The Nasty Bits - by Anthony Bourdain (Paperback)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
"The kind of book you read in one sitting." -USA Today
The good, the bad, and the ugly, served up Bourdain-style-with a new edition and foreword by Bill Buford coming in August 2026.

Bestselling chef and Parts Unknown host Anthony Bourdain has never been one to pull punches. In The Nasty Bits, he serves up a well-seasoned hellbroth of candid, often outrageous stories from his worldwide misadventures. Whether scrounging for eel in the backstreets of Hanoi, revealing what you didn't want to know about the more unglamorous aspects of making television, calling for the head of raw food activist Woody Harrelson, or confessing to lobster-killing guilt, Bourdain is as entertaining as ever.

Bringing together the best of his previously uncollected nonfiction-and including new, never-before-published material-The Nasty Bits is a rude, funny, brutal and passionate stew for fans and the uninitiated alike.

Review Quotes

"Bourdain's enthusiasm is so intense that it practically explodes off the page . . . Bourdain shows himself to be one of the country's best food writers. His opinions are as strong as his language, and his tastes as infectious as his joy." --New York Times Book Review

"[Writes] the kind of book you read in one sitting, then rush about annoying your coworkers by declaiming whole passages." --USA Today

"Bourdain's prose is utterly riveting, swaggering with stylish machismo and a precise ear for kitchen patois." --New York Magazine

"Anthony Bourdain's relentless dispatch of food and fame... In The Nasty Bits, Bourdain takes us through the unglamorous aspects of making television, confesses his guilt over killing lobsters, and, famously, holds nothing back." --Marie Claire

About the Author

Chef and author Anthony Bourdain wrote the New York Times bestselling memoirs Kitchen Confidential, Medium Raw, and A Cook's Tour; the collection The Nasty Bits; the novels Bone in the Throat, The Bobby Gold Stories, and Gone Bamboo; the biography Typhoid Mary; and the cookbooks Appetites and Les Halles Cookbook.

Bourdain was the host of the Emmy and Peabody Award-winning docuseries Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown on CNN, and prior to that hosted the Emmy Award-winning No Reservations and The Layover on the Travel Channel and The Taste on ABC.