10 books like Swann's Way

By Marcel Proust, CK Scott Moncrieff (translator),

Here are 10 books that authors have personally recommended if you like Swann's Way. Shepherd is a community of 7,000+ authors sharing their favorite books with the world.

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A Moveable Feast

By Ernest Hemingway,

Book cover of A Moveable Feast

When I’m teaching or mentoring in the craft of writing, one of the things I most often recommend is to “read Hemmingway.” For this book, it’s not just the lively descriptions of some very famous authors and the 1920s Paris literary scene, it’s how these descriptions are told – Hemmingway’s language is deceptively simple. It is “bare bones” writing, and yet it conveys so much. And, I think it’s important for writers to see how Hemmingway uses language and what he accomplishes with it.

A Moveable Feast

By Ernest Hemingway,

Why should I read it?

10 authors picked A Moveable Feast as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Published posthumously in 1964, A Moveable Feast remains one of Ernest Hemingway's most beloved works. Since Hemingway's personal papers were released in 1979, scholars have examined and debated the changes made to the text before publication. Now this new special restored edition presents the original manuscript as the author prepared it to be published.

Featuring a personal foreword by Patrick Hemingway, Ernest's sole surviving son, and an introduction by the editor and grandson of the author, Sean Hemingway, this new edition also includes a number of unfinished, never-before-published Paris sketches revealing experiences that Hemingway had with his son Jack and…


On Writing

By Stephen King,

Book cover of On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

This, unlike my other picks, is a work of nonfiction. It’s a treatise on the craft of writing, actually, and one of my favorites.

I’m including it because if you’re a fan of reading books with strong elements of escapism and world-building, there’s a good chance that one day you will want to write books with strong elements of escapism and worldbuilding! And what better way than to learn from a master himself?

Not only does King offer general advice (like, don’t watch tv), he weaves a surprising amount of practical advice into this enjoyable read, too (stay away from adverbs and long paragraphs). If you think one day you’d like to write books, read this one!

On Writing

By Stephen King,

Why should I read it?

15 authors picked On Writing as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Twentieth Anniversary Edition with Contributions from Joe Hill and Owen King

ONE OF TIME MAGAZINE’S TOP 100 NONFICTION BOOKS OF ALL TIME

Immensely helpful and illuminating to any aspiring writer, this special edition of Stephen King’s critically lauded, million-copy bestseller shares the experiences, habits, and convictions that have shaped him and his work.

“Long live the King” hailed Entertainment Weekly upon publication of Stephen King’s On Writing. Part memoir, part master class by one of the bestselling authors of all time, this superb volume is a revealing and practical view of the writer’s craft, comprising the basic tools of the…


Alfred Dreyfus

By Vincent Duclert,

Book cover of Alfred Dreyfus:  L’Honneur d’un patriote

This is the best history of the Dreyfus Affair and I wish it were available in English. Whereas most histories of the Affair cast Dreyfus as a hapless victim or as a patriotic automaton, who might not have even been a Dreyfusard had he not been Dreyfus, Duclert shows him to have been a true hero, whose super-human resolve and fortitude eventually allowed justice to prevail. Dreyfus emerges not as a martyr to antisemitism but as the first example of the resistance hero, the model for the struggle against authoritarianism and state terror in the twentieth century.

Alfred Dreyfus

By Vincent Duclert,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Alfred Dreyfus as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Des milliers de livres existent sur l'affaire à laquelle Alfred Dreyfus a donné son nom, mais nul n'a jamais écrit sa biographie. Curieuse, troublante lacune? Ne fallait-il pas montrer le rôle éminent que cette figure ignorée, déformée (quasi niée jusque chez une partie des dreyfusards), a joué dans le combat pour la vérité et la justice ? Certes Lazare, Zola, Péguy, Jaurès, Clemenceau et d'autres ont été nécessaires, mais sans le concours actif du principal intéressé (et de sa famille), y aurait-il eu seulement une affaire ? Un condamné qui se fût abandonné, qui eût capitulé devant la souffrance morale…


The House of Fragile Things

By James McAuley,

Book cover of The House of Fragile Things: Jewish Art Collectors and the Fall of France

There’s so much texture on this cover, and the Renoir painting stands out because it’s probably the most recognizable part. The story involves Irene Cahen d’Anvers, the woman who sat for Renoir as a young girl, and how she came from a prominent Jewish family in France. Irene made some pivotal decisions that would forever change the lives of her ex-husband and daughter.

