Here are 100 books that The Most of Nora Ephron fans have personally recommended if you like
The Most of Nora Ephron.
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I inherited an offbeat sense of humor from my mother, who encouraged me to create stories about outrageous subjects, like cats doing “people things.” I’m grateful to have made a living writing about such things, as well as observations about my own humorous experiences in essays, calendars, and books. I’ve always looked to other funny creatives for inspiration, and the books on my list reflect some of my favorites.
I love the rawness of Samantha Irby’s writing—she says it like it is. When I read her essays, I’m peeking in on her uncensored thoughts about the mundane, which are unrefined, real, and hysterical to me. Like many of us, I enjoy reading/hearing someone not trying to “polish a turd.”
While reading her book, my mind equally thinks: "I CANNOT believe she just wrote that” and “Tell me MORE.”
'Irby might be our great bard of quarantine.' New York Times
In this painfully funny collection, Samantha Irby captures powerful emotional truths while chronicling the rubbish bin she calls her life. From an ill-fated pilgrimage to Nashville to scatter her estranged father's ashes to awkward sexual encounters to the world's first completely honest job application, and more, sometimes you just have to laugh, even when your life is permanently pear-shaped.
'I cannot remember the last time I was so moved by a book. As close to perfect as an essay collection can get.' Roxane Gay 'Hilarious. I love it.' Candice…
I have been a champion of the essay form for some time, starting with my popular anthology Art of the Personal Essay and extending to my more recent trio of anthologies of the American essay. At the same time I have written four personal essay collections of my own, and I know I am really cooking when I can still laugh or at least smile at my jokes after the fifth or tenth reading of a piece I wrote. I have to admit that I can only appreciate writing (by myself or others) that is amusing or at least ironic, never solemn: to me the truth of existence is comic, like it or not.
I love Max, he always makes me laugh because he is so naughty and mischievous. He is utterly unafraid of going against the grain of social propriety, or admitting to his own selfish motives, jealousies, and contrariety. He has a wonderfully conversational style that engages the reader without pandering. (I should also admit that I wrote the introduction to this collection).
Virginia Woolf called Max Beerbohm “the prince” of essayists, F. W. Dupee praised his “whim of iron” and “cleverness amounting to genius,” while Beerbohm himself noted that “only the insane take themselves quite seriously.” From his precocious debut as a dandy in 1890s Oxford until he put his pen aside in the aftermath of World War II, Beerbohm was recognized as an incomparable observer of modern life and an essayist whose voice was always and only his own. Here Phillip Lopate, one of the finest essayists of our day, has selected the finest of Beerbohm’s essays.…
I have been a champion of the essay form for some time, starting with my popular anthology Art of the Personal Essay and extending to my more recent trio of anthologies of the American essay. At the same time I have written four personal essay collections of my own, and I know I am really cooking when I can still laugh or at least smile at my jokes after the fifth or tenth reading of a piece I wrote. I have to admit that I can only appreciate writing (by myself or others) that is amusing or at least ironic, never solemn: to me the truth of existence is comic, like it or not.
This classic of nineteenth-century English literature never dates, because Lamb is so refreshingly human and humane, and makes fun of himself so irreverently. Whether he is writing about his lack of musical gifts in “A Chapter on Ears” or spoofing the scholars in “A Dissertation Upon Roast Pig” or lamenting his own bachelorhood in “Dream Children,” he has set the standard for comic poignancy, for that paradox of laughter through tears.
Charles Lamb was considered the most delightful of English essayists in the middle of the 19th century. Essays of Elia is a collection of his finest work. Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. Pomona Press are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.
Do you trust anyone without a sense of humor? Neither do I. I’ve always had an odd sense of humor. Laughter is good for the soul. I don’t know if I’m an expert, but I’ve certainly spent decades watching and reading comedies. And while I love writing serious and dark fiction, something cute and funny now and then feels like a nice balance. My personal taste runs from slapstick to standup to snappy scenes and witty dialog. I like smart humor, and because I had the wittiest dad, I can even appreciate a well-done dad joke.
I could potentially recommend any of Sedaris’ early works. Pick one, you won’t regret it.
Sedaris has a way of taking our most mundane lives and making them hilarious. His style can be best described as memoirs meet standup comedy. We’ve all had those weird, awkward family moments. Sedaris does a great job of making them funny. Warning: people tend to look at you rather oddly and give you space when you listen to the audiobook while out walking alone.
