TV presenter and author Anthony Bourdain‘s final book will be released more than two years after his death by suicide.
World Travel: An Irreverent Guide will arrive on bookshelves in October 2020 courtesy of Ecco Publishing. Bourdain’s assistant Laurie Woolever completed the book after Bourdain’s death.
Although best known for his multiple award winning TV programs, Bourdain’s initial stardom came through writing. He was an anonymous chef working at New York City’s now defunct Brasserie Les Halles when he submitted the essay ‘Don’t Eat Before Reading This’ to the New Yorker in 1999.
It made an immediate impression and prompted Bloomsbury to hand him a book deal. This led to Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly, a lurid examination of life behind the scenes for the Big Apple’s restaurant workers.
Bourdain went on to present the short-lived A Cook’s Tour for the Food Network, before inking a deal with the Travel Channel in 2005. This led to nine seasons of the hugely popular No Reservations and a couple of seasons of the comparatively lightweight The Layover.
Bourdain’s crowning glory, however, is the CNN series Parts Unknown, which he was still working on at the time of his death in June 2018. Parts Unknown was as much an anthropological investigation and exercise in cultural exchange as it was a food show.
Watch: Bourdain falls in love with Vietnamese street food
He kept writing even as his fame skyrocketed. In 2010 came the Kitchen Confidential follow-up Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook. He released Appetites: A Cookbook in 2016, which was also written with Woolever.
World Travel is described as “an entertaining, practical, fun and frank travel guide that gives readers an introduction to some of [Bourdain’s] favourite places.” It’ll include advice on “what to eat, where to stay and, in some cases, what to avoid.”