The House of Fragile Things

By James McAuley,

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked The House of Fragile Things as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

A powerful history of Jewish art collectors in France, and how an embrace of art and beauty was met with hatred and destruction

"The depths of French anti-Semitism is the stunning subject that Mr. McAuley lays bare. . . . [He] tells this haunting saga in eloquent detail. As French anti-Semitism rises once again today, the effect is nothing less than chilling."-Diane Cole, Wall Street Journal

"Elegantly written and deeply moving. . . . [A] haunting book."-David Bell, New York Review of Books

In the dramatic years between 1870 and the end of World War II, a number of prominent…


The Journal of Hélène Berr

By Hélène Berr,

Book cover of The Journal of Hélène Berr

Hélène Berr was the French Anne Frank: a university student during the German Occupation, she kept a journal of her experience, which her family kept private until 2008, when it became a publishing sensation. The journal covers the period from 1942, when Jews were forced to wear the yellow star, until her arrest in 1944. Gifted with a literary sensibility, Hélène observes the world around her as the walls began to close in, but still manages to grasp moments of love and joy amid the suffering. A precious record of day-to-day life in Occupied France, the journal also provides that rarest of Holocaust narratives: the voice of someone who did not survive.

The Journal of Hélène Berr

By Hélène Berr,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Journal of Hélène Berr as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Not since The Diary of Anne Frank has there been such a book as this: The joyful but ultimately heartbreaking journal of a young Jewish woman in occupied Paris, now being published for the first time, 63 years after her death in a Nazi concentration camp. On April 7, 1942, H&eacutel&egravene Berr, a 21-year-old Jewish student of English literature at the Sorbonne, took up her pen and started to keep a journal, writing with verve and style about her everyday life in Paris - about her studies, her friends, her growing affection for the"boy with the grey eyes," about the…


La Place de l’étoile

By Patrick Modiano, Frank Wynne (translator),

Book cover of La Place de l’étoile

This is the first novel by Modiano, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2014.  It has been translated into English but with a French title, which contains a pun that can’t be translated (referring both to a location in Paris and to the infamous badge imposed by the Nazis). A darkly comic and shocking send-up of French antisemitic literature, the novel features a clownish protagonist named Raphaël Schlemilovitch who embraces every antisemitic stereotype imaginable, becoming in turn, a cosmopolitan, a traitor, a collaborator, and a pimp before winding up on the couch of Sigmund Freud begging to be put out of his misery.  Modiano wrote this novel to exorcise the demons of French literature and it helped him carve out a place as a distinctly Jewish voice in the French literary pantheon.

La Place de l’étoile

By Patrick Modiano, Frank Wynne (translator),

Why should I read it?

1 author picked La Place de l’étoile as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

The first novel by the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature 2014, which with The Night Watch and Ring Roads forms a trilogy of the Occupation 'A Marcel Proust of our time' Peter Englund, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy 'Modiano is the poet of the Occupation and a spokesman for the disappeared, and I am thrilled that the Swedish Academy has recognised him' Rupert Thomson, Guardian Modiano's debut novel is a sardonic, often grotesque satire of France during the Nazi occupation. We are immediately plunged into the hallucinatory imagination of Raphael Schlemilovitch, a young Jewish man, torn between…


Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour

By J.D. Salinger,

Book cover of Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction

Okay. Fine. Maybe I only think this book is about loss because I know that, in later books, the same Glass family suffers losses and this sets the stage. But this is a story about a promise that is never realized and a relationship that is becoming progressively distant—and, in it, there is a sense of being lost if not having experienced a loss, specifically. In it, Buddy Glass takes Army leave to attend his brother’s wedding, but his brother never shows up. Somehow, Buddy winds up stuck in a limo with a group of disgruntled guests from whom he tries to hide his identity. In his sense of isolation, but also his awareness of the situation’s absurdity, we find humor and also sadness.

Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour

By J.D. Salinger,

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

A Note from the Author: The two long pieces in this book originally came out in The New Yorker - RAISE HIGH THE ROOF BEAM, CARPENTERS in 1955, SEYMOUR - An Introduction in 1959. Whatever their differences in mood or effect, they are both very much concerned with Seymour Glass, who is the main character in my series about the Glass family. Oddly, the joys and satisfactions of working on the Glass family peculiarly increase and deepen for me with the years. I can't say why, though. Not, at least, outside the casino proper of my fiction.

'The Glasses are…


Death in the Afternoon

By Ernest Hemingway,

Book cover of Death in the Afternoon

Officially a book about bullfighting, with so many digressions that they become the book, the finest such sections delve deeply into the art and practice of writing, most extraordinarily in the thrilling, moving final pages. It is also in this great book that for the first time in print Hemingway articulates his principle that you can leave something out of what you are writing if you know you are leaving it out.

Death in the Afternoon

By Ernest Hemingway,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Death in the Afternoon as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Ernest Hemingway's classic portrait of the pageantry of bullfighting.

'I was trying to learn to write, commencing with the simplest things, and one of the simplest things of all and the most fundamental is violent death'

This is Hemingway's classic portrait of the pageantry of bullfighting. Here are the sights, the sounds, the excitement, and above all, the knowledge, that fuelled Hemingway's passion for Spain and the bullfight. This remarkable book contains some of his finest writing, inspired by the intense life, as well as the inevitable death, of those hot, violent afternoons.

'Hemingway's style, at its best, is a…


The Inquisitor's Tale

By Adam Gidwitz, Hatem Aly (illustrator),

Book cover of The Inquisitor's Tale: Or, the Three Magical Children and Their Holy Dog

A warm inn, and a stranger’s tale gather together a group of travelers as they become fascinated by the story of three gifted children that is sweeping the land. I loved the way this book brought the story of the people in the inn and the marvelous children together step by step. Peppered with real historical figures and legends this book is a must-read for the middle-grade medieval enthusiast. 

The Inquisitor's Tale

By Adam Gidwitz, Hatem Aly (illustrator),

Why should I read it?

3 authors picked The Inquisitor's Tale as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

A Newbery Honor Book
Winner of the Sydney Taylor Book Award

An exciting and hilarious medieval adventure from the bestselling author of A Tale Dark and Grimm. Beautifully illustrated throughout by Hatem Aly!

A New York Times Bestseller A New York Times Editor's Choice A New York Times Notable Children's Book A People Magazine Kid Pick A Washington Post Best Children's Book A Wall Street Journal Best Children's Book An Entertainment Weekly Best Middle Grade Book A Booklist Best Book A Horn Book Fanfare Best Book A Kirkus Reviews Best Book A Publishers Weekly Best Book A School Library Journal…


No Place to Lay One's Head

By Francoise Frenkel,

Book cover of No Place to Lay One's Head

This incredible memoir reads like a thriller. Polish-born Francoise ran a Berlin bookshop until she was forced to flee from Nazi persecution, first to Paris, then to Southern France. The term ‘unputdownable’ is a terrible cliché, but was literally the case for me with this breathtaking story of escape and survival. Clear your diary before you open the covers of this compelling book.

No Place to Lay One's Head

By Francoise Frenkel,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked No Place to Lay One's Head as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

In 1921, Francoise Frenkel - a Jewish woman from Poland - opens her first bookshop in Berlin. It is a dream come true. The dream lasts nearly two decades. Then suddenly, it ends.

It ends after police confiscations and the Night of Broken Glass, as Jewish shops and businesses are smashed to pieces. It ends when no one protests. So Francoise flees to France, just weeks before war breaks out.

In Paris, on the wireless and in the newspapers, horror has made itself at home. When the city is bombed, Francoise seeks refuge in Avignon, then Nice. She fears she…


5 book lists we think you will like!

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