New Cookbooks for the School Year

I love a good mug and the caption says it all. $9

We’re all busy, so why not find a faster way to cook? Homemade-Ish gives readers over 100 recipes that use store-bought shortcuts to make everything from dinner to dessert a lot easier to prepare.

The queen of the Bento Box has now given readers over 60 recipes to help you jazz up your kids’ (or your own!) lunch boxes. These adorable and delicious lunches are too cute and tasty to pass up.

I first read Roxane Gay after her essay collection Bad Feminist hit shelves. Since then, Gay has written essays, celebrity profiles, and advice columns. Opinions includes the best of Gay’s writing, giving readers a little snapshots of Gay’s life over the course of the last decade. There’s a profile of Janelle Monáe describing how Afrofuturism influenced their album Dirty Computer. Gay writes about #MeToo from her perspective as a survivor of sexual assault and pushes it further, discussing what it’s like to be well-known for being a survivor of sexual violence. In other less-serious pieces, Gay includes her delightful sense of humor and a practical take on what’s going on in the world.

Sometimes you read a writer and you find yourself mesmerized by their prose, wondering how on Earth they do it. For me, Jenn Shapland is one of those writers. In her essay collection, Jenn has several long pieces about her experience traveling alone and the role that clothes have played throughout her life. Within each of these, she connects her personal experiences to ideas in wider society. For example, in her essays about clothes, she ties together ideas of consumerism and how clothes help us perform societal expectations. I was struck over and over again with how Shapland’s work contains multiple layers of depth and meaning. Her prose feels so intentional, as if she’s already thought of and discarded every other possible way of expressing what she wants to say.