Here are 100 books that Table for Two fans have personally recommended if you like
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I'm fascinated by stories about complicated friendships because they speak to our eternal need to be part of something. Everyone wants to have friends, especially when we’re young, but what if those friendships aren’t good for us? What happens when self-interest motivates our social choices? It seems there’s often a fragile boundary between love and hate. This volatile intensity becomes addictive. I'm a Canadian writer with a BA in English from the University of Ottawa. When writing fiction, I love exploring the toxic threads of jealousy, ambition, and obsession that both bind us together and tear us apart.
I adored Charlotte and Rose’s heartbreaking friendship.
First, Charlotte and Rose come of age in the late nineties, a perfect pair with an inseparable bond taking on New York City. As they grow up, it’s their individual problems and decisions that loosen the bolts holding them together. Some friendships shape us into who we are, so losing a friend brings grief and anger.
Charlotte and Rose are both rich, fully realized characters with goals that don’t always align. Bauer’s brilliant prose makes this a book I could read again and again.
'The instant feminist classic our generation has been waiting for' Ada Calhoun, author of Why We Can't Sleep
What happens when growing up means growing apart?
1997. New York.
Earnest, bookish Rose.
Brash, extrovert Charlotte.
When they moved to New York in the late nineties, coffee cost less than a dollar and you could still smoke in bars. You could stay up drinking all night, sat in vinyl booths patched up with duct tape.
Everyone has their own New York, and for Rose and Charlotte it was a place to feed their ambition, a place to dance and party and…
I’m not as old as some of the characters in the books I’ve mentioned, but I’m getting there. With age, one learns to hold grief in one hand and gratitude in the other. The importance of friendship and community can hardly be overstated. I love reading books that represent older characters, especially women, as complex, life-embracing individuals without resorting to condescension. I strove to write such a book with Toby’s Last Resort. I’m not always writing about older characters, but in all my work, I want to dive below the surface, discover meaning in the ordinary, and treat my characters with respect.
Lillian is an 84-years old woman walking around New York City on New Year’s Eve.
She loves the city, made her way there as a young woman in advertising in the 30s, became well-known as a poet of light verse. She alternately reminisces about her life and encounters people you would not expect.
She remembers her life in pieces, the way one does, so the reader puts together the mystery.
I found her to be a delightful and refreshing character. The book is a beautiful lacing of the past with the promise of unexpected things to come.
A love letter to city life in all its guts and grandeur, Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk by Kathleen Rooney paints a portrait of a remarkable woman across the canvas of a changing America: from the Jazz Age to the onset of the AIDS epidemic; the Great Depression to the birth of hip-hop.
“In my reckless and undiscouraged youth,” Lillian Boxfish writes, “I worked in a walnut-paneled office thirteen floors above West Thirty-Fifth Street…”
She took 1930s New York by storm, working her way up writing copy for R.H. Macy’s to become the highest paid…
Our home was full of books. My mother routinely passed books to her firstborn, me. While she read widely, she loved mysteries, so I grew up devouring both classics and lesser-known whodunnits. Many of those novels had strong enough descriptions of their cities that I felt like a visitor. But most were set in places like New York and Los Angeles, never my home town, Buffalo, and never with an African-American hero. After my 2013 retirement from an English professorship, I began writing the Nickel City mysteries to add a new hero to the PI pantheon and showcase my birthplace, nicknamed for the buffalo head nickel.
In 2009, after years of writing Easy Rawlins novels set in a past Los Angeles, Walter Mosley began a new series set in contemporary New York. African-American Leonid McGill is a hard PI, with a complex seamy past who aspires to become a better person, despite the pressures of being a husband and family man caught in a near-loveless marriage. The New York in which McGill lives and struggles is the upscale but still gritty descendant of earlier versions of the city in the Mike Hammer novels of Mickey Spillane and the Matthew Scudder novels of Buffalo-born Lawrence Block. It is a land of wealth and culture but danger and deceit.
The widely praised New York Times bestseller, and Mosley's first new series since his acclaimed Easy Rawlins novels...
Leonid McGill is an ex-boxer and a hard drinker looking to clean up his act. He's an old-school P.I. working a New York City that's gotten a little too fancy all around him. But it's still full of dirty secrets, and as McGill unearths them, his commitment to the straight and narrow is going to be tested to the limit...
The Guest From Johannesburg is constructed from colorful threads that form a unique tapestry.
Stories of cruelty, resilience, and hope are crafted from incidents that occurred within the span of forty years—from the brutal days leading to the Second World War, to the chaotic mess of Vietnam. They are woven…
As a teenager, I didn’t have the lack of inhibition or abundant self-confidence to excel in high school drama. Like Sadie in Bit Players, I finally wowed the directors at my senior year audition, only to learn the lead was promised in advance to someone else. I recovered and stayed involved in theater: cast, crew, and front-of-house jobs for a summer theater program; the box office for Cornell’s MFA program; and supporting my kids’ drama activities. Performing in a show is different from any other experience. If you’ve been in a show, you know this. If you haven’t, read on to enter the magical world of theatre.
