Imagine waking up one day to find that you’ve lost all sensation in your body, head to toe. Imagine that you’re fully lucid, but your movement is limited to the slightest rotation of your nec...
https://offtheshelf.com/2018/08/the-diving-bell-and-the-butterfly-by-jean-dominique-bauby/
In the literati community, this is a sacrilegious confession—but here it goes: I was just never that into Harry Potter. I began to lose interest midway through the series, finishing it only bec...
https://offtheshelf.com/2017/07/a-field-guide-to-getting-lost-by-rebecca-solnit/
Paul Kalanithi recounts the story of his own mortality with the precision of a surgeon and the poeticism of a gifted writer—because, of course, he was both. But his uncanny ability to inhabit...
https://offtheshelf.com/2017/01/when-breath-becomes-air-by-paul-kalanithi/
Over the course of my lifetime, several noteworthy relationship guides have emerged from a generally uninspiring landscape. In the early ’90s, it was MEN ARE FROM MARS, WOMEN ARE FROM VENUS. If...
https://offtheshelf.com/2016/07/modern-romance-by-aziz-ansari/
We’re kicking off the summer season with a literary road trip from the lush forests of Maine, to the small towns of the Midwest, to the expansive plains of Wyoming. Each of these thirteen books...
https://offtheshelf.com/2016/05/this-land-is-your-land-13-literary-pit-stops-across-the-usa/
Until recently, the fraught relationship between the United States and Cuba has made it difficult for Americans to fully experience Cuba—except through books, that is. But even as tourism to Ha...
https://offtheshelf.com/2016/05/12-books-that-illuminate-the-beautiful-and-complex-history-of-cuba/
Millions of Americans are currently suffering from addiction, and countless more have lost their lives or a loved one to the disease. The following novels and memoirs are by turns harrowing, pain...
https://offtheshelf.com/2016/05/11-powerful-stories-of-addiction-and-what-comes-after/
Lena Dunham seems to be everywhere these days. Best known as the creator, writer, and star of the HBO series Girls, now in its fifth and penultimate season, and the author of Not That Kind of Gir...
https://offtheshelf.com/2016/04/12-lena-dunham-approved-books-you-need-to-read-right-now/
I have done much to earn the title of incurable Francophile. It began with weekly French lessons in elementary school, and quickly progressed to full-blown infatuation. I’ve done the whole bit:...
https://offtheshelf.com/2016/04/the-elegance-of-the-hedgehog-by-muriel-barbery/
If any writer has mastered the art of finding humor in the grotesque, it’s Augusten Burroughs. Really, he had no choice. If he had taken to heart every trauma of his childhood, he would never h...
https://offtheshelf.com/2016/03/running-with-scissors-by-augusten-burroughs/
British novelist Angela Carter once declared, “Cities have sexes: London is a man, Paris a woman, and New York a well-adjusted transsexual.” This feeling of perpetual movement—that the city...
https://offtheshelf.com/2016/02/12-novels-that-take-a-bite-out-of-the-big-apple/
Martin Luther King Jr. Day presents an important opportunity to reflect on the progress made since the Civil Rights Movement, as well as to meditate on how best to address inequalities that persi...
https://offtheshelf.com/2016/01/13-significant-books-on-civil-rights-for-martin-luther-king-jr-day/
When I was eight, I found my best friend. Alice, like me, was a voracious reader, with a wild imagination and a penchant for the written word. We spent days adventuring in the woods adjacent to m...
https://offtheshelf.com/2015/12/my-brilliant-friend-by-elena-ferrante/
There is no solace in pain but the promise of its end. The old cliché that time heals all wounds holds court over our suffering. But if we do not fully comprehend the source of our pain, if ques...
https://offtheshelf.com/2015/11/after-visiting-friends-by-michael-hainey/
It is too mild to say that I have never read anything like House of Leaves. In fact, I’ve never read anything that even lands in its realm. Long before I finally picked it up myself, I had hear...
https://offtheshelf.com/2015/10/house-of-leaves-by-mark-danielewski/
The delicious scent of a heaping apple tart, baking in my oven, is beginning to waft toward me as I write this. And I have Molly Wizenberg’s memoir Delancey to thank. The post This Poignant a...
https://offtheshelf.com/2015/09/delancey-by-molly-wizenberg/
In the bustling city of New York, eight million people whirl through their lives every day. It is easy for our tunnel vision to blind us to the humanity of the people we pass in the street, on th...
https://offtheshelf.com/2015/08/let-the-great-world-spin-by-colum-mccann/
If you have just awoken surrounded by cereal bowls with no idea of what’s happened in the world in the past three days, odds are you have just finished binge-watching season three of Netflix’...
https://offtheshelf.com/2015/07/pipers-prison-book-club-10-books-from-orange-is-the-new-black/
As the summer months stretch in front of us like treasures for plundering, a familiar restlessness takes hold. You may find yourself dreaming of a cross-country adventure to destinations yet unex...
https://offtheshelf.com/2015/07/get-your-kicks-with-this-8-book-tour-of-route-66/
The concept of sisterhood has always possessed an almost mystical allure for me. Growing up with no sisters of my own, my brother served as a proxy, begrudgingly allowing me to dress him up in ol...
Like those of my colleagues and friends in the publishing business, my to-read list lengthens at a daunting pace. There are heaps of books in my office, on my mantel, and on my bedside table, all...
https://offtheshelf.com/2015/06/dept-of-speculation-jenny-offill/
If you’re like most of us, your New Year’s resolutions were abandoned sometime between your champagne-fueled night of celebrating and the next morning’s hangover. But as we enter the season...
https://offtheshelf.com/2015/05/reinvent-yourself-this-spring-with-these-9-books/
Fiction for me is not an escape; it is an immersion in the real. I seek vivid renderings and eloquent language, beautifully parceled wisdom that I can take with me into my day. As such, I’ve ne...
https://offtheshelf.com/2015/05/super-sad-true-love-story-by-gary-shteyngart/
“Wild,” in reference to the great outdoors, conveys an image of land and creatures untarnished by human contact. Yet the adjective is just as often used to describe humans themselves—the bo...
https://offtheshelf.com/2015/04/into-the-wild-by-jon-krakauer/
To love and to lose is an experience universal to humankind. None among us will leave this earth having evaded the sorrow of losing someone dear to the ravages of time, or illness, or death. As s...
https://offtheshelf.com/2015/01/a-refreshingly-honest-memoir-about-grief/
Each time I sat down to read Anthony Doerr’s recent National Book Award nominee, All the Light We Cannot See, I found myself cocooned in his velvety evocations of Saint-Malo, an enchanting Fren...
https://offtheshelf.com/2014/11/anthony-doerr-four-seasons-in-rome/
My relationship with Miranda July began a mere three weeks ago, when disaffected 20-somethings across the nation—ahem, across northern Brooklyn—alighted upon her whimsical “Somebody” ipho...
https://offtheshelf.com/2014/09/no-one-belongs-here-more-than-you-miranda-july/