Your Weekly St. Louis Bestseller List

There are plenty of new titles on this week's adult bestseller list, including Rosanne Cash's memoir Composed; Erin Morgenstern's The Night Circus (which Salon critic Laura Miller called "the first Etsy novel"); 1493, Charles Mann's exploration of life in North America immediately post-Columbus (and a sequel to his earlier 1491); Habibi, graphic novelist Craig Thompson's long-awaited follow-up to the classic Blankets; and The Art of Fielding, which, sadly, is not a not a how-to, but rather a novel by Chad Harbach.

But atop them all is Stone Soup Cottage: A Vignette of Seasonal Recipes by Carl and Nancy McConnell, proprietors of the eponymous fine-dining restaurant in Cottleville, Missouri, in St. Charles County. In addition to producing a cookbook, the McConnells are giving weekly cooking lessons this fall, and they are offering private at-home catering to anyone who feels like paying. It's an empire to rival Gerard Craft's. The restaurant itself is in an 1850s farmhouse and has just seven tables and the website notes that reservations are required; it's definitely special-occasion dining. (For the record, Gut Check's Veggielante visited and approved.)

What would be super-cool, though, is if other local restaurants started producing cookbooks, too. We'd be thrilled to see Niche: The Cookbook, or 300 Fun Things You Can Do With Pork Belly or, better yet, Ted Kilgore's Guide to At-Home Mixology by Niche. Or Duck Fat, a Primer from Salt or Kakao: How to Mix Things in Your Chocolate That Shouldn't Go in Chocolate and Still Have Them Taste Good. There are so many innovative chefs in this town, and we're pretty sure that they won't be giving any secrets away: By the time the cookbooks come out, they'll have moved on to new creations. But it'll give gastronomes who can't afford special-occasion dining except on really, really special occasions the opportunity to enjoy exciting developments in cooking in their own kitchens.

Adult Bestsellers:

1. Stone Soup Cottage: A Vignette of Seasonal Recipes by Carl and Nancy McConnell
2. Composed by Rosanne Cash
3. Little Black Dress by Susan McBride
4. The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
5. The Light Bringer by Chris DiGiuseppe and Mike Force
6. 1493 by Charles Mann
7. The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach
8. A Dance With Dragons by George R.R. Martin
9. Habibi by Craig Thompson
10. Nurturing Paws edited by Lynn C. Johnston

Children's/YA Bestsellers:

1. The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
2. Every Thing On It by Shel Silverstein
3. Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs
4. Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown
5. Runaway Twin by Peg Kehret
6. Floors by Patrick Carman
7. Frankie Pickle and the Closet of Doom by Eric Wight
8. Goliath by Scott Westerfeld
9. Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins
10. The Monster at the End of This Book by Jon Stone and Michael Smollin