Fans pick 95 books like Edie

Where Are Your Boys is the book I always wanted to write. Watching emo bands like My Chemical Romance and Paramore soar from suburbs to stardom during my high school years inspired me to take writing seriously, that a kid like me growing up in New Jersey with few connections to the media industry could find a backdoor in, because those bands did, too. With its dense population, adjacency to New York City, and a multitude of record stores and all-ages shows, New Jersey was the setting for much of emo's 2000s boom and the home of My Chemical Romance and many other important bands. 

I am currently the features editor at Input, a website about tech and culture. Earlier in my career, I worked at the now-defunct music magazine Blender, for which I wrote an oral history of Sub Pop, the Seattle label that put out early records by the likes of Nirvana, Soundgarden, and Mudhoney. That article was the basis of my book for Everybody Loves Our Town. I’m also a widely published freelancer, with pieces in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Wired, WSJ. Magazine, Rolling Stone, and many other outlets.

I have been researching the changes in the workplace for 40 years now. The steady move over that time has been away from a situation where employers controlled the development of their “talent” and managed it carefully, especially for white-collar workers, toward arrangements that are much more arms-length where employees are on their own to develop their skills and manage their career. Most employees now see at least some management practices that just don’t make sense even for their own employer–casual approaches to hiring, using “leased employees” and contractors, who are paid more, to do the same work as employees, leaving vacancies open, and so forth.

I am currently the features editor at Input, a website about tech and culture. Earlier in my career, I worked at the now-defunct music magazine Blender, for which I wrote an oral history of Sub Pop, the Seattle label that put out early records by the likes of Nirvana, Soundgarden, and Mudhoney. That article was the basis of my book for Everybody Loves Our Town. I’m also a widely published freelancer, with pieces in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Wired, WSJ. Magazine, Rolling Stone, and many other outlets.

Life is stories, man. Telling stories. Listening to stories. One day, somebody had the brilliant idea to start writing these stories down. And that’s what we’ve been doing ever since. Trading yarns. Figuring things out. Reading and writing. I wrote my first story in middle school. My first novel in college. My first published novel (This Way Madness Lies) in my late twenties. Now it’s thirty years, twenty-five novels, fifty short stories, and three books of poetry later, and I’m still as obsessed with and passionate about storytelling as I was as a young buck backpacking around Europe with a notebook and a beat-up copy of Down and Out in London and Paris stuffed into my leather satchel.

I grew up as a closeted homosexual in a fundamentalist Christian home, enduring nearly two decades in a crisis of faith. Sermons frequently warned of damnation for my natural inclinations, pushing me to fast, pray, and achieve to resist temptation. This crisis gradually resolved over the eight years I spent writing Playing by the Book, the first coming-out novel to win a National IPPY Medal in religious fiction. Although I don’t consider myself a spiritual writer, I am drawn to stories that explore existential struggles and triumphs, including those related to a crisis of faith—much like the characters in the novels on this list.

The seventh child of a seventh son of a seventh son. Mother spoke of my sleeping nights and alert days…felt I was curious, observant. She was convinced I’d be the writer in the family. Named me Jerome after the librarian St. Jerome and Mark after Mark Twain, her favorite author as a child. Mother read to us daily, during high school time, a chapter a night. My brother Fred mailed me a word a week to look up. My freshman year in college I earned money writing compositions. And so it began. I sat on the floor and listened to the world war from Pearl Harbor to D-Day and Hiroshima.

I started studying the tarot ten years ago with no thought that I would ever write about it. I took an introductory class in the back of a local metaphysical shop and went down a rabbit hole of books and teachings. I also enjoy readings myself - from quick fifteen minute reads at sidewalk fairs, to hour long readings in person with renowned readers, from an hour on Zoom with a famous reader, to a reading in a shop in Salem, Massachusetts during the chaos that is October in that town - I’ve benefited from them all. It has been a delight to include this interest in my latest novel.

I grew up in a creative family. My father was an illustrator before becoming a children’s book author and novelist. My mother, a trained dancer, became my father’s collaborator, illustrating their internationally-known Frances books. They inspired me and encouraged me to develop my own talent. I started writing at nine, and have never stopped since. I became a journalist, writing about culture and art for The New York times, New York Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, and Vogue, among others. I am also the author of three well-received artist biographies: Basquiat: A Quick Killing in Art; Lucian Freud: Eyes Wide Open; and Alice Neel: The Art of Not Sitting Pretty.

I grew up in a creative family. My father was an illustrator before becoming a children’s book author and novelist. My mother, a trained dancer, became my father’s collaborator, illustrating their internationally-known Frances books. They inspired me and encouraged me to develop my own talent. I started writing at nine, and have never stopped since. I became a journalist, writing about culture and art for The New York times, New York Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, and Vogue, among others. I am also the author of three well-received artist biographies: Basquiat: A Quick Killing in Art; Lucian Freud: Eyes Wide Open; and Alice Neel: The Art of Not Sitting Pretty.