Here are 91 books that Katharine and E.B. White fans have personally recommended if you like
Katharine and E.B. White.
Shepherd is a community of 12,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.
I left my hometown of Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, at age 18 to attend university in Manhattan, where I started my career in journalism and the media. Since then, I’ve lived in Berlin, Germany; Hong Kong; and now Copenhagen, Denmark, generally moving to advance my career and explore new worlds. Whenever you move to a new place and establish yourself in a new culture, there’s always a learning curve. Helping other women (and men!) adapt to their new environment is why I started the “How to Live in Denmark” podcast, which has now been running for more than 10 years.
Set in the 1980s and 1990s, this memoir reminded me of the Manhattan media world I grew up in – before social media when glossy magazines and music videos were all-powerful.
The author is a suburban Jersey girl who stumbles into a job at Rolling Stone magazine back when it was able to make or break careers. She interviews celebrities, becomes a TV host, dates and breaks up with various 80s and 90s guys, and briefly loses herself in the New York City nightlife before figuring out that, hey, she really is just a Jersey girl who loves her mom and enjoys decorating for Thanksgiving with paper turkeys from Hallmark.
The author has a gentle sense of humor about herself, which is something I think characterizes my work as well.
New Jersey in the 1980s had everything Jancee Dunn wanted: trips down the shore, Bruce Springsteen, a tantalizing array of malls. To music lover Jancee, New York City was a foreign country. So it was with bleak expectations that she submitted her résumé to Rolling Stone magazine. And before she knew it, she was backstage and behind the scenes with the most famous people in the world—hiking in Canada with Brad Pitt, snacking on Velveeta with Dolly Parton, dancing drunkenly onstage with the Beastie Boys—trading her good-girl suburban past for late nights, hipster guys, and the booze-soaked rock 'n' roll…
As someone who lived through the very interesting and tumultuous 1960s and 70s, I am fascinated by details of other’s experiences of the same time frame. I inhabited the early 70s fully, going to so many once-in-a-lifetime cultural events: poetry readings, music performances, avant-garde theater, and ‘be-ins’ or ‘happenings.’ With a Masters degree in Creative Writing, I have been an observer of culture and art for several decades. I am the author of three collections of poetry, a book of short fiction, a novel, and a book for writers.
I love this book because it describes a closed world; an underground scene that was glamorous and edgy. The world of Andy Warhol attracted writers, artists, models, fashion designers, and other ‘beautiful people.’ Warhol helped many of his minions achieve great fame.
I love that the author is a budding writer and also, for all intents and purposes, fatherless. Many of his experiences resonated deeply with my own. This book has the detailed descriptions and self-reflection of a great memoir.
An evocative coming-of-age memoir—the story of the education of a wayward wild child and acidhead who, searching for meaning and purpose, found refuge in the demimonde of the ruined but magical metropolis that was New York City in the 1970s.
“In his beautiful memoir, Do Something, Guy Trebay paints a picture of a vanished, pre-AIDS Gotham that’s both gritty and dazzling.” —The New York Times Book Review
Born in the Bronx, Guy Trebay was raised in an atmosphere of privilege on Long Island’s North Shore after his entrepreneurial father struck business gold with Hawaiian Surf, a wildly successful cologne company…
Early in my life, I developed a keen appreciation of and a strong affinity for the unique culture encompassing the Jersey Shore, a lifestyle that unites infinite waves, distinctive art, soulful music, sand between one’s toes, and the dream of the endless summer. The sea speaks to me, and always has. My appreciation of the ocean and shore living leads me to seek comparable books with hopes of learning from and/or connecting with other writers like me, and it served as the basis of the setting for my novel, Enduring the Waves. I hope you make a similar connection to one of the books on my recommendation list.
I’ve always wanted to learn how to surf, and I stumbled upon Diane Cardwell’s memoir Rockaway: Surfing Headlong into a New Life while we were locked down in the middle of the pandemic.
She writes of learning how to surf in midlife and how finding her balance in the ocean led to discovering balance in her life. I marvel at her ability to set her passions above her fear and discovering a home among like-minded people while building a life centered around joy.
She not only embraced but celebrated the unknown, and that led her to discover her true self. After I read her memoir, I booked my first surf lesson, and while I still have a lot to learn, Cardwell’s voice reminds me to get onto a board again.
The inspirational story of one woman learning to surf and creating a new life in gritty, eccentric Rockaway Beach
Unmoored by a failed marriage and disconnected from her high-octane life in the city, Diane Cardwell finds herself staring at a small group of surfers coasting through mellow waves toward shore—and senses something shift. Rockaway is the riveting, joyful story of one woman’s reinvention—beginning with Cardwell taking the A Train to Rockaway, a neglected spit of land dangling off New York City into the Atlantic Ocean. She finds a teacher, buys a tiny bungalow, and throws her not-overly-athletic self headlong into…
I believe deeply that, as messy and painful as life is, there is always joy, and usually humor, to be found. The book I wrote, Leaving’s Not the Only Way to Go, pulls from some of the painful experiences I’ve had, and I often find myself following my description of the book, about two women who meet in a grief group, with “but it’s not a downer!” It’s true, because Leaving is also inspired by all the joy and connections I’ve made for myself, even in the midst of loss. I learned how to balance the two sides of life through books like the ones on this list.
