Alexandra Jacobs Book Recommendations & Book Mentions
This list consists of recommendations or mentions of books spotted in media, social media accounts, podcasts or other public websites.
Alexandra Jacobs on X
Alexandra Jacobs is a book critic. Book critic at The New York Times; author of STILL HERE: The Madcap, Nervy, Singular Life of Elaine Stritch.

Hello, Molly!: A Memoir
Molly Shannon
I laughed, I cried... I love Molly Shannon... It's an amazing story of human resilience and familial resilience really.
Paperback, 2023
$19.99$9.99 + Free shipping50% off your first book
Thrust
Lidia Yuknavitch
Thrust is an indignant and impressive novel, but only in spurts an enjoyable one, and maybe that’s exactly the point. Some will hurl it unfinished across the room. Others will savor its elaborately orchestrated punishments.
Paperback, 2023
$17.00$8.50 + Free shipping50% off your first book
Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People
Imani Perry
Ranges...widely ... The book drifts, like the ocean; it turns suddenly cloudy, like the heavens; it trills, like the jaybird (to which another chapter is devoted). It will have you looking afresh even at your corner mailbox.
Hardcover, 2025
$28.99$14.49 + Free shipping50% off your first book
Tom Lake
Ann Patchett
“Tom Lake” is a quiet and reassuring book, not a rabble-rouser… Domestic contentment is its North Star, generational continuity its reliable moon. Only a cynic could resist lying down on a nice soft blanket to marvel at Patchett’s twinkling planetarium.
Hardcover, 2023
$30.00$15.00 + Free shipping50% off your first book
Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us
Rachel Aviv
It is thrilling to see @jenszalai on the cover of the print Book Review with her superb review of Rachel Aviv’s “Strangers to Ourselves,” as the Berlin Wall between this much pored-over publication and the daily staff critics is finally pulverized for the digital era.💥 https://t.co/D3nIW4K7lG
Paperback, 2023
$18.00$9.00 + Free shipping50% off your first book
The Country of the Blind: A Memoir at the End of Sight
Andrew Leland
After reading Andrew Leland’s memoir, “The Country of the Blind,” you will look at the English language differently…His own prose is jazzy and intelligent: loaded with statistics and studies in some places, lyrical elsewhere, with licks of understated humor.
Hardcover, 2023
$29.00$14.50 + Free shipping50% off your first book
Lucky Dogs
Helen Schulman
Also, I reviewed Helen Schulman's roman à clef based on Harvey Weinstein, Rose McGowan and Stella Penn Pechanac, the Black Cube spy. I'd call it feminist satire—SHETIRE? Somebody stop me!—though did not think to do so in these paragraphs. https://t.co/McWwxnvsQp
Out of stock

Christopher Isherwood Inside Out
Katherine Bucknell
Bucknell will not be shucked so easily. Stone by stone, she’s built up a gritty, gorgeous monument to a curiously indelible 20th-century figure.
Hardcover, 2024
$45.00$22.50 + Free shipping50% off your first book
The Vegan
Andrew Lipstein
An aspiring master of the universe reckons with his animality in this sparkling sophomore fiction. Two opposable thumbs up! https://t.co/cnKzxydZ0v
Hardcover, 2023
$27.00$13.50 + Free shipping50% off your first book
Woman: The American History of an Idea
Lillian Faderman
Lots of books by and about women will be released in March, and this one doesn’t rankly smell, not remotely. Its bouquet is carefully gathered, wide-ranging, inoffensive, in a field that could actually use some stink bombs.
Paperback, 2023
$25.00$12.50 + Free shipping50% off your first book