prestigious prize for foreign literature). Intended as a memorial to elderly people ignored at the end of their lives, Jorge wrote the novel at the behest of her late mother, who passed away in a nursing home in southern Portugal early in the COVID-19 pandemic.
Kyle Paoletta’s American Oasis Published to National Acclaim
Released January 14, Kyle Paoletta’s new book from Pantheon, American Oasis: Finding the Future in the Cities of the Southwest, has been racking up accolades, including glowing reviews in the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Associated Press, Kirkus, the Chicago Review of Books, Publishers Weekly, and other media outlets following advanced praise from Beto O’Rourke, Rivka Galchen, Hampton Sides, Ross Andersen, Jay Caspian Kang, and Andy Borowitz, who wrote, “Kyle Paoletta has written a phenomenal book. American Oasis is much more than a sweeping and brilliant account of the Southwest. It’s essential reading about our past, present, and — if we have one — future.”
Voracious Acquires Paola Briseño González’s Pacífico in Auction
Paola Briseño González’s first cookbook, Pacífico: Bright Recipes from Vallarta and the Mexican Coast, has sold at auction in a six-figure deal to Raquel Pelzel in one of her first acquisitions at Voracious. Born in Puerto Vallarta, Briseño González will bring her extensive expertise — as a recipe developer, Los Angeles Times and New York Times contributor, and author of the Substack newsletter Fresca — to the new cookbook, which will feature more than 100 dishes highlighting the ingredients, artisans, and cultural traditions of the unique tropical region of the Pacific Coast of Mexico.