Here are 80 books that The Modern Bohemian Table fans have personally recommended if you like
The Modern Bohemian Table.
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I was a clothing designer in NYC in a previous life. I would cram friends into my small apartment and have dinner parties whenever I could. I love food, cooking, and entertaining. Food is a way to show love, but for me, cooking was also a way to flex my creative muscle outside a creatively and emotionally draining industry. For years I mused about how to pivot into the food industry without being a classically trained chef. Upon being laid off in 2020 the door was finally opened for me to move on a begin a career in food styling and photography. Once Upon a Rind in Hollywood is my first cookbook.
Athena Calderone welcomes you into her casual, cool, and elegant world in Cook Beautiful.
Recipes are listed by season, using simple and healthy ingredients at their peak of freshness. The recipes are simple and straightforward and include gorgeous and “swoon-worthy” photos and tips explaining how to style and plate your meal for maximum impact and little effort.
The recipes in Cook Beautiful are equally impressive for an intimate dinner party, yet simple enough to serve on a Tuesday night. Many of the seasonal dishes have made it into my own dinner rotation.
The debut cookbook from Athena Calderone, creator of EyeSwoon, with 100 seasonal recipes for meals as gorgeous as they are delicious.
In Cook Beautiful, Athena reveals the secrets to preparing and presenting unforgettable meals. As the voice and curator behind EyeSwoon, an online lifestyle destination for food, entertaining, fashion, and interior design, Athena cooks with top chefs, hosts incredible dinners, and designs stunning tablescapes, while emphasizing the importance of balancing the visual elements of each dish with incredible flavors. In her debut cookbook, she's finally showing the rest of us how to achieve her impeccable yet approachable cooking style.
As a child of divorce who moved around often, cooking and entertaining was consistent in my life on both sides of my family. The comforting smells and traditions around food in the home became a religion to me—something I could count on. My grandmother was a hostess to be admired—her impeccable entertaining etiquette was where my love of hosting was born. My degree in psychology lends itself to sharing what’s so important about creating intentional gatherings at the table. My education and passion for creative arts pair well with my husband’s expertise as an Architect, where we understand the importance of creating inviting spaces for people to occupy.
Another lifestyle cookbook with recipes and tips that are simple, comforting, and family-friendly. Kristin shares not only recipes for healthy comfort foods, but also the staple ingredients she keeps in her pantry. I love how she offers gluten and dairy-free alternatives in her recipes and how she uses natural sweeteners such as maple syrup and honey. The Nashville Hot Chicken Salad cups and the Creamy Roasted Veggie Pasta Salad are my two favorite dishes to make from this book—and my family agrees!
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The TV star and author of True Roots shares 130+ of her favorite recipes for healthy, natural, wholesome comfort food in this essential cookbook.
“Kristin’s family-friendly, decadently ‘health-ified’ recipes will have you reliving favorite memories and making delicious new ones bite after bite!”—Daphne Oz, Emmy Award-winning television host and bestselling author
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST COOKBOOKS OF THE YEAR BY DELISH
Over the past few years, Kristin Cavallari has become known for the healthy recipes she cooks at home for her family. In her bestselling cookbook, True Roots, she shared the recipes that keep…
As a child of divorce who moved around often, cooking and entertaining was consistent in my life on both sides of my family. The comforting smells and traditions around food in the home became a religion to me—something I could count on. My grandmother was a hostess to be admired—her impeccable entertaining etiquette was where my love of hosting was born. My degree in psychology lends itself to sharing what’s so important about creating intentional gatherings at the table. My education and passion for creative arts pair well with my husband’s expertise as an Architect, where we understand the importance of creating inviting spaces for people to occupy.
What a beautiful tribute this cookbook is to immigrant women from around the world. This book is a collection of family recipes from around the world—Anna’s realization that she didn’t know how to make her mother’s meatballs led to the curiosity of how many other family recipes would be lost or forgotten if not written down. The result is a collection of delicious international recipes with beautiful stories behind them that inspire you to want to get in the kitchen and also write down your favorite beloved family recipes.
A gorgeous, full-color illustrated cookbook and personal cultural history, filled with 100 mouthwatering recipes from around the world, that celebrates the culinary traditions of strong, empowering immigrant women and the remarkable diversity that is American food.
Born in Italy, Anna Francese Gass came to the United States as a young child and grew up eating her mother's Italian cooking. But when this professional cook realized she did not know how to make her family's beloved meatballs-a recipe that existed only in her mother's memory-Anna embarked on a project to record and preserve her mother's recipes for generations to come.
