Books by Michelle Wildgen
You're Not You: A Novel
Michelle Wildgen's debut novel You're Not You is "a complex and satisfying dish: a story of intimate strangers and their impact on each other's lives" (O, The Oprah Magazine).
Now a major motion picture directed by George C. Wolfe, produced by Denise Di Novi and starring Hilary Swank, Josh Duhamel and Emmy Rossum.
Bec is adrift. It's the summer before her junior year in college. She's sleeping with a married professor, losing interest in her classes, and equivocating about her career. She takes a job caring for Kate, a thirty-six-year-old woman who has been immobilized by ALS.
As it turns out, before the disease Kate was a stylish and commanding woman, an advertising executive and an accomplished chef. Now, as she and Bec spend long days together, Bec begins to absorb Kate's sophistication and her sensuality, cooking for her, sharing her secrets, and gradually beginning to live her own life with a boldness informed by Kate's influence. The more intense her commitment to Kate, the further Bec strays from the complacency of her college life. And when Kate's marriage veers into dangerous territory, Bec will have to choose between the values of her old life and the allure of an entirely new one.
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But Not for Long
Hard-shelled, career-minded Greta is the newest and least likely member of a sustainable foods cooperative house in Madison, Wisconsin. Shortly after she joins Karin and Hal in their stately residence near campus, the husband Greta left appears on their porch, drunk, and the reason for her sudden appearance becomes clear. Yet the house members already have plenty to occupy them: a series of summer blackouts has unearthed a disquietude lurking just under the surface for each of the three residents. Gas is dwindling, electricity is unreliable, and the natural world around them is in upheaval. The uneasiness of the environ ment mirrors that of Greta, Hal, and Karin as they each make efforts to resolve their own personal crises. With subtle attunement to the hovering uncertainty affecting each of her characters, Wildgen crafts a story both terrifying and beautiful.
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Bread and Butter
Kitchen Confidential meets Three Junes in this mouthwatering novel about three brothers who run competing restaurants, and the culinary snobbery, staff stealing, and secret affairs that unfold in the back of the house.
Britt and Leo have spent ten years running Winesap, the best restaurant in their small Pennsylvania town. They cater to their loyal customers; they don't sleep with the staff; and business is good, even if their temperamental pastry chef is bored with making the same chocolate cake night after night. But when their younger brother, Harry, opens his own restaurant—a hip little joint serving an aggressive lamb neck dish—Britt and Leo find their own restaurant thrown off-kilter. Britt becomes fascinated by a customer who arrives night after night, each time with a different dinner companion. Their pastry chef, Hector, quits, only to reappear at Harry's restaurant. And Leo finds himself falling for his executive chef-tempted to break the cardinal rule of restaurant ownership. Filled with hilarious insider detail—the one-upmanship of staff meals before the shift begins, the rivalry between bartender and hostess, the seedy bar where waitstaff and chefs go to drink off their workday—Bread and Butter is both an incisive novel of family and a gleeful romp through the inner workings of restaurant kitchens.
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Bread and Butter
Britt and Leo have spent ten years establishing Winesap as the best restaurant in their small Pennsylvania town. They cater to their loyal customers, they don’t sleep with the staff, and business is good, even if their temperamental pastry chef is bored with making the same chocolate cake night after night.
But when their dilettante younger brother, Harry, opens his own restaurant, Britt and Leo find their lives thrown off-kilter. Important employees quit and reappear in Harry’s kitchen, their “classic” menu starts to seem overly safe, and romance threatens to bubble up in the most inconvenient of places. As the brothers struggle to find a new family dynamic, Bread and Butter proves to be a dazzling novel that’s as much about siblinghood as it is about the mysterious world behind the kitchen door.
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Tin House: Spring 2009
by Rob Spillman, Lee Montgomery, Michelle Wildgen, Win McCormack
Product Description
With innovative and colorful design, innovative regular features appearing alongside award-winning fiction and essays, and even recipes and word games,
Tin House has established itself as one of America's most eagerly awaited literary magazines. Departments such as "Lost and Found," "Blithe Spirits," and interviews with some of the culture's most fascinating and talented people have made it a favorite of both readers and critics. Like all issues, there's an overarching theme to this latest one: appetite. Readers are encouraged to bring their appetites for food, sex, drugs, drink, and their hunger for resources, entertainment, gratification, and humiliation. The issue features stories, poems, and essays that fit and sometimes wildly expand upon Webster’s definitions for
appetite as an inherent craving” or any of the instinctive desires necessary to keep up organic life.”
