100 books like How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents

Immigrants have the biggest impact on what modern day New Yorkers eat.

This book tells the story of five families from different cultures—German, Irish, Russian (Prussian) Jewish, Lithuanian, and Italian—who at various times all lived at the same tenement on the Lower East Side in the late 19th and early 20th century. Their stories, and the ways their adopted culture evolved since immigrating to America, is told with an examination of the resourceful ways the families earned money, sourced, and shopped for food.

Recipes reveal how certain dishes born out of necessity became iconic staples of American cuisine (for instance, how and why corned beef is an Irish-American, not ethnically Irish dish). 

The book is an engaging memoir about what it was like in the 1950s for a single woman just out of college to balance life and relationships while starting a career in magazine publishing in the Big Apple and follows her career and family relationships through to the 1970s.

Though things like finding an apartment in a trendy neighborhood back then were significantly easier than they are in modern day, the hilarious accounts about the challenges of adapting to small living conditions still ring true.

It’s an entertaining glimpse into the golden age of the print magazine industry, but it’s also a brutally honest account of women’s mental health issues, and what it’s like to seemingly have it all but still feel the constraints imposed by choosing to live in NYC. Any aspiring writer should read this book. 

The musicians responsible for creating what we now think of as punk rock were a motley assortment of folks, many of them without much in the way of formal education. But they were all great storytellers, and they had plenty of wild, outrageous, and funny stories to tell.

Please Kill Me gathers some of those stories, from Patti Smith, Richard Hell, Debbie Harry, Dee Dee Ramone, Jim Carroll, and many others (the tales of Iggy Pop alone are worth the price of admission), and the editors do an outstanding job of bringing coherence to a scene that thrived on chaos.

This novel of interconnected stories is a fascinating snapshot of life in 1920s New York City.

Considering that it was written in 1925, Dos Pasos does an incredible job of representing different backgrounds and classes as they move through the city with one another. It shows how one can’t exist in such a setting on the highest levels of society without the help of people who make up the fabric of the rest of the town.

Encountering day-to-day strangers in the city won’t feel the same after reading this book. Plus, it takes place during Prohibition from a real time perspective, showing that the “Roaring Twenties” were more of a yelp.

Kellye Garrett takes the fake world of reality TV, hashtags, and influencers to circle her reluctant protagonist, Lena Scott. Life and actions are judged to only have value if you have video of it to get clicks. That’s the message that stuck with me.

Lena Scott and her sister Desiree may share a father, but they could not be more different. That father is hip-hop mogul Mel Pierce known in the business as Murder Mel. The family members are in and out of each other’s lives with the same kinds of drama a blue-collar family would have; there are just bigger price tags. Lena steps out and opts for a modest life away from the family fortune and her father’s name.

When Desiree suddenly dies as a fallen from grace celebrity who appears to have overdosed, Lena doesn’t buy it. Even two years without speaking doesn’t erase how well she… show more.

This YA Horror novel, by an Afro Dominican nonbinary author, won the prestigious Pura Belpré Award and was a finalist for the Bram Stoker Award.

The Bronx setting is depicted with such grit (spanning decades), it’s practically a character in its own right. I loved how the novel tied together a twisted “game,” similar to an urban legend, with a real, and very dark chapter of NYC history. It will definitely appeal to true crime fans, like myself, and features likable teen characters that are also relatable to adult readers. 

Random Family is a family saga; the story of two couples and their friends and families struggling to survive in the Bronx and upstate New York.

The author, Adrian Nicole LeBanc, spent years living alongside her subjects, which allowed her to paint an extraordinarily intimate portrait of the web of gangs, drugs, parenthood, poverty, and prison that dominated their lives.

I play a small role in the story, as I represented one of the people depicted in the book in a lawsuit brought against a prison guard.

Reading the book was, therefore, a personal revelation—illuminating the rich and complex context of her life, and the many ways it was shaped by the criminal justice system.

I first read this book as a teenager but didn’t appreciate Louisa May Alcott’s gift for storytelling until years later, when I reread it. 

This time, I didn’t want the story to end because I’d fallen in love with the four March sisters Jo, Beth, Meg, and Amy. I laughed. I cried. Though fictional characters and separated by hundreds of years, the March sisters felt real to me, and I was a little bereft at the end of their story. 

Along with universal themes of love, betrayal, anger, lust, revenge, and death, Little Women deftly portrays each sister’s struggles and aspirations and explores the conflicts each sister has between personal ambition, familial responsibility, and wanting to embrace the unknown.  

For one brief moment, I wished I had more than one sister…and then I came to my senses.

A good friend and fellow writer introduced me to Hunter Shea at a brewpub in New York City, and I quickly discovered he was a titan in the realm of creature features. The Jersey Devil, a mutated megalodon, the Loch Ness monster… Shea loves his cryptids!

Hurling the ultimate wilderness creature into the urban jungle was inspired, and this story is just as fun as you’d expect. Packed with humor and over-the-top mayhem, this book is a hoot and I tore through it in a day.

In this evocative memoir, the first in a series of three and a New York Times 1982 best book of the year, Simon, a travel writer, captures the world of an immigrant child growing up in the Bronx in the 1920s. Their fathers were harsh disciplinarians; mothers knew abortion to be the most effective birth control; and daughters saw poor scores in math crush their dreams. A story of triumph over the odds, of female rebellion, and of the many ways of learning, this memoir evokes a bygone world that also feels very contemporary.