Adam Gopnik Book Recommendations & Book Mentions
This list consists of recommendations or mentions of books spotted in media, social media accounts, podcasts or other public websites.
Adam Gopnik on X
Adam Gopnik is a staff writer at the New Yorker. writer @newyorker // https://t.co/7MshAor7AM…

Voltaire in Love
Nancy Mitford
The most exuberant, erotic history of the French Enlightenment. Mitford is disapproved of by sterner academics, though she has the most instinctive grasp of the crazily competitive French intellectual life.
Paperback, 2012
$19.95$9.98 + Free shipping50% off your first book
Side by Side: The Journal of a Smalltown Boy
Mioki
When I saw the London revue "Side By Side By Sondheim" in 1977, it changed my life. His art goes on changing it. Herewith, some memories, a few criticky scruples, a curtain call of gratitude for his existence. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/postscript/farewell-to-stephen-sondheim
Hardcover, 2011
$9.99$4.99 + Free shipping50% off your first book
Final Judgements
Joan Fuster
Can't recommend this book too much. It fell on me out of the blue and was so dense with aphoristic wit and wisdom, forgive the cliche, that it was entirely irresistible. A conservative mind with a liberal heart. Beautiful translation, too.
Out of stock

The Life of Samuel Johnson
James Boswell
The best and most entertaining biography ever written in English — addictive for its prescient, informal, racy prose and Johnson's epigrammatic precision and enduring decency.
Paperback, 2024
$16.99$8.49 + Free shipping50% off your first book
Camera Man: Buster Keaton, the Dawn of Cinema, and the Invention of the Twentieth Century
Dana Stevens
Excellent ... Stevens, in Camera Man takes an original and, in a way, more distanced approach to Keaton ... Stevens offers a series of pas de deux between Keaton and other personages of his time, who shared one or another of his preoccupations or projects.
Paperback, 2023
$21.99$10.99 + Free shipping50% off your first book
Florine Stettheimer: A Biography
Barbara Bloemink
One particular gift of Bloemink’s biography is that it presents the vers-libre poetry that Stettheimer wrote alongside her paintings, and shows that her verse, though produced without the immense technical care that she poured into her visual art, is in its way just as remarkable
Hardcover, 2022
$45.00$22.50 + Free shipping50% off your first book
Buster Keaton: A Filmmaker's Life
James Curtis
Excellent ... An immense year-by-year, sometimes week-by-week, account of Keaton as an artist and a man. Every detail of his life and work is here, starting with his birth ... Curtis is particularly good on the early years.
Hardcover, 2022
$50.00$25.00 + Free shipping50% off your first book
Portnoy's Complaint
Philip Roth
The story of how Robinson braved bigotry to break the color line is heroic, but it shouldn’t distract from the cruel absurdity of there having been a color line to be broken...The petty cruelties of American racism are a permanently depressing subject.
Paperback, 1994
$16.95$8.48 + Free shipping50% off your first book
The Early Stories: 1953-1975
John Updike
Though Updike is not a writer of happy subjects — the pains of marriage, the loss of time — he makes readers happy by the sheer perfection of his craft and his deep delight in the sensual surface of the world. He sings, and we harmonize.
Paperback, 2004
$20.00$10.00 + Free shipping50% off your first book
The New York Game: Baseball and the Rise of a New City
Kevin Baker
Kevin Baker...tells stories about the development of baseball, many of them involving the Polo Grounds, and, as with earlier baseball bards, the narratives come complete with morals. But his have a harder, more disabused edge than the familiar sporting sort.
Hardcover, 2024
$35.00$17.50 + Free shipping50% off your first book