Join Gayle Wattawa, Acquisitions Editor at Heyday Books, in her enthusiasm for their new title, Edges of Bounty: Adventures in the Edible Valley (978-1-59714-108-6) by Californian William Emery with photographs by Scott Squire. An excerpt from Edges of Bounty: Adventures in the Edible Valley is available for one week via the link in the right column.

How long have you been with the company?
I’ve worked for Heyday for almost five years and loved every minute of it.

What is the book you are most excited by this season, and how did it come to your attention?
I’m most excited by our upcoming Edges of Bounty (November) by William Emery with photographs by Scott Squire. William is actually the former acquisitions editor at Heyday Books and a wonderful friend. He and Scott, an accomplished documentary photographer, traveled all around California’s Central Valley and sought out people who are intimately and passionately involved in the relatively small-scale production of their own food: a beekeeper able to snatch a honeybee from midair to show William and Scott the honey inside, a woman who takes wonderfully bizarre ingredients—beets! avocados! rosemary!—and makes popsicles from them, a crew preparing a sumptuous sopas dinner for a thousand Portuguese immigrants, and a “river rat” and self-proclaimed liar who gets up every morning, puts on his duct-taped-together shoes and opens a trap door on the floor of his house to fish the Delta (where the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers meet)—these are some of the offbeat characters that populate the book and open their worlds to—and share their bounty with—these two strangers. The writing is gentle, humorous, insightful, probing, and deeply poetic, as are the accompanying photographs. And the food that’s discussed! It’s quite the experience, and it perfectly illustrates the kind of work that we do best—exploring all things California, from the obvious stuff like the Gold Rush and Yosemite, to the lives of those working in roadside produce stands.

What can you tell us about the author?
William is one of those authors that’s so fun to describe: he grew up a farm boy in rural Kansas, studied Russian language and literature, worked as a vacuum salesman and an early-morning donut fryer, dabbled in publishing for a couple of years and added some spectacular writers to our list, and then left to pursue his own writing, dividing his time between the Bay Area, where he bartends at a local pub, and Kansas, where he’s growing different kinds of grapes for the establishment of a winery. He’s deeply curious and a great lover of all things food-related. What better person to write a book like this? Scott is a Seattle-based photographer who has traveled extensively, documenting places like Romania and Cairo, tirelessly exploring social justice issues word-wide.

Who will enjoy this book?
Really anyone at all interested in food would enjoy this: anyone who likes going to farmer’s markets, who is curious about food production, who wonders where the ingredients to the dishes served at high end restaurants come from, who loves great travel writing, who fantasizes about making his or her own cheese and honey, who loves the idea of self-sufficiency, who is interested in life in non-coastal California, and also anyone who has never seen what a field of rotting melons looks like (absolutely horrifying but also strangely beautiful).

What can you tell us about the (excerpt) published online?
This excerpt is the first chapter (“The Bearer of Strange Melons”) from the first part (“Farmers”) of Edges of Bounty. William and Scott set off on their vaguely planned journey, meeting up with Mike Madison, a melon farmer engaged in “guerilla agriculture.” Edges of Bounty will be available in November. It’s an 8x10, 224-page trade paperback with 90 full-color photographs and a list price of $24.95.