Latest news with #MichelleHuneven
Los Angeles Times
3 days ago
- General
- Los Angeles Times
When cooks lose their dream kitchens
Their custom-built homes, each with kitchens tailored for their specific cooking needs, burned in the Eaton Fire. But through the loss, cookbook author Molly Baz and novelist/food writer Michelle Huneven have found renewed appreciation for friends and family.
Los Angeles Times
5 days ago
- Health
- Los Angeles Times
Easy homemade hash to make your dog smile
When I rescued Tatty Jane from the Pasadena Humane Society, she was a super skinny, long-legged little thing with the black and gray coloring and sweetness of a poodle and the long, spindly legs and energy of an Italian greyhound. At 16 pounds, she had sparse curly hair with a hilarious white tuft that hovered atop her head like a plume of smoke. She was soulful, elegant, loving and clearly puppyish, but her teeth were all brown — so discolored, in fact, that the staff technicians put her age at 4 years old. After examining her, my vet said she was probably only 1 year old — and her brown teeth were most likely the result of a bad diet. So Tatty Jane had her teeth cleaned, and I determined that she would never again suffer from a bad diet. Of course, I wondered what she was fed to make her teeth so brown with plaque at such a tender age — after all, I have seen lean scavenger dogs in developing countries with beautiful white teeth. Starch and sugars, I learned, are the main causes of plaque, which could mean that little Tatty Jane was fed a steady diet of sugar-laden kibble — or doughnuts. I did a deep dive into researching homemade dog foods. Who knew that cranberries, in small doses, are good for dogs? They're full of fiber and antioxidants and help to keep a dog's urinary tract healthy. I was also delighted to learn that I could bake and grind our chickens' organic eggshells into calcium powder, needed for a dog's bone health. However, I soon concluded that, short of accumulating a whole pharmacy of supplements, I couldn't guarantee that Tatty Jane could get all recommended trace vitamins and minerals. So I've compromised. I make her a well-balanced homemade dog food and serve it with a topping of vet-approved kibble. So far, so good. Tatty Jane at 7 years old is frisky, at a perfect weight, with a bright white smile. Michelle Huneven is a Los Angeles-based novelist and food writer.
CBS News
20-07-2025
- Entertainment
- CBS News
The Book Report: Ron Charles on new summer reads (July 20)
By Washington Post book critic Ron Charles As summer revs up, here are three cool new novels, and a work of history that's wilder than fiction! Lucas Schaefer's debut novel, "The Slip," takes place in and around a boxing gym in Austin, Texas, where everybody is trying to become somebody different. Following two White teenagers – one obsessed with his African American mentor, the other discovering their transgender identity – this sweaty, comic masterpiece jumps in the ring with our most pressing social debates, and lands a knockoutv . Read an excerpt: "The Slip" by Lucas Schaefer "The Slip" by Lucas Schaefer (Simon & Schuster), in Hardcover, eBook and Audio formats, available via Amazon, Barnes & Noble and At the start of Michelle Huneven's "Bug Hollow," the sweetest, smartest son any parents could ask for has just graduated from high school and headed off with his friends for a weeklong road trip. But what starts as a domestic comedy soon becomes a tragedy, and Huneven turns her gracious eye to the way families carry on, even when shattered, and thrive. Read an excerpt: "Bug Hollow" by Michelle Huneven "Bug Hollow" by Michelle Huneven (Penguin Press), in Hardcover, eBook and Audio formats, available via Amazon, Barnes & Noble and In "The Satisfaction Cafe," a gently witty new novel by Kathy Wang, a woman from Taiwan makes her way in America with patience and determination. For decades, she struggles to fit in with a complicated, wealthy family, until she can finally create a little safe space where people can find what they really want: just to be heard. Read an excerpt: "The Satisfaction Café" by Kathy Wang "The Satisfaction Café" by Kathy Wang (Scribner), in Hardcover, eBook and Audio formats, available via Amazon, Barnes & Noble and A century ago, Western scientists knew almost nothing about giant pandas. Now, in a thrilling work of history, Nathalia Holt follows Teddy Roosevelt's sons, Ted and Kermit, as they set out with a team to China to track down these black-and-white creatures. How would the brothers survive this treacherous expedition? And what would the implications be for these gentle animals? Holt explores these fascinating questions and others in "The Beast in the Clouds." Read an excerpt: "The Beast in the Clouds" by Nathalia Holt "The Beast in the Clouds: The Roosevelt Brothers' Deadly Quest to Find the Mythical Giant Panda" by Nathalia Holt (Atria/One Signal), in Hardcover, eBook and Audio formats, available via Amazon, Barnes & Noble and That's it for the Book Report. For these and other suggestions about what to read this summer, talk with your local bookseller or librarian. I'm Ron Charles. Until next time, read on! For more info: Produced by Robin Sanders. Editor: Joseph Frandino. For more reading recommendations, check out these previous Book Report features from Ron Charles:
CBS News
20-07-2025
- Entertainment
- CBS News
Book excerpt: "Bug Hollow" by Michelle Huneven
