Reflecting on the moment, Bourdain beamed. “From the second she said she’d been invited to present an award, I knew it would be a nuclear bomb,” he said. “I was so proud of her. It was absolutely fearless to walk right into the lion’s den and say what she said, the way she said it. It was an incredibly powerful moment, I thought. I am honored to know someone who has the strength and fearlessness to do something like that.”
It doesn’t take much to assert that Bourdain and Argento form a natural symbiosis: both radiate the aura of weathered cultural warriors, navigating a landscape that doesn’t always know quite where to place them, even as it continues to respond to their moves. Considering the potential for this power couple leads one to the natural conclusion that the world needs less Kimye and more Bargento. “She listens to my advice and frequently if not most of the time, rejects it,” said Bourdain, who released a throaty laugh that almost sounded like the tough guy might be welling up. “That is something that Asia cannot help but do,” he said. “She is brutally honest about herself and anything, and it’s a great quality.”
ANTHONY BOURDAIN was born on June 25, 1956 in New York City, but raised in the nearby suburb of Leonia, New Jersey. His mother Gladys was a copy editor at The New York Times, and his father Pierre was an executive in the classical music recording industry. Bourdain said the spark for his culinary career came when, as a boy, he had his first oyster, while on a trip to France visiting his father’s family. He would subsequently drop out of Vassar College to work in seafood restaurants in Provincetown, Massachusetts, then move on to attend the prestigious Culinary Institute of America. From there he worked at numerous restaurants in New York City, until landing at Brasserie Les Halles, where he rose to become executive chef. Later in life Bourdain was open about his extensive drug usage during these years. In the early 1990s, he published a couple of unsuccessful detective novels, but in 1999 he published an essay about restaurant life in the New Yorker magazine (called “Don’t Eat Until You Read This”) that would change his life. When an expanded version of the essay was published as a book called Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly, it became an immediate bestseller. Courted by producers to turn the book into a television show, Bourdain would go on to essentially create the food-travel show genre, hosting his own hugely popular programs: A Cook’s Tour; No Reservations; and Parts Unknown. On June 8, 2018, Bourdain was on location filming an episode of Parts Unknown in Kaysersberg, France, when he was found dead in his hotel room, an apparent suicide.
HELEN ROSNER is the food correspondent for The New Yorker magazine, where she writes about gastronomic culture and history. Formerly, she was a cookbook editor at Workman Publishing; restaurant editor at New York magazine; executive editor at Eater.com; and executive digital editor at Saveur magazine. In 2016, she won the James Beard Foundation Journalism Award for her essay, “On Chicken Tenders.”
JESSICA BENNETT is the former assistant editor of Rain Taxi Review of Books and founding editor of Beacon Broadside. She has written criticism, essays and interviews for Publishers Weekly, the Ruminator Review, and others.
JILL DUPLIEX is an Australian chef, critic, and food writer who is the author of numerous cookbooks. After a long stint as food editor of The Times (of London), she returned to Sydney, where she is a frequent guest on TV and radio, and writes regularly for leading publications including the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON is an astrophysicist who is the director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York. He has served on government commissions related to the aerospace industry and space travel, and written for numerous popular publications on those issues. Tyson has hosted several of his own television and radio programs on PBS and National Geographic.
JOHN W. LITTLE is the creator of Blogs of War and the host of the Covert Contact national security podcast. His analysis and reporting related to encryption and intelligence collection has received global coverage from major news organizations, and he is a 2017 Institute for the Future fellow.
PETER ARMSTRONG is a long-time CBC News journalist, having served in many capacities there, including as Jerusalem bureau chief, anchor of CBC Radio’s World Report, and as host of the business news series on CBC TV, On the Money.
TREVOR NOAH is a South African comedian and actor who is host of the satirical news television program The Daily Show. His 2016 autobiography, Born a Crime, was a critically acclaimed bestseller.
ERIC KOHN is executive editor and chief critic for Indiewire. His work has also appeared The New York Times, New York magazine, Variety, Filmmaker, and elsewhere.
THE LAST INTERVIEW SERIES
KURT VONNEGUT: THE LAST INTERVIEW
“I think it can be tremendously refreshing if a creator of literature has something on his mind other than the history of literature so far. Literature should not disappear up its own asshole, so to speak.”
$15.95 / $17.95 CAN
978-1-61219-090-7
ebook: 978-1-61219-091-4
JACQUES DERRIDA: THE LAST INTERVIEW LEARNING TO LIVE FINALLY
“I am at war with myself, it’s true, you couldn’t possibly know to what extent…I say contradictory things that are, we might say, in real tension; they are what construct me, make me live, and will make me die.”
translated by PASCAL-ANNE BRAULT and MICHAEL NAAS
$15.95 / $17.95 CAN
978-1-61219-094-5
ebook: 978-1-61219-032-7
ROBERTO BOLAÑO: THE LAST INTERVIEW
“Posthumous: It sounds like the name of a Roman gladiator, an unconquered gladiator. At least that’s what poor Posthumous would like to believe. It gives him courage.”
translated by SYBIL PEREZ and others
$15.95 / $17.95 CAN
978-1-61219-095-2
ebook: 978-1-61219-033-4
JORGE LUIS BORGES: THE LAST INTERVIEW
“Believe me: the benefits of blindness have been greatly exaggerated. If I could see, I would never leave the house, I’d stay indoors reading the many books that surround me.”
translated by KIT MAUDE
$15.95 / $15.95 CAN
978-1-61219-204-8
ebook: 978-1-61219-205-5
HANNAH ARENDT: THE LAST INTERVIEW
“There are no dangerous thoughts for the simple reason that thinking itself is such a dangerous enterprise.”
