Here are 100 books that Up the Down Staircase fans have personally recommended if you like
Up the Down Staircase.
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I taught teenagers and young adults for 40 years. During these years, I always thought about what I could use to make my classroom an exciting place for learning. I would hear a new song about loneliness that I wanted to share with my students. Or I would think of a prompt they would laugh about in notebook writing. Too often, we take the dedication teachers give to their students for granted. I hope you enjoy the books on this list as much as I have and make you remember again a special teacher in your life who gave his/her all, and if you’re a teacher, here’s to you!
A student would be incredibly lucky to have had Palmer as a teacher. I adore his humanistic way of thinking about teaching. As we all know, a classroom can be such a joyful place if teachers and students are on a voyage of discovery, but at other times, a lifeless, frustrating place to run away from. This is the most theoretical book of the five, but it’s based on his years of teaching experience.
Palmer feels strongly that good teaching cannot be reduced to technique if a teacher doesn’t have self-knowledge. I really appreciated his advice to slow down, keep questioning, and work on learning who you are. This is good advice for not just teaching but any field!
Wisdom that's been inspiring, motivating, and guiding teachers for two decades
The Courage to Teach speaks to the joys and pains that teachers of every sort know well. Over the last 20 years, the book has helped countless educators reignite their passion, redirect their practice, and deal with the many pressures that accompany their vital work.
Enriched by a new Foreword from Diana Chapman Walsh, the book builds on a simple premise: good teaching can never be reduced to technique. Good teaching comes from the identity and integrity of the teacher, that core of self where intellect, emotion, and spirit…
A moving story of love, betrayal, and the enduring power of hope in the face of darkness.
German pianist Hedda Schlagel's world collapsed when her fiancé, Fritz, vanished after being sent to an enemy alien camp in the United States during the Great War. Fifteen years later, in 1932, Hedda…
I taught teenagers and young adults for 40 years. During these years, I always thought about what I could use to make my classroom an exciting place for learning. I would hear a new song about loneliness that I wanted to share with my students. Or I would think of a prompt they would laugh about in notebook writing. Too often, we take the dedication teachers give to their students for granted. I hope you enjoy the books on this list as much as I have and make you remember again a special teacher in your life who gave his/her all, and if you’re a teacher, here’s to you!
I adored this book. I think every teacher should be given this book just to feel that although you might shut the door to the outside and be alone in the classroom with your students, you are not alone in what you face. This book convinced me that I needed to write my own teaching memoir.
McCourt (author of Angela’s Ashes) and his sense of humor and creativity at times get him into trouble but eventually endear him not only to the students but also to the school administration. I might not have agreed with everything he described, but I was overwhelmingly delighted with his approach and his great rapport with his students.
Nearly a decade ago Frank McCourt became an unlikely star when, at the age of sixty-six, he burst onto the literary scene with Angela's Ashes, the Pulitzer Prize -- winning memoir of his childhood in Limerick, Ireland. Then came 'Tis, his glorious account of his early years in New York.
Now, here at last, is McCourt's long-awaited book about how his thirty-year teaching career shaped his second act as a writer. Teacher Man is also an urgent tribute to teachers everywhere. In bold and spirited prose featuring his irreverent wit and heartbreaking honesty, McCourt records the trials, triumphs and surprises…
I taught teenagers and young adults for 40 years. During these years, I always thought about what I could use to make my classroom an exciting place for learning. I would hear a new song about loneliness that I wanted to share with my students. Or I would think of a prompt they would laugh about in notebook writing. Too often, we take the dedication teachers give to their students for granted. I hope you enjoy the books on this list as much as I have and make you remember again a special teacher in your life who gave his/her all, and if you’re a teacher, here’s to you!
I love how the epigraphs set the tone. “I cannot teach anything; I can only make them think” (Socrates) and “It’s not the broken dreams that break us, it’s the ones we don’t dare to dream.” Connecticut high school science teacher Andy Bramante not only has his students dream, but he also shows them how to put foundations under these dreams.
