The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese

In the picturesque village of Guzmán, Spain, in a cave dug into a hillside on the edge of town, an ancient door leads to a cramped limestone chamber known as “the telling room.” Containing nothing but a wooden table and two benches, this is where villagers have gathered for centuries to share their stories and secrets—usually accompanied by copious amounts of wine.
 
It was here, in the summer of 2000, that Michael Paterniti found himself listening to a larger-than-life Spanish cheesemaker named Ambrosio Molinos de las Heras as he spun an odd and compelling tale about a piece of cheese. An unusual piece of cheese. Made from an old family recipe, Ambrosio’s cheese was reputed to be among the finest in the world, and was said to hold mystical qualities. Eating it, some claimed, conjured long-lost memories. But then, Ambrosio said, things had gone horribly wrong. . . .
 
By the time the two men exited the telling room that evening, Paterniti was hooked. Soon he was fully embroiled in village life, relocating his young family to Guzmán in order to chase the truth about this cheese and explore the fairy tale–like place where the villagers conversed with farm animals, lived by an ancient Castilian code of honor, and made their wine and food by hand, from the grapes growing on a nearby hill and the flocks of sheep floating over the Meseta.
 
What Paterniti ultimately discovers there in the highlands of Castile is nothing like the idyllic slow-food fable he first imagined. Instead, he’s sucked into the heart of an unfolding mystery, a blood feud that includes accusations of betrayal and theft, death threats, and a murder plot. As the village begins to spill its long-held secrets, Paterniti finds himself implicated in the very story he is writing.
 
Equal parts mystery and memoir, travelogue and history, The Telling Room is an astonishing work of literary nonfiction by one of our most accomplished storytellers. A moving exploration of happiness, friendship, and betrayal, The Telling Room introduces us to Ambrosio Molinos de las Heras, an unforgettable real-life literary hero, while also holding a mirror up to the world, fully alive to the power of stories that define and sustain us.

Inlcuded in True Stories Recommendations.

Design Crazy: Good Looks, Hot Tempers, and True Genius at Apple

Apple Inc. is one of the most successful—and influential—companies of our time, the transformational innovator that made computers not just personal but beautiful everyday objects. Technology met design, and our culture was altered forever.

And yet very little is known about life inside Apple. The company is pathologically secretive—even with its own designers—about how it comes up with its groundbreaking products: iMac, iPod, iPhone, iPad, and the next “insanely great” thing on the horizon. Here, for the first time, the men and women who worked for and alongside Steve Jobs share their remarkable, nearly forty-year-old story. How Apple survived nearly catastrophic failure early on. How Jobs and his team came to understand and execute design like no one else. And how their philosophy ultimately changed the world.

This Fast Company/Byliner Original is unlike any other book about Apple. Author Max Chafkin led a team of “Fast Company” reporters that spent months interviewing more than fifty former Apple execs and insiders, many of whom had never spoken publicly about their work. The result is a compelling and deeply revealing oral history of how design evolved at the most creative enterprise of our time, the company that one entrepreneur says “taught the world taste."

In these interviews, former colleagues describe Jobs at his most brilliant and bombastic—hurling unsatisfactory products across the lab and insulting employees, yet also singling out and celebrating craftsmanship and original work. Without a doubt, Jobs is the single most important figure in the company’s history. But overlooked in Apple’s carefully cultivated mythology are the other ingenious men and women who’ve left an indelible mark on Apple, some of whom think they deserve much more of the credit. At Apple, the stakes were big, and so were the egos.

“Design Crazy” takes us behind the mystique and reveals Apple to be a deeply misunderstood company. And the greatest business story of the past two decades is far from over. Two years after the death of Steve Jobs, with many of his former colleagues now at startups like Tesla, Evernote, and Nest Labs, some think the end of Apple’s dominance is only a matter of time. The company has risen to the challenge before, but still the question lingers: Can Apple be Apple without Jobs?

Included in True Stories. 

Design Crazy: Good Looks, Hot Tempers, and True Genius at Apple

This Fast Company/Byliner Original is unlike any other book about Apple. Author Max Chafkin led a team of “Fast Company” reporters that spent months interviewing more than fifty former Apple execs and insiders, many of whom had never spoken publicly about their work. The result is a compelling and deeply revealing oral history of how design evolved at the most creative enterprise of our time, the company that one entrepreneur says “taught the world taste.”

In these interviews, former colleagues describe Jobs at his most brilliant and bombastic—hurling unsatisfactory products across the lab and insulting employees, yet also singling out and celebrating craftsmanship and original work. Without a doubt, Jobs is the single most important figure in the company’s history. But overlooked in Apple’s carefully cultivated mythology are the other ingenious men and women who’ve left an indelible mark on Apple, some of whom think they deserve much more of the credit. At Apple, the stakes were big, and so were the egos.

“Design Crazy” takes us behind the mystique and reveals Apple to be a deeply misunderstood company. And the greatest business story of the past two decades is far from over. Two years after the death of Steve Jobs, with many of his former colleagues now at startups like Tesla, Evernote, and Nest Labs, some think the end of Apple’s dominance is only a matter of time. The company has risen to the challenge before, but still the question lingers: Can Apple be Apple without Jobs?

Included in True Stories.