Simply the Best is a romance set after the COVID-19 pandemic began, and it doesn’t flinch from the pain that era has inflicted on us all. Kallmaker set out to grapple with the question of how we find joy and love after experiencing such devestation, and why trying to find joy and love at all still matters.
This romance is, despite its serious circumstances, as funny and pleasurable as all Kallmaker novels are.
Simply the Worst…Alice Cabot’s only great love is science, but a lapse in judgment has exiled the New York journalist to the glitzy Gallerias and vapid bubble-babble of Beverly Hills. The assignment to do a flattering feature series on Simply the Best and the superficial nonsense it sells threatens to crush what little is left of her spirit.
Simply the Best...Pepper Addington can’t believe she’s moved up from grunt intern to personal assistant for Helene Jolie, the celebrity socialite founder of SimplytheBest.com. Succeeding at the job she worked so hard to get is her only priority. Keep a cynical know-it-all…
I’m a fiction and humor writer whose imagination was initially sparked by superheroes and comic books. The idea of an otherwise average person who could turn themselves into a superbeing was transformative and powerful. As a teenager, these early heroes faded, and I became fascinated by The Twilight Zone’s compact and poignant storytelling that contained moral messages. This eventually led me to the fiction of Stephen King where the idea of average people encountering the supernatural and overcoming obstacles was a recurring theme. In my own work, I have tried to carry forward the idea that our everyday lives are more absurd, complex, and magical than they appear.
Adler’s book depicts a woman’s life through a series of moments, incidents, bits of speech that come at the journalist narrator. The short passages perfectly capture the neurotic energy, humor, and horror of New York City. When I first read it, I was blown away. It showed there is great latitude in ways to approach writing. The short, choppy format is the closest a book has come to mirror my experience as a writer who seeks to find meaning and/or humor in everyday life. It’s a jagged mosaic of a book when put together is a delightful treasure.
When Speedboat burst on the scene in the late ’70s it was like nothing readers had encountered before. It seemed to disregard the rules of the novel, but it wore its unconventionality with ease. Reading it was a pleasure of a new, unexpected kind. Above all, there was its voice, ambivalent, curious, wry, the voice of Jen Fain, a journalist negotiating the fraught landscape of contemporary urban America. Party guests, taxi drivers, brownstone dwellers, professors, journalists, presidents, and debutantes fill these dispatches from the world as Jen finds it.
A touchstone over the years for writers as different as David…
I worked as a journalist for the BBC for nearly thirty years: my writing of espionage novels set in Europe during the Second World War goes back to 1994 when I was covering the 50th anniversary of D-Day for the BBC. I became fascinated with the human stories behind big military events and especially the British deception operation that was so crucial to the Allies’ success. This led to my first novel, The Best of Our Spies. To ensure my novels feel as authentic as possible my research means I travel around Europe and I’ve also amassed a collection of maps and guidebooks from that period.
Berlin was at the centre of Nazi Europe and is invariably at the heart of my novels, including Agent in Berlin. I’m fascinated by Berlin and I try to get beyond the obvious aspects of the city and give a sense of what life was like on a daily basis. I have chosen this book by William Shirer, an American journalist based in the city from 1934 and who only left after Pearl Harbor. The book combines the sharp observations of a journalist with an eye for fascinating detail, such as the nuanced wording of the death notices of soldiers and the impact of rationing on the population.
Berlin Diary, 1934-1941 : The Rise of the Third Reich: As chief of Universal News Service's Berlin office and later a broadcaster for CBS, William L. Shirer witnessed and recorded the rise to international power of Hitler and the Nazis. This is Shirer's diary of events between 1934 and 1941.
As a born and bred Mainer, there are dozens of great books I could recommend set in the Pine Tree State. But the five I’ve curated capture, for me, the diversity of the Maine culture, from the long-gone loggers who made their living from the woods to the often-overlooked Indigenous communities to the mill towns struggling to survive. When a non-Mainer thinks of our state, what usually comes to mind are quaint coastal villages, lighthouses, lobster… And while those things are part of what makes Maine the place it is, there exists, both on and off the page, plenty of other experiences and histories to discover here.
Even though Jewett wrote the stories in this book in the late 1800s, there is a timeless feeling to her prose that reverberates today.
I love Jewett’s attention to and reverence for the natural beauty that surrounds the fictional town of Dunnet Landing. Her descriptions of the Maine coastline—a blend of craggy rocks, forest, meadows, and sea—are visceral, sensory, and alluring. Jewett also nicely captures the hardworking, humorous, quietly resilient spirit of the year-round residents of Dunnet Landing, with a particularly keen and kind eye toward her female characters.
Her care for the everyday rituals of life, the small moments that make up an existence, are lovingly rendered and evocative. There’s a reason this is a Maine classic.
A rich collection of classic American literature potraying the beauty of a 19th-century New England town.
