Welcome to Shelf Life, ELLE.com’s books column, in which authors share their most memorable reads. Whether you’re on the hunt for a book to console you, move you profoundly, or make you laugh, consider a recommendation from the writers in our series, who, like you (since you’re here), love books. Perhaps one of their favorite titles will become one of yours, too.
She may have written the book (You Should Have Known) on which David E. Kelley’s The Undoing (HBO) was based, but even Jean Hanff Korelitz wasn’t sure hoe the ending would unfold in the limited series nominated for four Golden Globes. Now her latest and ninth novel, The Sequel (Celadon) is out, a, well, sequel to 2021’s The Plot, which is also being adapted for the small screen with Mahershala Ali. Korelitz, whose The Latecomer is also being adapted for TV, will executive produce both series. Her book Admission became a 2013 movie with Tina Fey. She’s also written a poetry collection and a children’s book.
The NY-born, -raised, and -based NYT-bestselling author (she lived in Princeton, New Jersey, for years while she and her Pulitzer-Prize-winning poet and former New Yorker poetry editor husband, Paul Muldoon, taught at the Ivy) is no stranger to adapting works for other media. The couple adapted James Joyce’s The Dead, 1904, an immersive play at Irish Repertory Theatre in the past and opening this year, on November 20.
What started out as an auction item for her kids’ school fundraiser has become BOOKTHEWRITER, which holds pop-up book groups in private apartments, including the apartment that served as the home in “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” pilot (unofficial motto: “Come for the literature, stay for the real estate!”), featuring Shelf Lifers Jennifer Egan, Sarah Ruhl, Cathleen Schine, Elizabeth Strout, Michael Cunningham, Griffin Dunne, Julia Phillips, and Taffy Brodesser-Akner, among others. She was an extra on “The Undoing”; lead actor Hugh Grant’s first movie, “Privileged” (her son makes a cameo on “Admission”); lives in upstate New York part time, where she interviewed Erica Jong for the Sharon Springs Poetry Festival; took Zoom ballet classes during the pandemic and reads books on epidemiology; once fell asleep during a Bob Dylan concert; was told by her 5th-grade teacher was a good writer; and has dogs named Sherlock and Olive
Interests: The UK (the Anglophile, who first visited London when she was 6, attended Cambridge after graduating from Dartmouth); psychopaths (her mother was a therapist), hoarders, and liars; mudlarking; Mormonism.
Fan of: Audiobooks, which she downloads from the NYPL site, Beekman Farm, musical theater.
Good at: Being up on Jewish-American history, making marzipan Santas (a family tradition), decorating with antique store and flea market finds (she collects ironstone, pink lustreware, and way too many other things), old houses.
Bad at: Discipline.
On bucket list: Having an antique store (an antique/vintage corner at Rural Provisions in Sharon Springs, NY has to do for now). Browse her list of book recs below.
The book that:
…I consider literary comfort food:
Elinor Lipman’s The Inn At Lake Devine is a novel I often give to people who are sick, perhaps because it features an indelible bout of accidental poisoning by mushrooms.
…shaped my worldview:
Ingri D’Aulaire’s D’Aulaire’s Book of Greek Myths, which I read at age 8 and which made me, instantly and irrevocably, an atheist. It remains the single most influential book in a lifetime of reading. Beautifully written, comprehensive in scope, gorgeously illustrated. It should be in every library. (It also made an entire college course on Greek Mythology utterly redundant.)
…made me rethink a long-held belief:
Jo Baker’s Longbourn. I had always been of the opinion that an author’s characters belong to them and them alone, but this reimagining of Pride and Prejudice was revelatory and powerful. I’ve since opened my eyes to other novels that lean on existing works of literature: Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs, Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea, Valerie Martin’s Mary Reilly. Eventually, I wrote an entire novel (The Plot) about the imprecise borders between fictions.
…I read in one sitting, it was that good:
Anything by Thomas Perry. I won’t start one of his books if I can’t finish it. Gateway drug: Vanishing Act.
…made me laugh out loud:
All but forgotten today, but still the funniest novel I’ve ever read: Gail Parent’s Sheila Levine is Dead and Living in New York. It begins with a street vendor who lies about the calories in his chocolate “health shakes.” HOW COULD HE DO THAT?
…has the best title:
You Are Now Entering the Human Heart by Janet Frame.
…has the greatest ending:
A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth. (I had to have it explained to me, but once that happened my head exploded. Not literally.)
…features a character I love to hate:
Martin Amis’ early novels are full of grotesques. No one who reads his novel Dead Babies will ever name a child Keith.
…describes a place I’d want to live:
I’m a confirmed New Yorker but Cathleen Schine’s novel The Love Letter made me want to move instantly to this fictional Connecticut town.
…features the coolest book jacket:
The cover of Rats by Robert Sullivan is justly famous. Sullivan stood in an alley in Lower Manhattan for an entire year to write about the rat colony there, and used it to tell an entirely different story about the history of New York. Last year I moved to that neighborhood, and I pass the alley every day.
…has a sex scene that will make you blush:
The White Rose by…me. It absolutely made me blush when I was writing it.
…I would have blurbed if asked:
I am a confirmed non-blurber. I have broken my rule only once, for the same close friend who explained the end of A Suitable Boy to me. Otherwise, I am of the opinion that blurbing has evolved into a form where it means little. Having said that, I would have blurbed Pride and Prejudice. I would have blurbed the hell out of it.
…I’d want signed by the author:
If I did blurb Pride and Prejudice, do you think I could get her to sign it for me?
Riza Cruz is an editor and writer based in New York.