The year Gabrielle Hamilton opened her restaurant, Prune, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, she was approached about doing a cookbook. That’s how auspicious Prune was from the very beginning. Cozy and hip without trying to be, the tiny bistro has drawn lines down the block (no reservations, no way around it) for 15 years now. Finally, after all these years and the wild success of her acclaimed memoir, Blood, Bones & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef, Hamilton gives her hungry fans the cookbook they’ve been waiting for. Called, simply, Prune, it’s a thick anthology of recipes from her restaurant, and it’s as autobiographical as her previous literary effort, but in a very different way.

MS Hamilton recently gave an inspiring and very humorous fundraising presentation at the Missoula Public Library.