David Sedaris's remarkable ability to uncover the hilarious absurdity teeming just below the surface of everyday life is elevated to wilder and more entertaining heights than ever in this new book of stories. Sedaris proceeds from bizarre conundrums of daily life - the etiquette of having a lozenge fall from your mouth into the lap of a fellow passenger or how to soundproof your windows with LP covers against neurotic songbirds - to the most deeply resonant human truths. Taking in the parasitic worm that once lived in his mother-in-law's leg, an encounter with a dingo and the purchase of…
If you’re anything like me, you are driven by your passions. And the key to stoking our passions is finding inspiration—sometimes in the most unlikely of literary places. The study of literature is intrinsically about the act of knowing. It is about knowing the world—a vast, uncharted universe of people and places, ideas, and emotions. But in helping us to know the world, literature is mostly about coming to know yourself. It is about exploring the recesses of your mind, the vicissitudes of your memories, the weight and pleasure of your deepest, most personal experiences. It is about getting closer and ever closer to understanding your own essential truths—and yet never quite arriving there. It is, in short, the most intimate and transformative journey that you can possibly take through the lens of your mind’s eye. It is about you.
In his tragicomic novel The Good Soldier, Ford Madox Ford’s thickheaded narrator John Dowell trolls, over and over again, through the detritus of his life, searching vainly for the origins of his predicament—namely, that he has been duped by his wife and her lover, his supposedly best friend and the “good soldier” of the novel’s title. When Dowell finally succumbs to the utter hopelessness of his situation, he turns away from his audience in a brash attempt to bargain with a misbegotten universe, and his dreams of an impossible reconciliation with the world become our own: “Is there any terrestrial paradise where, amidst the whispering of the olive-leaves, people can be with whom they like and have what they like and take their ease in shadows and in coolness?” In his greatest moment of anguish and uncertainty, Dowell grasps for the poetry of language to sate his weary soul.
I’m a novelist and student of the imagination living in Honolulu. I actually write most of my fiction inside a volcano: Koko Crater, a botanical garden near my home. Fantasies, visions, hallucinations, or whatever we call those irrational powers that illuminate our inner life fascinate me. I’m particularly intrigued by the creative intelligence that scripts our dreams. And I love how this dramatic energy finds its way to the page, into the one form that most precisely defines who we are: story.
When I first read this novel at age 15, I knew upon finishing that I wanted to be a science fiction writer. The strangeness of the tale enchanted me. And, by dint of that spell, my mind opened to the author’s philosophical insights about identity, cultural dreaming, and sexuality. Set on a far-future Earth where humanity is a mythical memory, the narrator assumes an identity based on Orpheus – and so, lost love and music play witching roles. Meaning is elusive, and that's part of the book's charm. Meaning in this story is also allusive, and the many legendary and literary references in the telling wander far from their origins and lead us to unexpected associations with our own time and lives.
The Einstein Intersection won the Nebula Award for best science fiction novel of 1967. The surface story tells of the problems a member of an alien race, Lo Lobey, has assimilating the mythology of earth, where his kind have settled among the leftover artifacts of humanity. The deeper tale concerns, however, the way those who are "different" must deal with the dominant cultural ideology. The tale follows Lobey's mythic quest for his lost love, Friza. In luminous and hallucinated language, it explores what new myths might emerge from the detritus of the human world…
I’m an archaeologist, which means that I’ve been lucky enough to travel to many places to dig and survey ancient remains. What I’ve realized in handling those dusty old objects is that all over the world, in both past and present, people are defined by their stuff: what they made, used, broke, and threw away. Most compelling are the things that people cherished despite being worn or flawed, just like we have objects in our house that are broken or old but that we keep anyway.
Sh*t happens (bad relationships, business failures, burnt toast). That’s OK, says Scanlan, because making garbage is an essential part of any activity. In fact, you can’t get anywhere, or achieve any kind of personal or intellectual growth, without some detritus. To me, this explains why humans make so much trash of the kind that I’ve spent my life digging up in archaeological sites. And it makes me feel quite OK about spending a day writing stuff that might go straight into the shredder tomorrow…
This is the first work to examine the detritus of our culture in its full range; garbage in this sense is not only material waste and ruin, environmental degradation and so on, but also residual or 'broken' knowledge, useless concepts, the remainders of systems of intellectual and cultural thought. In this unique and original work (a kind of intellectual scavenging in its own right) the author shows why garbage is, perversely, the source of all that is valuable. The author considers how Western philosophy, science and technology attained mastery over nature through what can be seen as a prolonged act…
I’m a world historian with a special interest in religion. In particular, I’m excited by the possibility that traditional religious ideas and practices can be useful in our modern, often secular, society and in our individual lives. So often, I read books about religion that make their subject accessible to readers today, but at the cost of turning religion into a modern thing and removing its transformative potential as an alternative way to think about life. I keep these five books close by on my shelves because their creators use sympathy, grace, and sharp analysis to make religion accessible even while also keeping it true to itself.