$15.95 / $15.95 CAN
978-1-61219-311-3
ebook: 978-1-61219-312-0
RAY BRADBURY: THE LAST INTERVIEW
“You don’t have to destroy books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”
$15.95 / $15.95 CAN
978-1-61219-421-9
ebook: 978-1-61219-422-6
JAMES BALDWIN: THE LAST INTERVIEW
“You don’t realize that you’re intelligent until it gets you into trouble.”
$15.95 / $15.95 CAN
978-1-61219-400-4
ebook: 978-1-61219-401-1
GABRIEL GÁRCIA MÁRQUEZ: THE LAST INTERVIEW
“The only thing the Nobel Prize is good for is not having to wait in line.”
$15.95 / $15.95 CAN
978-1-61219-480-6
ebook: 978-1-61219-481-3
LOU REED: THE LAST INTERVIEW
“Hubert Selby. William Burroughs. Allen Ginsberg. Delmore Schwartz…I thought if you could do what those writers did and put it to drums and guitar, you’d have the greatest thing on earth.”
$15.95 / $15.95 CAN
978-1-61219-478-3
ebook: 978-1-61219-479-0
ERNEST HEMINGWAY: THE LAST INTERVIEW
“The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof shit detector.”
$15.95 / $20.95 CAN
978-1-61219-522-3
ebook: 978-1-61219-523-0
PHILIP K. DICK: THE LAST INTERVIEW
&nb
sp; “The basic thing is, how frightened are you of chaos? And how happy are you with order?”
$15.95 / $20.95 CAN
978-1-61219-526-1
ebook: 978-1-61219-527-8
NORA EPHRON: THE LAST INTERVIEW
“You better make them care about what you think. It had better be quirky or perverse or thoughtful enough so that you hit some chord in them. Otherwise, it doesn’t work.”
$15.95 / $20.95 CAN
978-1-61219-524-7
ebook: 978-1-61219-525-4
JANE JACOBS: THE LAST INTERVIEW
“I would like it to be understood that all our human economic achievements have been done by ordinary people, not by exceptionally educated people, or by elites, or by supernatural forces.”
$15.95 / $20.95 CAN
978-1-61219-534-6
ebook: 978-1-61219-535-3
DAVID BOWIE: THE LAST INTERVIEW
“I have no time for glamour. It seems a ridiculous thing to strive for…A clean pair of shoes should serve quite well.”
$16.99 / $22.99 CAN
978-1-61219-575-9
ebook: 978-1-61219-576-6
MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.: THE LAST INTERVIEW
“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
$15.99 / $21.99 CAN
978-1-61219-616-9
ebook: 978-1-61219-617-6
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: THE LAST INTERVIEW
“If someone says I’m doing this out of faith, I say, Why don’t you do it out of conviction?”
$15.99 / $20.99 CAN
978-1-61219-672-5
ebook: 978-1-61219-673-2
HUNTER S. THOMPSON: THE LAST INTERVIEW
“I feel in the mood to write a long weird story—a tale so strange and terrible that it will change the brain of the normal reader forever.”
$15.99 / $20.99 CAN
978-1-61219-693-0
ebook: 978-1-61219-694-7
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE: THE LAST INTERVIEW AND OTHER CONVERSATIONS
“I’m a typical American. Half of me is dying to give myself away, and the other half is continually rebelling.”
$16.99 / 21.99 CAN
978-1-61219-741-8
ebook: 978-1-61219-742-5
KATHY ACKER: THE LAST INTERVIEW AND OTHER CONVERSATIONS
“To my mind I was in a little cage in the zoo that instead of ‘monkey’ said ‘female American radical.’ ”
$15.99 / $20.99 CAN
978-1-61219-731-9
ebook: 978-1-61219-732-6
PRINCE: THE LAST INTERVIEW AND OTHER CONVERSATIONS
“That’s what you want. Transcendence.
When that happens—oh, boy.”
$16.99 / $22.99 CAN
978-1-61219-745-6
ebook: 978-1-61219-746-3
JULIA CHILD: THE LAST INTERVIEW AND OTHER CONVERSATIONS
“I’m not a chef, I’m a teacher and a cook.”
$16.99 / $22.99 CAN
978-1-61219-733-3
ebook: 978-1-61219-734-0
URSULA K. LE GUIN: THE LAST INTERVIEW AND OTHER CONVERSATIONS
“Resistance and change often begin in art.
Very often in our art, the art of words.”
$16.99 / $21.99 CAN
978-1-61219-779-1
ebook: 978-1-61219-780-7
Anthony Bourdain: The Last Interview Page 9