In Person Author Talk: Steve Hoffman, A Season for That

Book Larder is excited to welcome Steve Hoffman on Thursday, September 19th to celebrate his book, A Season for That: Lost and Found in the Other Southern France. Steve will be in conversation with Seattle-based food writer, radio personality and public speaker Nancy Leson.

Reservations are non-refundable and can include a signed copy of the $30 book. Applicable sales tax and a $0.75 transaction fee are also included. Can't attend but still want a signed book? Order here for shipping or in-store pickup.

About the Book:  Steve Hoffman is a perfectly comfortable middle-aged Minnesotan man who has always been desperately, pretentiously in love with France, more specifically with the idea of France. To follow that love, he and his family move, nearly at random, to a small, rural, scratchy-hot village in the south of the country, and he immediately thinks he's made a terrible mistake. Life here is not holding your cigarette chest-high while walking to the cafe and pulling off the trick of pretending to be French, it's getting into fights with your wife because you won't break character and introduce your very American family to the locals, who can smell you and your perfect city-French from a mile away.

But through cooking what the local grocer tells him to cook, he feels more of this place. A neighbor leads him into the world of winemaking, where he learns not as a pedantic oenophile, but bodily, as a grape picker and winemaker's apprentice. Along the way, he lets go of the abstract ideas he'd held about France, discovering instead the beauty of a culture that is one with its landscape, and of becoming one with that culture.

Steve Hoffman is a Minnesota tax preparer and food writer. His writing has won multiple national awards, including the 2019 James Beard M.F.K. Fisher Distinguished Writing Award. He has been published in Food & Wine, The Washington Post, and The Minneapolis Star Tribune, among others. He shares one acre on Turtle Lake, in Shoreview, Minnesota, with his wife, Mary Jo, their elderly and entitled puggle, and roughly 80,000 honeybees.