Camille Aubray’s charming Cooking for Picasso is set in the spring of 1936 in the French Riviera village of Juan-les-Pins, where Pablo Picasso is secretly renting a villa after extricating himself from life in Paris. Seventeen-year-old Ondine Belange is tasked with delivering meals to the celebrated artist from her family’s café, where she cooks with her mother. Her adventures in self-discovery as a woman and a chef hit their stride as a result of this chance encounter. Decades later, Ondine’s American granddaughter Celine follows the trail of her mother’s mysterious stories to discover there may be a family treasure buried in years of art, food and intrigue. (Ballantine Books, Aug. 9)
Tama Janowitz’s collection of short stories, Slaves of New York, published in 1986 with a nod from Warhol on the back cover, captured the ’80s New York City art scene in all its eccentricities. Janowitz is to Gen X what Lena Dunham is to millennials now. In her first memoir, Scream: A Memoir of Glamour and Dysfunction, Janowitz turns her razor-sharp insight on her own life. She recalls the literary world of the ’80s in which she was immersed and forges ahead to the quirks of middle age in a small upstate New York town where a teenage daughter and mother with dementia play central roles. (Dey Street Books, Aug. 9)