Jay McInerney portrait

Jay McInerney's Top Book Recommendations

Want to know what books Jay McInerney recommends? We've researched interviews, social media posts, podcasts, and articles to build a comprehensive list of Jay McInerney's favorite book recommendations of all time. At Shortform, we know books. Our book guides are the best in the world. Learn why.

The Fortress of Solitude book cover1

The Fortress of Solitude

Jonathan Lethem

4.0
The Fortress of Solitude is the story of Dylan Ebdus growing up white and motherless in downtown Brooklyn in the 1970s. It's a neighborhood where the entertainments include muggings along with games of stoopball. In that world, Dylan has one friend, a black teenager, also motherless, named Mingus Rude. As Lethem follows the knitting and unraveling of their friendship, he creates an overwhelmingly
Bryan Callen portraitJay McInerney portrait Recommended by Bryan Callen and Jay McInerney.
Jay McInerney portrait
Jay McInerney

Lethem was one of the first people to write about the new Brooklyn. This is a beautiful coming-of-age novel. [source]

Bryan Callen portrait
Bryan Callen

So here are my three must read books. I've been reading a lot of great books like: Outsmart Your Instincts, The Culture Code, and Antonio Damasio’s The Strange Order, and sometimes when you read a lot of nonfiction it’s very enriching, sometimes you need a novel. I really believe you should take a minute and read something beautiful. Listen, listen to Lolita by Nabokov. But also listen to Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy and listen to Richard Poe narrate that. Those are two of the greatest feats of the english language that I can think of. Then there’s Fortress of Solitude, an amazing book, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, these are great novels. Cold Mountain is a beautiful novel, Snow Falling On Cedars, I mean they’ve been around for a while. But goddamnit, get those under your belt. Those are the novels I think you should read. You know Love In The Time Of Cholera it just makes you ache. Kind of like a Hemingway thing, where Hemingway “ahh!”, it’s the same thing, you know. So I don’t know, I’m a fan of all those books. Those are my 3 slash 20 books. [source]

The Catcher in the Rye book cover2

The Catcher in the Rye

J. D. Salinger

4.0
The hero-narrator of The Catcher in the Rye is an ancient child of sixteen, a native New Yorker named Holden Caulfield. Through circumstances that tend to preclude adult, secondhand description, he leaves his prep school in Pennsylvania and goes underground in New York City for three days. The boy himself is at once too simple and too complex for us to make any final comment about him or his story
Bill Gates portraitEv Williams portraitWoody Allen portrait Recommended by Bill Gates, Ev Williams, Woody Allen, and 7 others.
Jay McInerney portrait
Jay McInerney

Salinger almost invented the concept of teenage angst – his was the first voice of the youthquake that transformed our society in the 50s, 60s and 70s. [source]

Woody Allen portrait
Woody Allen

Film Director

It was such a relief from the other books I was reading at the time, which all had a quality of homework to them. [source]

American Psycho book cover3

American Psycho

Bret Easton Ellis

4.0
Patrick Bateman is twenty-six and he works on Wall Street, he is handsome, sophisticated, charming and intelligent. He is also a psychopath. Taking us to head-on collision with America's greatest dream—and its worst nightmare—American Psycho is bleak, bitter, black comedy about a world we all recognise but do not wish to confront.
Jay McInerney portraitPavel Tsatsouline portrait Recommended by Jay McInerney and Pavel Tsatsouline.
Jay McInerney portrait
Jay McInerney

It’s a brilliant satire of greed and the mindlessness of popular culture, of American life and of New York in the 80s. [source]

Pavel Tsatsouline portrait
Pavel Tsatsouline

Most people exist between the on and off switch. They are unable to turn on and put out high power, and they are unable to turn off completely and enjoy true rest. To learn how to control your on and off switch, read the book Psych by Dr. Judd Biasiotto. He is one of the most successful power lifters in history, having squatted over 600 pounds at a bodyweight of 132... drug free, at the age of 44, after back surgery. [source]

The House of Mirth book cover4

The House of Mirth

Edith Wharton, Anna Quindlen

4.0
A literary sensation when it was published by Scribners in 1905, The House of Mirth quickly established Edith Wharton as the most important American woman of letters in the twentieth century. The first American novel to provide a devastatingly accurate portrait of New York's aristocracy, it is the story of the beautiful and beguiling Lily Bart and her ill-fated attempt to rise to the heights of a
Chelsea Handler portraitJay McInerney portrait Recommended by Chelsea Handler and Jay McInerney.
Jay McInerney portrait
Jay McInerney

Americans are always fascinated with the wealthy. It’s a bit of an illusion to imagine ours to be a classless society, as novelists like Wharton made brilliantly clear. [source]

Chelsea Handler portrait
Chelsea Handler

A timeless story we have seen play out for hundreds of years — yet, it feels like it would only apply to modern day society in the form of a Kardashian. [source]

5

The Wicked Pavilion

Dawn Powell

4.3
The “Wicked Pavilion” of the title is the Café Julien, where everybody who is anybody goes to recover from failed love affairs and to pursue new ones, to cadge money, to hatch plots, and to puncture one another’s reputation. Dennis Orphen, the writer from Dawn Powell’s Turn, Magic Wheel, makes an appearance here, as does Andy Callingham, Powell’s thinly disguised Ernest Hemingway. The climax of th
Jay McInerney portrait Recommended by Jay McInerney.