In this book, a journalist describes an amazing teacher who gives the students freedom to research for science fairs and celebrates independent learning. With humor and kindness, Andy truly changes their lives and shows us we’re capable of so much if given the opportunity and trust. The book made me feel good about what a teacher can do and led me to remember great teachers in my own life.
An unforgettable year in the life of a visionary high school science teacher and his award-winning students, as they try to get into college, land a date for the prom . . . and possibly change the world
“A complex portrait of the ups and downs of teaching in a culture that undervalues what teaching delivers.”—The Wall Street Journal
Andy Bramante left his successful career as a corporate scientist to teach public high school—and now helms one of the most remarkable classrooms in America. Bramante’s unconventional class at Connecticut’s prestigious yet diverse Greenwich High School has no curriculum, tests, textbooks,…
Delve into this internationally best-selling series, now complete! A fast paced laugh-out-loud mix of Urban Fantasy and Mystery.
I can tell when you’re lying. Every. Single. Time. I’m Jinx, a PI hired to find a missing university student, I hope to find her propped up at a bar–yet my gut…
I taught teenagers and young adults for 40 years. During these years, I always thought about what I could use to make my classroom an exciting place for learning. I would hear a new song about loneliness that I wanted to share with my students. Or I would think of a prompt they would laugh about in notebook writing. Too often, we take the dedication teachers give to their students for granted. I hope you enjoy the books on this list as much as I have and make you remember again a special teacher in your life who gave his/her all, and if you’re a teacher, here’s to you!
I loved this book because of the issues it raises: should you bring social problems into the classroom, or should it be a sheltered enclave? When I started teaching, we were told to keep sex, politics, and religion out. But is this correct? The editor of this collection thinks no—There are so many important issues that young people need to grapple with: hate speech, violence against women, and war. How can you deal with them?
The author/editor believes that teachers have a responsibility to engage students in respectful discussions. The book features various teachers’ voices on how they have handled current issues and discussions. I love how these teachers show their caring side by wanting to help teenagers make sense of their lives.
A timely collection of advice and strategies for creating a just classroom from educators across the country, handpicked by MacArthur "genius" and bestselling author Lisa Delpit
"A favorite education book of the year." -Greater Good magazine
Is it okay to discuss politics in class? What are constructive ways to help young people process the daily news coverage of sexual assault? How can educators engage students around Black Lives Matter? Climate change? Confederate statue controversies? Immigration? Hate speech?
In Teaching When the World Is on Fire, Delpit turns to a host of crucial issues facing teachers in these…
I am a professor of American literary history. Still, as an undergraduate, I studied with a charismatic, postmodern French-American fiction writer, Raymond Federman, who, in a theatrical accent, called me by my last name, “Pel-tone.” Atop the Kurt Vonnegut I’d read in high school that gave me my taste for crazy, socially-conscious novels that I have tried myself also to write, I imbibed the books Federman sent my way: Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Italo Calvino, Samuel Beckett. In years since, I’ve championed innovative novels through my own small press, Starcherone Books. I am an artist whose greatest passion is discovering writing that makes me see in new ways.
This was the first book I’ve seen that re-oriented the United States within a cultural understanding of “the Americas,” a complete resituating of our usually conceived “unique” history. Doing this, Bolaño, a Chilean, puts our own fanatic, right-wing weirdos–religious fanatics, militarists, unhinged hyper-patriotic dictatorial aspirants–into a context where Americans can see ourselves in hemispheric context; these are political pathologies that have historically been seen as much throughout Central and South America as within our own borders.
I found this mind-blowing. This is a collection of fictional biographies, fantastically imagined and yet achingly familiar, and as relevant now as when it was first written more than two decades ago and translated and published in the US in 2009, such that our current politics seem almost pre-scripted by Bolaño’s vision.
Nazi Literature in the Americas was the first of Roberto Bolano's books to reach a wide public. When it was published by Seix Barral in 1996, critics in Spain were quick to recognize the arrival of an important new talent. The book presents itself as a biographical dictionary of American writers who flirted with or espoused extreme right-wing ideologies in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It is a tour de force of black humor and imaginary erudition.