I like the grittiness and real-life issues addressed in this story. The pressures and joys of being students at an elite performing arts high school are described through the eyes of five friends: two actors, one writer/director, and two dancers. Aspirations, disintegrating friendships, budding romances, vengeance, and addiction interweave as the students forge ahead to the career-making (or breaking) Senior Showcase. Tragedy enfolds the friends in a dark ending as the dangers of the outside world pierce their high school bubble.
Theatre Quotient: Medium. Plot is split between dance and theater, and the show gets minimal pages.
It's always been you - you know that, right? At a prestigious New York City performing arts school, five friends connect over one dream of stardom. But for Joy, Diego, Liv, Ethan, and Dave, that dream falters under the pressure of second semester, senior year. Ambitions shift and change, new emotions rush to the surface, and a sense of urgency pulses among them: Their time together is running out. Diego hopes to get out of the friend zone. Liv wants to escape, losing herself in fantasies of the new guy. Ethan conspires to turn his muse into his girlfriend. Dave…
Stories of migration journeys and their knock-on impact through the generations are part of my family history. Like Jacques, the key protagonist in Austerlitz, I too wasn’t told the whole story of my family’s past. Stumbling on stories of colonialism, migration, and racism as an adult has opened up an understanding of a very different world to that of my childhood. The books I have recommended are all excellent examples of migration stories and through the use of beautiful prose pack a punch in a ‘velvet glove’.
This is a book I have been recommending to teenagers and adults alike.
This is no ordinary romantic tale of girl meets boy; it is a very much contemporary take on the notion. Two very different protagonists, from two very different backgrounds are brought together in the immigrant ‘melting pot’ of New York City. In what could be seen as a modern-day Romeo and Juliet, the characters are much more self-aware than in Shakespeare’s original and thankfully this leads to a more enlightened outcome, for them, and the people they meet on their journey.
Using deceptively simple short chapters which chart the course of one day, it cleverly deals with so many of life's big issues (including migration) primarily through the two teenage narrators.
The internationally bestselling love story from Nicola Yoon, author of Everything, Everything - coming as a major film starring Yara Shahidi in 2019.
The internationally bestselling love story from Nicola Yoon, author of Everything, Everything. Now a major film starring Yara Shahidi and Charles Melton!
Natasha- I'm a girl who believes in science and facts. Not fate. Not destiny.
Or dreams that will never come true. I'm definitely not the kind of girl who meets a cute boy on a crowded New York City street and falls in love with him.
I discovered science fiction at age nine with Rocketship Galileo and Red Planet and have never lost my love for speculative worlds, even after growing up to follow a career teaching and writing about the history of cities and city planning. In recent years, I’ve also begun to write about the field of SF. So it is one-hundred-percent natural for me to combine the two interests and explore science fiction cities. I try to look beyond the geez-whiz technology of some imagined cities to the ideas of human-scale planning and community that might make them fun places to visit or live in if we could somehow manage to get there.
For me, the worst thing about New York is getting stuck in traffic.
In the New York of 2140, that’s not a problem because rising sea levels have drowned much of Manhattan and motorboats zip through the flooded streets like it’s a high-rise Venice. Future New York is also a city whose residents are coping with the planet’s new reality.
In the midst of climate gloom, it is refreshing to imagine a scenario where New Yorkers can come together through cooperative action to take control of their own future.
As the sea level rose, every street became a canal, every skyscraper an island. For the residents of one apartment building in Madison Square, however, New York in the year 2140 is far from a drowned city.
New York Times bestselling author Kim Stanley Robinson delivers a bold and brilliant vision of New York in the next century.
'New York may be underwater but it's better than ever' - New Yorker
It is 1948 in Berlin. The economy is broken, the currency worthless, and the Russian bear is preparing to swallow its next victim. In the ruins of Hitler's capital, former RAF officers and a woman pilot start an air ambulance company that offers a glimmer of hope. Yet when a…
I’m a queer, nonbinary, Muslim, immigrant writer who has been reading their whole life and writing for part of it. I learned to write by reading–by devouring all kinds of books across different genres and paying attention to how words create feelings, worlds, and chronologies. I also learned to live by reading–I didn’t grow up with models of how to live a life that was true to my identities and so I read everything I could find about experiences that were adjacent to my own. The emergence of queer Muslim literature has been exciting to follow, and I try to read everything in the field.
I love the way Bushra Rehman writes about immigrant New York in the 80s – in vignettes that thread together to convey a sense of time, place, and geography.
All her characters are portrayed sensitively and complexly: from the main protagonist Razia coming into her queerness, to Pakistani aunties with their own histories and trauma, to friends who grow further apart.
I love how much this story is about women as the cornerstones of community.
