Winner of the 2024 Thurber Prize for American Humor

A darkly hilarious and ultimately affecting story about food, fame, and our ongoing complicity in devouring our cultural heroes—written by Joe Keohane, Kevin Alexander, and Alessandra Lusardi, under the name S.E. Boyd.

**Named a Most Anticipated Book of Fall 2022 by Entertainment Weekly, Vogue, AARP the Magazine, Eater, The New York Post, LitHub, Publishers Lunch, and more…**

What People Are Saying About The Lemon

As tart as “artisanal citrus,” as sharp as a chef’s knife, “The Lemon” is both a gleeful foodie sendup ..and an incisive takedown of the commercial exploitation of just about everything, even death. -The New York Times

“A helluva novel. Hip-deep in knowing detail from the worlds of food, media, and Hollywood, they pull off a saucy spin on the death of Anthony Bourdain—only in this version, his name is John Doe . . . If your Bourdain-loving hackles go up in response to this ploy, know that the book manages to artfully defang that reaction, both because the whole thing is actually about the potential effect of a salacious detail on a posthumous reputation and because in every other way John Doe is an embodiment of everything great about Bourdain . . . A hilarious, brilliant, cynical (and maybe even a little sad) takedown of the moral vacuum that is celebrity culture.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“S.E. Boyd has taken the secret ingredient to fame—‘shameless persistence’—and used it to pressure-cook up a novel funny enough and hot enough to singe the high brows off of any raised-pinkie foodie.” —Paul Beatty, Booker Prize–winning author of The Sellout

“Every story line offers suspense and surprises, and the book’s deadpan humor is unremitting. . . . This frequently brilliant debut novel is a hilarious spoof of monetization mania and foodie culture.” —Shelf Awareness

“Laugh-out-loud sensational—a nonstop, scalpel-sharp, satirical skewering of, well, everything . . . A whole new genre: sardonic suspense!” —Lee Child

“Fearless, moving, and funny as hell. This is incisive, witty, era-defining literature like they used to make it. Thank God it’s back.”
—Lisa Taddeo, bestselling author of Three Women and Animal

“The Lemon is the most fun I’ve had reading a made-up story in forever and a day. It rips on everything and everybody in our zeitgeist and beyond. It’s full of terrible people behaving like asses. Like real life. Funny, smart, surprising. Loved it.” —Bob Odenkirk

“[An] acid, knife-edged satire on food-world mores and the vagaries of modern fame.”
—Entertainment Weekly

“Sure to set the food world abuzz, The Lemon is an archly acidic look at the celebrity death industrial complex and all those who seek to seize the narrative—and the spotlight—in the wake of a famous person’s death.” —Vogue

“A winner that’s packed with dark humor.”
—AARP the Magazine

“This bitingly satiric tale examines the mix of greed and reverence that drives people who have something to gain or to protect. ”
—Library Journa

“Deliciously trenchant, hilarious, and impossible to put down, this dark comedy says something profound about the world of celebrity and the mesmerizing subversives within it.”
—Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan, author of the international bestsellers Sarong Party Girls and A Tiger in the Kitchen

“Witty, razor sharp, and enviably well-written, The Lemon is the bombshell book that members of the food-obsessed Kitchen Confidential generation have been waiting for.” —Adam Platt, former New York Magazine chief restaurant critic and author of The Book of Eating