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Read the opening free
4,250 words · no email, no account
No. 089 · Letters & Ideas · Literature
The Kaysersberg Hotel
a biography of Anthony Michael Bourdain
What the book is
An oyster, pulled cold from the Gironde estuary in the summer of 1966. A nine-year-old boy tips back the shell and swallows. Decades later, he would describe that briny shock as the moment a life began — the first appetite that would outrun every other.
Theo Wickham traces the long arc of that hunger: through the dishpits and brigade kitchens of Provincetown and the Lower East Side, through the heroin years that nearly ended everything, through the broke and middle-aged line cook who, at forty-four, sat down at a borrowed typewriter and wrote the essay that pulled him out. Within a year he was the most famous chef in the world. Within a decade he had eaten in nearly every country on earth, on camera, for an audience that took him to be a kind of secular confessor.
Wickham is interested in what the camera could not hold. The marriages and the daughter. The reading habit. The loyalty to old line cooks and old punk records. The depressions that arrived without warning in beautiful hotel rooms. The friends he made on the road, and the ones he could not save.
Here is a portrait of a man who spent his life looking for the next true thing to put in his mouth, and of the appetite that, in the end, could not be fed.
At a glance
- Subject
- Anthony Michael Bourdain
- Shelf
- Letters & Ideas · Literature
- Written by
- Theo Wickham
- Chapters
- 19 across 203 pages
- Narrated by
- Desmond Vale
- Editions
- Paperback · Hardcover · EPUB · Audiobook
- Authorisation
- Unauthorised — no subject, estate or label had approval over the text.
Contents · 19 chapters
- 01The OysterRead free
- 02Vassar and the CIA3,101 words
- 03The Line4,209 words
- 04Les Halles3,102 words
- 05"Don't Eat Before Reading This"2,935 words
- 06Kitchen Confidential3,240 words
- 07A Cook's Tour3,078 words
- 08No Reservations3,222 words
- 09Parts Unknown3,859 words
- 10The Bun Cha2,974 words
- 11250 Days3,115 words
- 12Medium Raw2,995 words
- 13The Immigrant Kitchen3,321 words
- 14Asia3,083 words
- 15Le Chambard2,854 words
- 16The Grief2,225 words
- 17Unknown Parts3,160 words
- 18The Inheritance3,597 words
- 19Roadrunner3,606 words
The opening chapter is published in full — read it here.
Editions
- Paperback · $19.99
- 6 × 9 in · 203 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · perfect-bound paperback
- Hardcover · $24.99
- 6 × 9 in · 203 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · case laminate on the same text block
- EPUB · $3.99
- EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books
ISBN 979-8-90470-045-4 - Audiobook · $5.99
- Unabridged · measured from the masters · read by Desmond Vale
ISBN 979-8-90623-026-3
The printed edition has no ISBN registered yet. It affects library and retail listing, not your order.
Questions
01Who is The Kaysersberg Hotel about?
Anthony Michael Bourdain. The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case The Kaysersberg Hotel — and the name goes on the line underneath.
02Is this an authorised biography?
No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented.
03Can I read some of it before buying?
Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 4,250 words of the book.
04How long is it?
About 63,500 words, 19 chapters, 203 pages in the paperback.
05What is the printed book like?
6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink, perfect-bound paperback, matte laminate. Every title in the series uses the same specification, so they line up on a shelf.