Razia Mirza grows up amid the wild grape vines and backyard sunflowers of Corona, Queens, with her best friend, Saima, by her side. When a family rift drives the girls apart, Razia's heart is broken. She finds solace in Taslima, a new girl in her close knit Pakistani-American community. They embark on a series of small rebellions: listening to scandalous music, wearing mini skirts, and cutting school to explore the city.
When Razia is accepted to Stuyvesant, a prestigious high school in Manhattan, the gulf between the person she is and the daughter her parents want her to be, widens.…
My father came from Ukraine, and every summer took the family to stay on a farm in an immigrant community in southern New Jersey, Carmel, a community begun by the Baron de Hirsch Foundation, which settled Jews from all over Europe. Italian immigrants also settled there. I lived in a family that spoke to their siblings in three languages, Yiddish, Russian, and Ukrainian. Hence, I was privy to the loves and losses of people who felt estranged from their language and often yearned to return to their country of origin.
Tough Jews is a short history of Jewish-American gangsters and their Italian colleagues with whom they made common cause. It is here for the first time that we understand why Arnold Rothstein was the most important gangster in America. Having introduced "organized" into organized crime, he promised underworld figures the help of the famous attorney William Fallon if they landed in trouble and agreed to look after their families if they got sent up the Hudson (to Sing Sing). I am struck by the fact that Cohen makes his history personal, by means of his own contacts with the people who know the inside story of how the Jewish gangsters thrived—or didn't. He sits down with them; he eats with them; and he gets them to remember how it once was in the days of Dutch Schultz, Legs Diamond, and Arnold Rothstein.
Award-winning writer Rich Cohen excavates the real stories behind the legend of infamous criminal enforcers Murder, Inc. and contemplates the question: Where did the tough Jews go?
In 1930s Brooklyn, there lived a breed of men who now exist only in legend and in the memories of a few old-timers: Jewish gangsters, fearless thugs with nicknames like Kid Twist Reles and Pittsburgh Phil Strauss. Growing up in Brownsville, they made their way from street fights to underworld power, becoming the execution squad for a national crime syndicate. Murder Inc. did for organized crime what Henry Ford did for the automobile,…
I have always liked antiheroes and characters that are in some way doomed. To me, there’s something romantic about them. And over time I have come to replace the fictional protagonists of noir and horror with antiheroes from real life. With miserable authors who wrote about their own lives, where instead of gangsters or monsters, they waged battle against themselves, against their own demons and despair. Books like these have kept me company during some of the darkest periods of my life, and their unflinching honesty has inspired me to become a writer. Perhaps they can do the same for you.
It takes courage to name your book that. Especially in the 90s before self-publishing became a thing. Which did not stop its renegade author from selling xeroxed copies of it in the streets.
Its titular protagonist, who is jobless and homeless after his girlfriend kicks him out, is based on the author himself. He struggles with feelings of inadequacy and a sense of purposelessness. He works odd jobs, writes an occasional poem, meets eccentric strangers, engages in substance abuse, and gets into sticky situations on account of his bad decisions.
While I don’t know about you, I can strongly relate to the character. The book's dark humor is also enough to make it one of my favorites.
Arthur Nersesian's underground literary treasure is an unforgettable slice of gritty New York City life...and the darkly hilarious odyssey of an anonymous slacker. He's a perennial couch-surfer, an aspiring writer searching for himself, and he's just trying to survive. But life has other things in store for the fuck-up. From being dumped by his girlfriend to getting fired for asking for a raise, from falling into a robbery to posing as a gay man to keep his job at a porn theatre, the fuck-up's tragi-comedy is perfectly realised by Arthur Nersesian, who manages to create humour and suspense out of…
In 1929, a dark secret at the heart of a Hungarian farming village was finally exposed. For more than 15 years, Nagyrev had harbored a group of serial killers, one of the largest murder rings ever recorded. They came to be known…
When I was a young girl, I was lucky to have friends from all over the world, so learning about a new country or a new city always fascinated me, and it still does. I’m always trying to learn new things, meet new people and whenever I can I like to travel the world. As a writer and illustrator, it’s always nice to experience new things, it helps to expand my imagination. I hope this list inspires you not only to read but to learn a few things here and there.
Anyone who is curious about other cities and cultures will love the complete series of the This Is… books by Miroslav Sasek. They are filled with exciting facts and the colorful illustrations are truly delightful. From New York, to London, to Hong Kong, and many more, these books will inspire you to travel the world!
With the same wit and perception that distinguished his stylish books on Paris, London, and Rome, M. Sasek pictures fabulous, big-hearted New York City in This Is New York, first published in 1960 and now updated for the 21st century. The Dutchman who bought the island of Manhattan from the Native Americnas in 1626 for twenty-four dollars' worth of handy housewares little knew that his was the biggest bargain in American history. For everything about New York is big -- the buildings, the traffic jams, the cars, the stories, the Sunday papers. Here is the Staten Island Ferry, the Statute…