As a child of divorce who moved around often, cooking and entertaining was consistent in my life on both sides of my family. The comforting smells and traditions around food in the home became a religion to me—something I could count on. My grandmother was a hostess to be admired—her impeccable entertaining etiquette was where my love of hosting was born. My degree in psychology lends itself to sharing what’s so important about creating intentional gatherings at the table. My education and passion for creative arts pair well with my husband’s expertise as an Architect, where we understand the importance of creating inviting spaces for people to occupy.
We all love to know what someone we admire does beyond the scope of what they are most known for. I love how this cookbook goes beyond recipes—Giada also shares her beauty secrets such as hair and makeup routines, how she stays trim with lifestyle and exercise, tips for choosing healthy options when eating out, and what she packs for snacks while on the go. It’s truly a lifestyle that I want to subscribe to!
Food Network's most beautiful star shares her secrets for staying fit and feeling great in this gorgeous, practical book with healthy recipes including nutritional information, and personal lifestyle and beauty tips.
The number one question that Giada De Laurentiis is asked by fans is, "How do you stay so trim?" Admirers then ask about her favorite recipes, her nail polish color, her exercise routine. . . and much more. In Giada's Feel Good Food, she answers all of these questions in her most personal and also most hardworking book yet.
Here are 120 recipes for breakfasts, juices, lunches, snacks, dinners,…
Growing up in an intellectual household with a New Yorker subscription, I became a fan of the short story early on, with J.D. Salinger, Ann Beattie, and Raymond Carver forming a baseline of personal taste and inspiration. I especially love stories that resonate with my own sense of yearning for life and love—and the deep losses that inevitably come our way. Decades of reading would pass before I began writing stories myself, and I’m thrilled to have a chance to recommend these moving and beautifully written collections.
I’ve been a fan of Tessa Hadley’s for years and tore through this book from 2023. There’s so much humor and surprise in these stories. And I loved the vivid details and painfully sharp contrast between what her characters hope for and what they wind up with in the aftermath of both minor and major events.
Heartbreaking tales of everyday life, of family and romantic relationships, filled with nuanced gestures, fateful misunderstandings, and raw emotion. I couldn’t ask for more from a story collection.
Sunday Times bestseller Tessa Hadley explores the big consequences of small events in this new collection
'You've either got it or you haven't. Hadley's got it' FINANCIAL TIMES
Heloise's father died in a car crash when she was a little girl; at a dinner party in her forties, she meets someone connected to that long-ago tragedy. Janey's bohemian mother plans to marry a man close to Janey's own age - everything changes when an accident interrupts the wedding party. A daughter caring for her elderly mother during the pandemic becomes obsessed with the woman next door; in the wake of…
I’ve been writing queer historical romances/murder mysteries since the third grade when I accidentally wrote a pretty homoerotic Sherlock Holmes fanfiction despite being too young to know what any of those words meant. I’m now both a writer and reader of the genre and while I’m delighted that so many other people love gay historical romance as much as I do, I feel like I always see the same few books recommended. I wanted to share some of my lesser-known favorites so that they can get the love they richly deserve and so that there are more people who can geek-out about them with me!
Honestly, I could recommend all of Bonnie Dee’s back catalog, but this one in particular has always stuck with me. I think what I love most is that the setup seems like a standard Beauty and the Beast type tale, but instead, a thoughtful (and incredibly hot!) novel that doesn’t shy away from the fact that one of the characters is far from traditionally handsome, but embraces it.
I really cheered him on as he began to see himself in a new light, the way the man who loves him sees him.
Creating love from darkness is the greatest art…Living a bohemian lifestyle in Paris is wonderful for Teddy Dandridge, but disastrous for his finances. His unconventional artistic creations find few buyers. After a year of failure, he returns to England to fulfill a portrait commission for a wealthy family, but he finds a different, source of inspiration secreted away in their sprawling house. Isolated and rejected by his family, Phineas Abernathy haunts the west wing like a ghost. A physical deformity has locked him away from society for all his life. Filling his days with reading and drawing, he dreams of…
My childhood, very much shaped by World War II, led me the study of international relations and political psychology. I have written numerous books on conflict management and prevention, and also on ancient Greek thinkers and writers, and the elusive nature of knowledge. In recent years I have begun to explore these themes in fiction. This shift has been exhilarating and liberating and provides me the opportunity to present the tragic understanding of life and politics to a larger audience.
Mansfield is another pioneering, modernist
writer, whose psychologically driven characters have sudden epiphanies.
Insights of this kind are extremely difficult to make credible in stories yet
she invariably succeeds. Understanding how she pulls this off enriched my
understanding of how plots work and how personalities are depicted. I might
also add that I am married to a New Zealand and some time in that country, so
nice to have a local, so to speak, author.