Nazi Literature in the Americas is composed of short biographies, including descriptions of the writers' works, plus an epilogue ("for Monsters"), which…
My greatest passion? Human nature and the endless cycles we repeat, different on the surface yet identical at their core. We build systems, cultures, and rules, destroy them, then rebuild everything in remarkably similar forms, as though we possessed no memory of the past. I have studied human nature throughout my life, but this passion took shape at university through cultural anthropology and comparative theology. Over thirty years, it has guided my work in developing human potential and talent, and has been refined further through working with thousands of people from more than 200 countries and territories. It is now the lens through which I write speculative fiction.
This book gave me two pleasures: following its story and discovering how ingeniously that story had been assembled.
Its 127 short chapters sometimes contain little more than an idea, a joke, or a shift in perspective. At first, they require some patience. A few may seem disconnected or even unnecessary, but gradually they build upon one another like pieces of a mosaic.
Vonnegut leaves me room to assemble the whole, connecting science, religion, politics, and catastrophe without explaining every link. The form made me an active reader rather than a passive one. Its compression creates space for me to participate while allowing every absurdity to land with greater force.
One of America's greatest writers gives us his unique perspective on our fears of nuclear annihilation
Experiment.
Told with deadpan humour and bitter irony, Kurt Vonnegut's cult tale of global destruction preys on our deepest fears of witnessing Armageddon and, worse still, surviving it.
Solution.
Dr Felix Hoenikker, one of the founding fathers of the atomic bomb, has left a deadly legacy to the world. For he is the inventor of ice-nine, a lethal chemical capable of freezing the entire planet. The search for its whereabouts leads to Hoenikker's three eccentric children, to a crazed dictator in the Caribbean, to…
On the morning of December 26, 2004, an undersea earthquake struck off the coast of Sumatra in the Indian Ocean. The resulting tsunami killed an estimated 230,000 people across fourteen countries, from Indonesia to Sri Lanka to Thailand to the Maldives to India and all the way to East Africa.…
Second novels rarely get the love that they deserve. People come to them with all kinds of presumptions and expectations, mostly based on whatever they liked (or didn’t like!) about your first novel, and all writers live in fear of the dreaded “sophomore slump.” I spent a decade trying to write my second novel and was plagued by these very fears. To ward off the bad vibes, I want to celebrate some of my favorite second novels by some of my favorite writers. Some were bona fide hits from the get-go, while others were sadly overlooked or wrongly panned, but they’re all brilliant, beautiful, and full of heart.
Sam Lipsyte’s sentences are demented and perfect. He’s one of the funniest writers I have ever read.
The story behind this book is one of publishing legend. Here's the way I've always heard it told: Lipsyte’s first book, The Subject Steve, was a brutal satire of contemporary American life that had the deep misfortune of being published on September 11, 2001. (Yes, I know, it wasn’t the worst thing that happened on 9/11, but still.)
He followed it with Home Land, a vitriolic, sleazy, hilarious novel in the form of epic pissy dispatches to a high school alumni newsletter. As narrators go, Lewis Miner is as unimprovable as he is unredeemable. This book was passed around to every publishing house in New York City, read and cherished by dozens of editors who were scared to put their colophon where their heart was.
Welcome to the most twisted high-school reunion imaginable, from a rising star of American satire. 'Sam Lipsyte is a gifted stylist, precise, original, devious, and very funny.' Jeffrey Eugenides, author of 'Middlesex' 'It's confession time, fellow alumni. Ever since Principal Fontana found me and commenced to bless my mail slot, monthly, with the Eastern Valley High School Alumni Newsletter, I've been meaning to pen my update. Sad to say, vanity slowed my hand. Let a fever for the truth speed it now. Let me stand on the rooftop of my reckoning and shout naught but the indisputable: I did not…
I love short-story collections. I’ve read dozens to hundreds of them, starting as a child reading Richard Scarry, and I still make them a regular part of my reading diet. I started trying my own hand at short fiction in 2012 and have since finished more than one hundred stories, including the ones in Animal Husbandry. I’m now working on my first novel after years as a short-story writer, and it gives me additional admiration for how many outstanding novelists are also able to master short fiction. It’s two different skill sets, and the five authors I mentioned here (among many others) excel at both.
