“I guess I should be like 600 pounds with a beard or something, with lots of leather,” she says, “which would be scary.”

No thanks. Fractured, the second departure from her wildly popular Grant County series, is scary enough. The novel lifts characters from her previous non-Grant County work, Triptych, and drops them into a murder/rape/kidnapping in Atlanta’s tony Ansley Park neighborhood.

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David Lee Simmons speaks with Karin Slaughter - Download

Podcast produced by Alejandro A. Leal – Photo by Allison Rosa

Air Loaf is broadcast weekdays on 1690 WMLB-AM at approximately 8:10 a.m., 12:20 p.m. and 6:20 p.m.

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Air Loaf is broadcast weekdays on 1690 WMLB-AM at approximately 8:10 a.m., 12:20 p.m. and 6:20 p.m.

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Air Loaf is broadcast weekdays on 1690 WMLB-AM at approximately 8:10 a.m., 12:20 p.m. and 6:20 p.m.

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Brown reads and signs Feasting on Asphalt. $29.50. Thurs., May 8. 7 p.m. Variety Playhouse, 1099 Euclid Ave. 404-681-5123. www.variety-playhouse.com.

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Alton Brown is as famous for the visual style that permeates his Food Network show, “Good Eats,” as he is for his manic energy. But what becomes surprisingly apparent in thumbing through the pages of Feasting on Asphalt: The River Run, the book version of his TV road show’s second season, is what a talented wordsmith Brown is. Photographer and former chef Jean Claude Dhien’s photos vividly capture the spirit of a food journey, which shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who’s seen Brown’s TV work.

But at some point, you have to put your travels down on paper, and here Brown proves as meticulous with words as he does with recipes.

“I wrote it for myself,” Brown says via cell phone from his latest foray, which he says is somewhere in Mississippi. “With the photography, I wanted to let the people gaze on those photos. But it was also part catharsis. It was a different style for me.”

The writing comes off as part diary-style ranting on the evaporation of family-owned dining establishments and part celebration of what is left. His keen eye for observation serves him well at stops such as Baton Rouge, La.: “Out back, Lionel Key reaches into a burlap bag of dried sassafras leaves and deposits them into the hollowed center of a hunk of cypress stump. The device is as ancient as the matching four-foot pestle, which was passed down to Lionel by his great-uncle, who taught his nephew his craft. That is how to pound filé powder (aka gumbo file), the mystical spice … used to thicken soups and stews alike.”

“We wrote the whole thing from memory, because I found it more meaningful,” Brown says. “I’d read Travels with Charley in Search of America by John Steinbeck … I wanted to hear that sense of grandeur. I wanted to write in a sense that evokes another time period.”

Podcast produced by Alejandro Leal / Photo courtesy Don Chambers/Chamber Studios

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Crouch’s own story isn’t that far removed from her protagonist’s. Crouch is also a Charleston native who’s lived in New York, and admits to making a lot of dating mistakes.

“The book is autobiographical emotionally,” Crouch says over the phone from her San Francisco home. “I sort of took my life and then heightened it, because if I wrote a book about my life it would be pretty dull.”

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Krista Derbecker Gilliam speaks with Katie Crouch

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Podcast produced by Alejandro Leal / music provided by the Podshow Music Network.

It’s hard out there for a vegan. And not because vegans or even vegetarians secretly crave the Wendy’s Baconater, but because their values clash with the established status quo.

Stereotypes of wan hippies and crazy-eyed activists undermine the concrete moral and ethical issues behind the animal-rights-based movements. It’s for this reason that the first few sections of vegan and activist Gene Baur’s compelling new book, Farm Sanctuary: Changing Hearts and Minds About Animals and Food, are slightly troublesome. Early on, Baur rightly notes that “we do, all too often, accept something – whether it’s a product, a piece of information, or food – because it taps into superficial desires or familiar habits and assumptions that are neither healthy, smart, nor in our or others’ best interests.”

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Podcast produced by Alejandro Leal / Music for this podcast was provided by the Podsafe Music Network

Podcast produced by Alejandro Leal / Music for this podcast was provided by the Podsafe Music Network.

Novelist and playwright Pearl Cleage has lived in Atlanta for almost 40 years.

She’s written several plays including A Song for Coretta, which wrapped up last month at 7 Stages, and her first book, What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day, was an Oprah Book Club pick and best seller. Cleage wrote a column for the Atlanta Tribune for a decade and has contributed to Essence, Ms., Rap Pages, Vibe and Ebony as well.

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Podcast produced by Alejandro Leal / Photo by Albert Trotman