Thanksgiving is the favorite holiday of millions of Americans. And with so many diverse regions across the United States, it's no surprise to find that the Thanksgiving menu changes significantly from New England to the Pacific Northwest. This is the quintessential cookbook for our national day of thanks, capturing this diversity with creative recipes for the perfect dinner and providing the key to a stress-free occasion with author Diane Morgan's indispensable do-ahead tips. Including appetizers, soups, salads, main courses, stuffings, casseroles, biscuits, side dishes, desserts, and even leftovers, it contains everything the busy cook needs to celebrate this most festive and food-centered of holidays!

Grandmother almost loses her secret recipe for Cranberry bread to one of her Thanksgiving dinner guests

From the founder of the eponymous party-planning website, a guide to creating exceptional celebrations that will inspire any host. Tablescapes, tips, DIY party crafts, beautiful color photos, and more than 50 never-before-seen recipes, in an easy-to-follow format. Beginner hosts will find tons of tips and how-tos, as they’re walked through practical steps to creating fabulous parties on a realistic budget. The seasoned host will discover unique details and new recipes to enhance their tablescapes all year long. Follow one party to a tee, or mix-and-match elements to create a unique affair all your own. Courtney Dial Whitmore provides instructions for more than a dozen occasions (from simple backyard gatherings to special celebrations), each complemented with full tablescape details; decor tips; and recipes for each party covering appetizers, desserts, and drinks. Ring in the new year with a glitzy New Year's Day Brunch; savor a bit of Parisian culture with a Crêpe Cake and Sparkling Raspberry Cocktails; enjoy Spinach Tea Sandwiches and Lavender Fizz Cocktails at a Jane Austen–inspired Book Club Gathering; celebrate your favorite guy with Bacon and Pecan S'mores and Sriracha and Bourbon Wings; and don your best black-and-white apparel to enjoy Red Velvet Brownie Truffle Cakes and White Chocolate Martinis at a Black and White Masquerade Party. These are just a few of the ideas you'll find in Pizzazzerie: Entertain in Style. “Courtney covers every detail, and breaks them down to make entertaining easy. With so many creative ideas, you’ll want to start celebrating half birthdays, too!” —Kimberly Schlegel Whitman, editor-at-large, Southern Living “Festive, bright, and cheerful…full of ideas and passionate about the details.” —Tara Guerard, owner/creative director, Soiree

Discover the real Thanksgiving through photographs from a recreation of the true Thanksgiving by Plimoth Plantation

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY EATER.COM From one of America’s finest food writers, the founder of The New York Times Cooking section, comes a definitive, timeless guide to Thanksgiving dinner—preparing it, surviving it, and pulling it off in style. From the planning of the meal to the washing of the last plate, Thanksgiving poses more—and more vexing—problems for the home cook than any other holiday. In this smartly written, beautifully illustrated, recipe-filled book, Sam Sifton, the Times’s resident Thanksgiving expert, delivers a message of great comfort and solace: There is no need for fear. You can cook a great meal on Thanksgiving. You can have a great time. With simple, fool-proof recipes for classic Thanksgiving staples, as well as new takes on old standbys, this book will show you that the fourth Thursday of November does not have to be a day of kitchen stress and family drama, of dry stuffing and sad, cratered pies. You can make a better turkey than anyone has ever served you in your life, and you can serve it with gravy that is not lumpy or bland but a salty balm, rich in flavor, that transforms all it touches. Here are recipes for exciting side dishes and robust pies and festive cocktails, instructions for setting the table and setting the mood, as well as cooking techniques and menu ideas that will serve you all year long, whenever you are throwing a big party. Written for novice and experienced cooks alike, Thanksgiving: How to Cook It Well is your guide to making Thanksgiving the best holiday of the year. It is not fantasy. If you prepare, it will happen. And this book will show you how. Advance praise for Thanksgiving “If you don’t have Thanksgiving, you are not really having Thanksgiving. This book is as essential to the day as the turkey itself. It’s an expert, gently opinionated guide to everything from the cranberry sauce to the table setting to the divvying up of the leftovers, but it’s also a paean to the holiday and an evocation of both its past and its promising future. Sam Sifton’s Thanksgiving world is the one I want to live in.”—Gabrielle Hamilton, bestselling author of Blood, Bones, & Butter “The charm of Sam Sifton’s Thanksgiving is that he proposes that home cooks treat this culinary Olympics like any other dinner party—don’t panic, deconstruct your tasks into bite-size pieces, and conquer that fear of failure. Sam could talk a fledgling doctor through his first open-heart surgery. It’s all here—from brining to spatchcocking, sides to desserts—and served up with a generous dollop of reassuring advice from one of America’s most notable food writers.”—Christopher Kimball, editor of Cook’s Illustrated and host of America’s Test Kitchen

“I’ll croak before I write ads or sell bonds—or do anything except write.” James Agee’s father died when he was just six years old, a loss immortalized in his Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, A Death in the Family. Three years later, Agee’s mother moved the mourning family from Knoxville, Tennessee, to the campus of St. Andrew’s, an Episcopal boarding school near Sewanee. There, Agee met Father James Harold Flye, who would become his history teacher. Though Agee was just ten, the two struck up an unlikely and enduring friendship, traveling Europe by bicycle and exchanging letters for thirty years, from Agee’s admission to Exeter Academy to his death at forty-five. The intimate letters, collected by Father Flye after Agee’s death, form the most intimate portrait of Agee available, a starkly revealing account of the internal and external life of a tortured twentieth-century genius. Agee candidly shares his struggles with depression, professional failure, and a tumultuous personal life that included three wives and four children. First published in 1962, Letters of James Agee to Father Flye followed the rediscovery of Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and the posthumous publication of A Death in the Family, which won the 1958 Pulitzer Prize and became a hit Broadway play and film. The collection sold prolifically throughout the 1960s and ’70s in mass-market editions as a new generation of readers discovered the deep talents of the writer Dwight Macdonald called “the most broadly gifted writer of our American generation.”

A spider helps a turkey find a unique way to avoid being eaten for Thanksgiving dinner.