We may receive an affiliate commission from anything you buy from this article. A summer lark turns tragic, and a shattered family must carry on, in "Bug Hollow" (Penguin Press), the latest novel by Michelle Huneven, the author of "Round Rock" and "Blame." Read an excerpt below. "Bug Hollow" by Michelle Huneven Prefer to listen? Audible has a 30-day free trial available right now. The summer when Sally Samuelson was eight, her brother Ellis graduated from high school and a few days later, he and his best friends, Heck Stevens and Ben Klosterman, drove up the coast in Heck's '64 Rambler American. They promised to be back in a week. Sally was the only one who went outside to see them off. She waved a dishrag and dabbed at pretend tears, then one or two real ones. "Bye, little Pips!" Ellis yelled from the back seat—he called her Pipsqueak, with variations. "See you in the funny papers!" Ellis had thick, curly yellow hair long enough to tuck behind his ears and he wore a baseball cap to keep it there. He'd lately grown incredibly tall and skinny; his pants rode so low on his hip bones, they seemed about to slip off. Sally's sister, Katie, who was fourteen, called him El Greck after they saw El Greco's Christ on the Cross at the Getty; even their parents confirmed the resemblance. His last two years in high school, Ellis had a girlfriend named Carla, who was also tall and blond and liked to show off her stomach. In front of Ellis, she would say hi to Sally. Sometimes Ellis would come into Sally's room when she was drawing on the floor; he'd sit by her and talk about his last baseball game or his weird calculus teacher, and sometimes he'd wonder how much he liked Carla and if she was even nice. Sally somehow knew not to say what she thought. Anyway, Ellis spent most of his time playing ball with Ben and Heck. For their trip, they packed Heck's old Rambler with sleeping bags, the small smelly tent the Samuelson kids used on camping trips, and a cooler full of sodas. After ten days, when Ellis hadn't come back, Heck showed up at the Samuelsons' front door with the tent. Sally answered his knock. "Ellis decided to stay away for a few more days," he said. "Stay where?" Sally's mother said from behind her. "With some girl he met," said Heck. "Not sure where, exactly." "Well, where did they meet?" "On a beach around Santa Cruz." That was all her mother could get out of Heck. "Some girl has snagged Ellis," she told Sally's father when he came home from work. "Good for her," he said. "How can you say that, Phil?" her mother cried. "El's such an innocent. What if she's trouble?" Hinky, their Manchester terrier, cocked her head at one parent, then the other; she followed conversations—they'd tested her by standing in a circle and tossing the conversation back and forth. Hinky shifted her attention to each speaker in turn. "What if he doesn't come back in time for his job?" Ellis was supposed to be a counselor at the day camp he'd attended since first grade. "Let's worry about that when the time comes," Sally's father said. The camp's start date came and went. An excerpt from "Bug Hollow," published by Penguin Press, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2025 by Michelle Huneven. Reproduced with permission. Get the book here: "Bug Hollow" by Michelle Huneven Buy locally from For more info:
New York Times
16-06-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
The Memory of a Teenage Golden Child Ripples Across Generations
BUG HOLLOW, by Michelle Huneven Entering the lives of the Samuelson family in 1970s Altadena, Calif., feels like getting into a warm bath. Michelle Huneven's sixth novel, 'Bug Hollow,' instantly seduces even the most news-addled reader with its lovely, lucid prose, its spot-on period details (those pay phones!) and superb gift for description — of a sprawling cast led by a supportive engineer father, Phil, and a prickly elementary-school teacher mother, Sibyl; and especially of California's many wildly differing landscapes. The Samuelsons' simple suburban world turns upside down when 17-year-old Ellis, the sunny eldest child of three, goes camping with his friends outside Santa Cruz and doesn't bother to come back. 'Some girl has snagged Ellis,' Sibyl frets. 'Good for her,' Phil says, and the marital tension is established: Dad is chill and Mom is a control freak. Days turn into weeks with little contact from Ellis and a lot of panicking from Sibyl (is her son dropping out of college before he's even begun?), until the family tracks him to a rundown house in the Santa Cruz Mountains called Bug Hollow, the part commune, part crash pad where Ellis has moved in with Julia, an artsy, beautiful girl he met on the beach. The young couple's joy brings back all the feels, as the kids say today — the aha-ness of falling in love for the first time — but Sibyl isn't having any of it, and brings her boy home to spend his last pre-college week with his family. As Ellis's youngest sister, Sally, the precocious and dryly hilarious narrator of the first chapter, puts it: 'Julia made a little speech about how she didn't want our parents to be mad at her because she and Ellis truly loved one another and would be together forever, and she hoped to love and be loved by his family, too.' My eyes filled. It is not a spoiler to reveal that by Page 21, Ellis is dead: accidentally drowned in a quarry five days into his freshman year at Ole Miss. Phil goes down to Mississippi and returns with 'a box wrapped in shiny ivory paper and tied with a thick purple ribbon,' Sally narrates, thinking 'it was probably candy, and for everyone, another big assortment of chocolates he'd bought at the airport.' In fact, it is Ellis's remains. The lack of sentimentality surrounding this death is as shocking to the reader as it is to this repressed and soon-to-be fractured family who will carry this dead child along with them emotionally for generations. The novel evolves from its innocent opening into something more intriguing. Nothing (aside from the book jacket summary) prepares the reader for the five-decade international saga that unfolds in 10 discrete but interwoven chapters, each narrated by a different member of the Samuelson family or its widening circle. Formally, the result is something like a narrative love child of Alice Munro's novelistic short stories and Elizabeth Strout's novels of interconnected short stories. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