This was Katherine Mansfield's last collection of short stories to be published during her lifetime. They are The Garden Party, A Dill Pickle, Her First Ball, The Doll's House, The Daughters of the Late Colonel and A Cup of Tea. The stories vary in length and tone, yet all are sensitive revelations of human behaviour that reveal Mansfield's supreme talent as an innovator who freed the story from its conventions and gave it a new strength and prestige.
As a lifelong computer nerd, I’m disappointed by the way we’re portrayed in the media. If you believe the stories, nerds are awkward and self-centered, with no room in their compulsive worldview for anything outside of their singular goals. This is absurd. Sure, some nerds are awkward and self-centered, but so are most of the people on this planet. To set the record straight, I’ve written stories about the many nerds I know, all of them with rich lives that extend far beyond their love of computers. These people are adventurers, jokesters, musicians, athletes, motorheads, connoisseurs, and more, with extreme passions that defy nerdiness.
As a kid, I loved these tales of the Glass children, smart and nerdy but interesting, fully developed, and passionate about their creative outlets. Franny and Zooey are two from the family, and Salinger writes about others in Nine Stories, as well as Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters & Seymour: An Introduction.
These children validated my life, and I wanted all of them as my brothers and sisters.
"Perhaps the best book by the foremost stylist of his generation" (New York Times), J. D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey collects two works of fiction about the Glass family originally published in The New Yorker.
"Everything everybody does is so--I don't know--not wrong, or even mean, or even stupid necessarily. But just so tiny and meaningless and--sad-making. And the worst part is, if you go bohemian or something crazy like that, you're conforming just as much only in a different way."
A novel in two halves, Franny and Zooey brilliantly captures the emotional strains and traumas of entering adulthood. It…
I went through major surgery when I was in eighth grade. The physical pain was bad, but what hurt more was the emotional side. When I returned to school, the friend groups had shifted, shutting me out because of my extended absence. I had to face that time in life alone. Perhaps that’s why I’m drawn to works about kids who have to face challenges on their own. When we go through hard times, our true selves come out. They have to; we have no one else. We can’t pretend. We can only try to make it. The books I like show characters that shine through their hardships.
I never thought I’d love a book written in verse; poetry just isn’t my thing. Yet, Chris Baron’s work took my breath away. I was mesmerized and couldn’t put it down.
It’s about Ari, an overweight kid, who struggles with his self-worth because of his size. I’ve struggled with my weight too–all my life. So I understood what he was going through. It broke my heart when Ari harmed himself, but I appreciated seeing him make it through this tough time. He showed determination and grit.
"Beautifully written, brilliant, and necessary," (Matt de la Pena, Newbery Medalist), here is a body-positive book about how a boy deals with fat-shaming.
Ari has body-image issues. After a move across the country, his parents work selling and promoting his mother's paintings and sculptures. Ari's bohemian mother needs space to create, and his father is gone for long stretches of time on "sales" trips.
Meanwhile, Ari makes new friends: Pick, the gamer; the artsy Jorge, and the troubled Lisa. He is also relentlessly bullied because he's overweight, but he can't tell his parents―they're simply not around enough to listen.
I'm a contemporary romance writer with two novels: No Hard Feelings and Crushing, stories about complex, messy women making mistakes and learning from them. As I work on my third novel, I'm remembering how hard it is to write when you're in a reading rut. Sometimes every book I pick up is disappointing, and reading feels like a chore, and I risk losing momentum. Sometimes I need something familiar to get back on track and remember why I love my job. These books feel like a long exhale. I can come to them with an overloaded brain, bad moods and doubt and discontent, and turn the last page restored.
While not exactly a light read – it contains adult explorations of trauma and violence – Purcell’s writing is drum-tight and entirely absorbing.
This book broke my months-long reading slump and writer's block, reminding me that all it takes to fall in love with stories again is one really, really good one. I’m not much of an annotator, but the pages of my copy are splattered with pen, most often exclamation marks and underlines and obscene exclamations of enthusiasm and grief.
Split between multiple perspectives, locations, and decades, The Lessons is a heart-wrenching romance without fluff, tropes, and suspended disbeliefs. A story of expectations and disappointments, promises and betrayals, it’s full of sharp observations about writing and writers, social constructs, and human behaviour.
I devoured it in days, and can’t wait to forget all the details so I can come back to it and fall in love all over…
What if your first love was your one and only chance of happiness? In our lives, some promises are easily forgotten, while others come to haunt us with tragic results. From the bestselling author of The Girl on the Page comes The Lessons, a compelling novel about love and betrayal.
1961: When teens Daisy and Harry meet, it feels so right they promise to love each other forever, but in 1960s England everything is stacked against them: class, education, expectations. When Daisy is sent by her parents to live with her glamorous, bohemian Aunt Jane, a novelist working on her…