A female writer comes one summer to Dunnet Landing, a Maine seacoast town, where she follows the lonely inhabitants of once-prosperous coastal communities. Here, lives are molded by the long Maine winters, rock-filled fields and strong resourceful women.
Throughout Sarah Orne Jewett’s novel and stories, these quiet tales of a simpler American life capture the inspirational in the everyday: the importance of honest friendships, the value of family, and the gift of community.
“Their counterparts are in every village in the world, thank heaven,…
I was born in New Jersey to an American mother and an Iranian father. I spent the first twenty years of my life living both in Tehran and New York, striving to fit and blend into whatever culture I happened to occupy at a given moment. I whined about this, wishing I was one thing or another. But after the 1979 Islamic Revolution erupted and my family was permanently exiled, I learned the true meaning of being careful about what you wish for. To connect with my lost Persian heritage, I began to write about it, and to write about living in the diaspora. It’s how I make sense of the world.
This is a memoir by a 32-year-old Iranian-American journalist who, in 2009, was accused and sentenced to 8 years in Evin Prison for being an American spy. Paraphrasing my review inThe San Francisco Chronicle, Saberi's skillful reconstruction of dialogue leads to a spot-on chronicle of the paranoia and utter buffoonery of the Iranian government and its apparatchiks. I was especially impressed by the way she survives her time in solitary confinement – the resources of her mind that keep her sane. Beyond that, this memoir is a kind of coming-of-age story for those of us in the diaspora who can be a bit naïve about how safe we are as journalists and US citizens in dictatorships. Saberi is freed after 4 months, thanks to international pressures, but she’s haunted by those she met in prison who are left behind.
“Between Two Worlds is an extraordinary story of how an innocent young woman got caught up in the current of political events and met individuals whose stories vividly depict human rights violations in Iran.” — Shirin Ebadi, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize
Between Two World is the harrowing chronicle of Iranian-American journalist Roxana Saberi’s imprisonment in Iran—as well as a penetrating look at Iran and its political tensions. Here for the first time is the full story of Saberi’s arrest and imprisonment, which drew international attention as a cause célèbre from Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and leaders across the…
I’m the author of the critically acclaimed Geneva Chase Crime Reporter series. I live and write on a barrier island on the coast of North Carolina with my wife, Cindy, and Annie, our Shih-Tzu. I’ve had a long career working for newspapers and magazines, primarily in New England and New York, and I’m currently working on my next novel.
Mr. Belsky’s media background is in newspapers, magazines, and TV/digital news. Yesterday’s News is the first in his series featuring Clare Carlson, the hard-driving and tenacious news director for Channel 10 in New York City. When eleven-year-old Lucy Devlin disappeared on her way to school more than a decade ago, it became one of the most famous missing child cases in history. The story turned reporter Clare Carlson into a media superstar overnight.
Now Clare once again plunges back into this sensational story. With new evidence, new victims, and new suspects—too many suspects. Everyone from members of a motorcycle gang to a prominent politician running for a US Senate seat seems to have secrets they’re hiding about what really might have happened to Lucy Devlin.
I love Mr. Belsky’s Clare Carlson series because they’re fast-paced and thought out and the protagonist is easy to identify with.
“Tell me what happened to my daughter?” For fifteen years this anguished plea has haunted reporter Clare Carlson
When eleven-year-old Lucy Devlin disappeared on her way to school more than a decade ago, it became one of the most famous missing child cases in history.
The story turned reporter Clare Carlson into a media superstar overnight. Clare broke exclusive after exclusive. She had unprecedented access to the Devlin family as she wrote about the heartbreaking search for their young daughter. She later won a Pulitzer Prize for her extraordinary coverage of the case.
As a writer, reader, and human, I’m drawn to complex stories about motherhood. It’s something we can choose, or something that can be forced upon us. Our relationships with our own mothers shape our entire lives. For my book She’s Not Home, I spent a lot of time deepening Sheryl, the mother’s, character. Early versions of the manuscript received criticism for her being too easily villainize. Too two-dimensional. Readers wanted a complex, heartbreaking character. I went to a very painful place to give Sheryl a richer voice. Here are a few books I love that also face the pain and complexity of motherhood and mothering head-on.
I don’t even think I was through the first chapter before I cried over this book.
Mary Louise Kelly writes frankly and poignantly about the nature of time as it pertains to raising children. She does not apologize for being good at her job, nor for the essential part of herself who needs to be immersed in it.
At the same time, she is unsparingly vulnerable about the tradeoffs: the times, good and bad, she has missed with her kids. As a writer who couldn’t stop writing to be a full-time parent if I tried, Kelly’s words resonated with me from the first page to the last.
This memoir is a gift to ambitious, big-hearted moms everywhere.
“This voice-driven, relatable, heartfelt and emotional story will make any parent tear up.” ―Good Morning America, “15 Delightful Books Perfect for Spring Reading”
Operating Instructions meets Glennon Doyle in this new book by famed NPR reporter Mary Louise Kelly that is destined to become a classic―about the year before her son goes to college―and the joys, losses and surprises that happen along the way.
The time for do-overs is over.
Ever since she became a parent, Mary Louise Kelly has said “next year.” Next year will be the year she makes it to her…