About the Author
Win McCormack is publisher and editor-in-chief of Tin House magazine. He has been in the magazine and book publishing business since 1976. He published Oregon Magazine from 1976 to 1988, and has also been involved in publishing Oregon Business, Oregon Home, Travel Oregon, Military History Quarterly, and Art and Auction magazines, and was involved in the start-up of Mother Jones. He is editor of the books Profiles of Oregon, Great Moments in Oregon History, and The Rajneesh Chronicles, and won a William Allen White award for his investigative coverage of the Rajneesh cult from 1982-1986. He writes on politics and wrote the article "Deconstructing the Election: Foucault, Derrida and GOP strategy," about the presidential election debacle in Florida in 2000, for the Nation. He holds a BA in Government from Harvard College and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Oregon.
Rob Spillman is editor of Tin House magazine and executive editor of Tin House Books. He was previously the monthly book columnist for Details magazine and is a contributor of book reviews and essays to Salon and Bookforum. He has written for the Baltimore Sun, the Boston Review, British GQ, Connoisseur, Details, Nerve, the New York Times Book Review, Premiere, Rolling Stone, Spin, Sports Illustrated, SPY, Vanity Fair, Vogue, and Worth, among other magazines, newspapers, and online magazines. He has also worked for Random House, Vanity Fair, and the New Yorker.
Michelle Wildgen is the author of the novel
You’re Not You (St. Martin’s/Dunne). She is a senior editor at Tin House magazine, where she edits the Readable Feast and Blithe Spirits departments, and an editor at Tin House Books. Her writing has appeared in Best New American Voices 2004, Best Food Writing 2004, the anthology Death by Pad Thai, the journals StoryQuarterly, TriQuarterly, Prairie Schooner, Small Spiral Notebook, and elsewhere.
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Tin House Magazine: Summer Reading 2010: Vol. 11, No. 4
by Rob Spillman, Michelle Wildgen, Win McCormack, Holly MacArthur
Tin House is an award-winning literary magazine that publishes new writers as well as more established voices; essays as well as fiction, poetry, and interviews.
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Tin House: Spring Issue 2008: Off the Grid
by Rob Spillman, Lee Montgomery, Michelle Wildgen, Win McCormack, Holly MacArthur
Beautifully designed and showcasing the best of both well-known writers and rising stars, Tin House has pulled out of the pack to gain a reputation as the most important of contemporary literary magazines. Outsider literature, like outsider art and music, has become increasingly popular in our corporatized, consumerist society. The Spring theme issue of Tin House examines this trend in depth. Subtitled Off the Grid,” this special issue includes powerful work by or about people or institutions that function or don’t out of the bounds of normal” society. Highlighting a unique kind of raw creativity unmediated by formal training or standard narrative strategies, the issue includes a Lost & Found” section that contains brief appreciations of texts written outside of conventional publishing, writings done in prison and mental institutions, exile and in secret,” and in fantastic realms beyond.
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Girl Activist (Generation Girl)
by Susanna Daniel, Michelle Wildgen, Louisa Kamps
Rebel girls, young activists, and other trailblazing tweens and teens will be inspired by the stories of 40 women who have changed the world for the better.
Mini-biographies of unstoppable women activists—from Malala Yousafzai to Susan B. Anthony, Emma Gonzalez to Gloria Steinem, Wangari Maathai to Dolores Huerta—offer windows into what it takes to stand up for a cause, rally others together, and even ignite a movement. The book features activists from around the world and throughout history, spotlighting impressive women who have fought for workers' safety, women's rights, racial equality, animal welfare, democracy, environmental causes, and more. Each story reminds readers that they really can make a difference in the world and inspires today's young activists to stand up for what they believe in.
With a foreword by activist Shannon Watts, founder of Moms Demand Action.
ABOUT THE SERIES
Generation Girl books celebrate game-changing women. They are filled with profiles of amazing women who’ve been there, done that, and learned some valuable lessons along the way. Readers will be inspired by their stories, learn from their struggles and successes, and pick up some useful tools so that they too can change the world. Other Generation Girl books include: Girl CEO and Girl Genius.
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