The only work of fiction on this list, Motel of the Mysteries set me laughing, first at the book itself, then at historians more generally, and finally at myself.
Macaulay invites us to join a fictitious archaeological team from the future excavating a twentieth-century American motel that had been buried under a tsunami of junk mail. If this team is misunderstanding American culture so ridiculously and profoundly, how far have real historians missed the mark when writing about their subjects and their religions? If the Christians and Muslims of the fifteenth century read my Jesus book, would they be laughing at me?
This book makes me more cautious, more reflective, and more creative when I'm doing my own excavations of past religious cultures.
It is the year 4022; all of the ancient country of Usa has been buried under many feet of detritus from a catastrophe that occurred back in 1985. Imagine, then, the excitement that Howard Carson, an amateur archeologist at best, experienced when in crossing the perimeter of an abandoned excavation site he felt the ground give way beneath him and found himself at the bottom of a shaft, which, judging from the DO NOT DISTURB sign hanging from an archaic doorknob, was clearly the entrance to a still-sealed burial chamber. Carson's incredible discoveries, including the remains of two bodies, one…
I am a journalist with a background in performing arts and have spent much of my work life as a storyteller, fascinated by the process of knocking a narrative into shape, either for print or stage performance. My mother’s death prompted me to use those same skills to tell my own stories and the process has been the most satisfying of my professional life. As a memoirist of two books, my dreams have come true. My work has been shortlisted for awards, featured in national newspapers, special interest magazines, and by the BBC. I regularly speak to family history societies, book clubs, writer’s groups, and at literature festivals.
In the aftermath of a parent’s death, sifting through their possessions is a necessary but painful rite of passage. It can feel overwhelming and confrontational, especially if the relationship was difficult, as is the case here.
I loved how the author highlights specific objects from the detritus of her mother’s hoarding to piece together the hurts and distress of a woman she hardly knew. A complex mother and daughter story that comments authoritatively on the psychology behind hoarding and raises important questions about our material world and what our possessions reveal about our interior life.
I have written about some of these things in my own book and found this memoir at roughly the same period in my life. It stayed with me a long time after the final page.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Shortlisted for the James Tait Black biography prize 2019
'This extraordinary, beautiful memoir gripped me from the first page.' Clover Stroud, author of The Wild Other
What do our possessions say about us? Why do we project such meaning onto them?
Only after her mother's death does Susannah Walker discover how much of a hoarder she had become. Over the following months, she has to sort through a dilapidated house filled to the brim with rubbish and treasures, in search of a woman she'd never really known or understood in life. This is her last chance to piece together…
It’s all my father-in-law’s fault. Before I ran into him, I was a card-carrying “literary” high-brow. Shoot, I was reading Faulkner’s “The Bear” in high school and thought I would be the next generation Steinbeck if I ever got around to writing novels. But one weekend, while visiting my wife’s folks, I found myself with nothing to read—a problem solved by my father-in-law’s complete collection of Richard Stark novels. Those books knocked me head-over-heels, which is why when I did get around to writing novels, the first six were hard-edged crime fiction.
I love the way this book got me beneath the glossy veneer of our national capital and made me come to grips with the cold reality hiding there. And the perfectly imperfect guides who took me on that trip are unforgettable creations, which I ultimately discovered is par for the course for Pelecanos.
A fatal shooting that strikes too close to home leaves PI Derek Strange determined to find the killer - whatever the cost. From one of the award-winning writers of THE WIRE.
Set in darkest, downtown Washington, Hell to Pay begins with Quinn and Strange dealing with the usual detritus of the world's most violent city - a bent cop and a missing teenage-girl-turned-hooker - but then a senseless death on a sunny afternoon shakes even Derek Strange's existence.
A victim shot down by bullets meant for another; a tragic accident that strikes just too close to home. Strange's grief is…
