Debut Book Submission Package
elevator
guns + butter pop-up pilgrimage I’m a Detroit kid a semi-truck tried to kill. That same night, a Coney Island chef who may or may not be of this world called me to the kitchen. My quest to become a world-class chef takes me from three-star Jean-Georges to an underground biryani network in India. — I’m hunted by Violence — the vengeful spirit of my aunt's abuser. When I return home to find my car on fire and my childhood friends chained by Violence, I must face my adversary and answer him—not with a gun, but with a song.
beat 1
Mr. McGinnis, a Detroit economics teacher, sweats through a lecture on guns and butter: what a nation arms, how it cares. Everyone thinks he’s insane, until a knock at the classroom door. The World Trade Center has fallen. In the back row, I’m handed the theory of my whole life.
beat 2
Fourteen years follow in the country’s best kitchens. The Culinary Institute of America teaches me to sharpen my knife as daily spiritual discipline. I become Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s protégé at his three-Michelin-star kitchen in Manhattan.
beat 3
I travel to India, I meet a guru, and a series of micro-pilgrimages begins through underground kitchens and dosa houses. A kitchen generator sputters out. Karan, once a stranger who has become my friend, says, “Don’t worry, don’t worry, this happens all the time.” He lights a candle; there is light.
Karan’s Mum mixes turmeric paste for blessings, possible spiritual pathways to God.
beat 4
Back in Detroit, guns + butter feeds the city from parking garages and art galleries with one extension cord and two induction burners. Anthony Bourdain comes to film Parts Unknown. It is the greatest night of my life, until God whispers, “Your cooking career is over.” Violence is waiting.
synopsis
My Aunt Joan comes home holding her face in her hands, and my grandpa Russ, a former lightweight boxer, answers her abusive husband, Violence, eye for an eye — it works, until Violence’s spirit attaches itself to my journey, seeking revenge. On I-94 in a winter storm, a semi-truck hits me head-on; I shouldn’t survive, I do, and a chef who may not be of this world invites me into the profession. From Jean-Georges’s kitchen to the underground kitchens of Mumbai, I follow the pilgrimage until Violence takes everything: my money, my career, my home. Russ answered Violence with violence to protect one woman; now I face the same scene, multiplied, two girls I knew as friends chained in a Detroit party store by the gun on Violence’s hip.