Vonnegut has been one of my favorite authors for a long time, and this might be the first collection I read that wasn’t specifically for young readers. Some of the future-set stories like “Harrison Bergeron” and “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow” changed how I saw science fiction.
Welcome to the Monkey House introduced me to Vonnegut and to a love of short-story collections as a form, and it holds up remarkably well.
A MASTERFUL COLLECTION OF TWENTY-FIVE SHORT STORIES FROM THE INIMITABLE AUTHOR OF SLAUGHTERHOUSE 5, KURT VONNEGUT
'Vonnegut is George Orwell, Dr Caligari and Flash Gordon compounded into one writer...a zany but moral mad scientist' Time
A diabolical government asserts control by eliminating orgasms. A scientist discovers the secret to unlocking instant happiness, with unexpected consequences. In an America where everyone is equal every which way, a tennage boy plans to overthrow the system.
Welcome to the Monkey House gathers together twenty-five of Kurt Vonnegut's short stories from the 1950s and 1960s. Shot through with Vonnegut's singular humour, wit and bewilderment…
Inspired by my dad–a fan of Hammond Innes, Alistair MacLean, and the like–and two older brothers, I discovered Desmond Bagley as a teenager. My passion for his style of action-adventure has never dwindled. As the crime thriller genre appears to move relentlessly in the direction of dark, gritty, serial-killer territory, I can’t help but wonder if there isn’t something to be said for the now less-fashionable escapist worlds these writers created. Thanks to HarperCollins, I was given the chance to work on Bagley’s last posthumous novel, Domino Island, and my own original books inevitably followed.
It’s impossible to talk about action-adventure thrillers without recommending something by Graham Greene. It could have been any one of his great novels, but I’ve settled on this book as one of his shortest and most easily accessible stories.
It’s quirky without being obscure, full of atmosphere and intrigue, and wonderfully witty in its portrayal of its central characters. For sheer panache, this book is hard to beat.
'Manages to say more about love, hate, happiness, grief, immortality, greed and the disgustingly rich than most contemporary English novels three times the length' The Times
Doctor Fischer despises the human race. A millionaire with a taste for sadism, he spends his time and money planning notorious parties, entertainments designed to expose the shallowness and greed of his craven hangers-on. Black comedy and painful satire combine in a totally compelling novel.
Nelson West, a former Chicago homicide detective, is hired by wealthy heir Lionel Bing to discreetly help “fix” scandals and legal problems for his father’s wealthy friends.
Bing, a brilliant but troubled investigator, suffers from PTSD symptoms as a result of being kidnapped and witnessing the murder of his mother…
I’ve been an actor and a writer all my life. After many years performing in theatre and television in both Australia and the UK, I turned my hand to prose and revelled in the creative freedom. Thirty years and sixteen novels later I’m still revelling. As both actor and writer, the mix of fact and fiction has always intrigued me and I love travelling my characters through historical times of great impact, particularly upon Australia. In 2015 I was honoured to be made a Member of the Order of Australia for my service to the performing arts as an actor and to literature as an author.
Identity Crisis is the most delicious satire! It is so much a send-up of modern times it will unfortunately date, and all too quickly become tomorrow’s history. But I don’t care. I will always find this one of the funniest books I have ever had the pleasure to read - indeed a wickedly witty laugh-out-loud on every page. Anyone who chooses to find the political incorrectness that abounds in Identity Crisis offensive really will need to delve deep in order to discover their obviously lost or sadly under-developed sense of humour.
Why are we all so hostile? So quick to take offence? Truly we are living in the age of outrage.
A series of apparently random murders draws amiable, old-school Detective Mick Matlock into a world of sex, politics, reality TV and a bewildering kaleidoscope of opposing identity groups. Lost in a blizzard of hashtags, his already complex investigation is further impeded by the fact that he simply doesn't 'get' a single thing about anything anymore.
Meanwhile, each day another public figure confesses to having 'misspoken' and prostrates themselves before the judgement of Twitter. Begging for forgiveness, assuring the public "that…
