The White Dinner is a love poem to friendship, joy, elegance, and the monuments of Paris. And each year it is an unforgettable summer night, especially for Jean-Philippe Dumas, a longtime participant, and the three couples he's carefully selected to attend this exclusive and cherished event. Interweaving the stories of seven individuals, lives will be forever changed on the eve of one such White Dinner; a night that will lead to new friendships, new...

The Cohens are wildly impractical intellectuals: academics, activists, and artists. The Barlows are Wall Street Journal-reading lawyers, steeped in trusts and copyrights, golf and tennis. Tonight, the evening before the wedding that is supposed to unite them in marriage, they will attempt to set aside their differences over dinner in the garden. Up and down the table unions are formed and dissolve. In the surrounding forest, mischief will lead to...

The mysterious envelope arrives on Nick Cominsky's desk amid a stack of credit card applications and business-related junk mail. Although his seventy-hour workweek has already eaten into his limited family time, Nick can't pass up the opportunity to see what kind of plot his colleagues have hatched. The normally confident, cynical Nick soon finds himself thrown off-balance, drawn into an intriguing conversation with a baffling man who appears to be...

At a dinner party in the posh London suburb of Greenwich, Miles Garth suddenly leaves the table midway through the meal, locks himself in an upstairs room, and refuses to leave. An eclectic group of neighbors and friends slowly gathers around the house, and Miles's story is told from the points of view of four of them: Anna, a woman in her forties; Mark, a man in his sixties; May, a woman in her eighties; and a ten-year-old named Brooke. The thing...

"In June 1972, John Creighton determines to build his wife Joan a kitchen table. His largest project to date had been picture frames but he promises to have the table ready for Thanksgiving dinner. Inspired to put something delicious on the table, Joan turns to her mother's recipes she had given to Joan when she and John married. In June 2012, Lauren Mabrey discovers she's pregnant. Gloria, Miriam, and the rest of her friends at Glory's Place begin...

When her boyfriend relationship collapses, Hannah Sugarman seizes the chance to do what she's always loved and launches an underground supper club out of her new landlord's town house. Though her delicious dishes become the talk of the town, Hannah faces various romantic prospects that leave her guessing and confused, parents who don't support cooking as a career, and her own fears of taking a risk and charting her own path.

Val Deniston certainly has her plate full running a café, dabbling with recipes, and helping her grandfather prepare for the town's upcoming tri-centennial celebration, but she's grown fond of her new life in the Chesapeake Bay town of Bayport. . . So when Val is asked to reclaim her old position as a cookbook publicist in New York City, she puts off her decision in order to help her grandfather perfect his chocolate fondue for the weekend festivity's...

"Alain Bonnard, the owner of a small art cinema in Paris, is a dyed-in-the-wool nostalgic ... He wants to show films that create dreams, and he likes most of the people that come to his cinema. Particularly the enchanting, shy woman in the red coat who turns up every Wednesday in row 17 ... One evening, Alain plucks up courage and invites the unknown beauty to dinner. The most tender of love stories is just getting under way when something incredible...

"Stories from the Kitchen is a one-of-a-kind anthology of classic tales showcasing the culinary arts, from across the centuries and around the world. Here is a mouthwatering smorgasbord of stories with food in the starring role, by a range of masters of fiction--from Dickens and Chekhov to Isaac Bashevis Singer, from Shirley Jackson to Jim Crace and Amy Tan. These richly varied selections offer tastes as decadent as caviar and as humble as cherry...