Meredith Maran Book Recommendations & Book Mentions
This list consists of recommendations or mentions of books spotted in media, social media accounts, podcasts or other public websites.
Meredith Maran on X
Meredith Maran is a book critic and journalist. Live-tweeting #LaLaLife since 2012.

Diary of a Misfit: A Memoir and a Mystery
Casey Parks
The very intensity with which Parks pursues Roy’s story reveals and reflects the depth of Parks’s longing to love herself ... Parks has written a memoir that will serve as a beacon for many others still yearning to no longer feel like misfits.
Paperback, 2023
$18.00Member price:$9.00 + Free shipping50% off your first book
Somehow: Thoughts on Love
Anne Lamott
In her trademark godly yet snarky way, she extracts every life lesson from her latest new experience with the deft zeal of a chef reducing flour and fat to roux... Lamott speaks to the human in all of us, challenging us to bear her beam of love, and our own.
Hardcover, 2024
$22.00Member price:$11.00 + Free shipping50% off your first book
You Were Always Mine
Christine Pride
Deciding what to do, Cinnamon deliberates with everyone...These discussions elevate the novel from entertaining domestic drama to enlightening portrait of how race can infuse every decision and interaction, even between close friends.
Out of stock

1974: A Personal History
Francine Prose
Prose succeeds where many before her have failed, enlivening -- without demonizing or idealizing -- the valiant, creative, idealistic movement that almost brought capitalism down.
Hardcover, 2024
$27.99Member price:$13.99 + Free shipping50% off your first book
Your Driver Is Waiting
Priya Guns
Travis Bickle, meet Toni Morrison, in a socially probing, fiercely fun debut novel... It’s rare for a writer to marry such deep social consciousness with a comic, sultry romance, rarer still to pull that off in a way that satisfies and provokes the reader.
Paperback, 2024
$17.00Member price:$8.50 + Free shipping50% off your first book
The Five Wounds
Kirstin Valdez Quade
RT @bookcritics: NBCC member @meredithmaran reviewed Kirstin Valdez Quade’s "The Five Wounds" for @latimesbooks: https://t.co/MzR64PRAXQ
Paperback, 2022
$17.95Member price:$8.98 + Free shipping50% off your first book
All the Way to the River: Love, Loss, and Liberation
Elizabeth Gilbert
Classic Gilbert: entertaining, insightful, wrenching, self-effacing, self-indulgent and profoundly real. Its strongest scenes, of Gilbert and partner Rayya Elias's beyond-beautiful and then beyond-ugly interactions, are punch-to-the-gut powerful.
Hardcover, 2025
$35.00Member price:$17.50 + Free shipping50% off your first book
The Survivalists
Kashana Cauley
In today’s America, what constitutes success? What are the obstacles to achieving it? How do race, class, age, and location affect the odds? These oh-so-serious questions are tackled with scathing, lol-inducing wit in The Survivalists, Kashana Cauley’s smart, sharp debut novel.
Paperback, 2024
$17.95Member price:$8.98 + Free shipping50% off your first book
Knocking Myself Up: A Memoir of My (In)Fertility
Michelle Tea
…Her unmistakable voice: wry, witty, authentic, down-to-earth but also way-up-in-the-clouds. Above all, it’s the self-deprecating, self-aware and ultimately self-loving honesty that distinguishes Tea’s way of life and her irresistible, evocative and wise way of writing about it.
Paperback, 2023
$18.99Member price:$9.49 + Free shipping50% off your first book