Please Welcome 'Lunch from Home' to the World
Congrats! It's a...book!
Someday I’ll figure out how to use Substack for what it’s meant to be used for. Ideas include:
Bespoke Erotica
Nihilistic Reviews of Restaurants
New York Review of Books-Style Reviews of Toys
I’m Fine: One Word Interviews with Men about Emotion
Meticulous Tracking of Where It Went All Wrong For Me, written as a John Le Carré spy novel
Until then, it will continue to just be a newsletter which, far from charging people for, I should probably pay people to read. But if you would be so kind, I do have news to report.
Today marks the publication day of my newest book, Lunch From Home. Lunch From Home is a children’s book from Rise X Penguin Workshop featuring the “lunch box moments” of four kids: Niki, Preeti, Ray and Mina. (A lunch box moment is a moment of peripeteia when a child realizes that his or her lunch, hitherto unremarkable and beloved, can be seen as foreign and yucky to others.) If those names look familiar, it’s because these are real kids who grew up to be real chefs: Niki Russ Federman, Preeti Mistry, Ray Garcia and Mina Park. It’s the first children’s book I’ve written in which I’ve been entrusted with telling the true stories of other people and people, moreover, who I tremendously admire. I was very nervous going into the project and very proud coming out of it.
It’s the perfect book, I think, to pick up as kids return to school cafeterias and lunch rooms — in some cases for the first time in years, in some cases, for the first time ever. Hopefully it imparts empathy, love, a sense of belonging, even more importantly a sense of being seen while not being preachy, precious or demonizing the sandwich-eating yuckers of yum. (The last thing the world needs more of are moralizing screeds.)
All books — all things — are a joint effort but this one even moreso than most. Obviously, it wouldn’t have existed at all without Ray, Preeti, Niki and Mina sharing their stories with me. It wouldn’t have existed so beautifully if not for the wonderful illustrations of Jing Li, an illustrator who, I think, really nailed it. (Her spread of Russ & Daughters is A-1 Primo Frameable Art.) And of course, none of my children’s books would have existed without Cecily Kaiser, my friend and publisher, with me all the way from Can I Eat That? A big thank you to everyone at PRH, including art queen Maria Elias and Gabriella DeGennaro, who recently traded in a Penguin for Big Bird at Sesame Workshop.
So, please, if you would like to, pick up a copy of Lunch from Home. It’s on Amazon, of course, but also on Bookshop.org and, one hopes, on the shelves of your favorite local bookstore. For those of you who like audiobooks, there’s also an audiobook version on Audible narrated by….
Yours truly,
JDS