By title

By author

Jason Reynolds

• The Young Landlords
• Walter Dean Myers

• It’s a brilliantly gritty story about a bunch of kids who get swindled into taking over a slum building. Super creative, yet totally feasible in New York City.

• Kira-Kira
• Cynthia Kadohata

• The story takes place in the sixties in the segregated south. Black people know where they stand. White people know where they stand. But what about a Japanese family?

• Noggin
• John Corey Whaley

• Smart and hilarious story about a young man who is dying and his parents decide to cryogenically freeze his head. A few years later, he’s back from the dead. And he’s still in high school.

• The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey
• Walter Mosley

• One of the gems that flew under the radar because Mosely is so prolific. But it’s a sweet, yet biting story about an elder man, Ptolemy Grey, suffering from dementia.

• Erasure
• Percival Everett

• It’s a weird book about a stuffy writer and his hatred for the industry. His frustration with his agent wanting him to write a “sellable” book pushes him to pen “street fiction” just as a middle finger to the corporate publishing structure. Madness ensues, and it’s downright hilarious.

Stephen Emond

• The Art of Urban Sketching, Drawing On Location Around The World
• Gabriel Campanario

• This book is full of sketches of buildings and cityscapes, and was influential in the design of my novel Bright Lights, Dark Nights.

• Dark City, The Lost World of Film Noir
• Eddie Muller

• Really cool book with lots of full page sharp stills from noir films. I was very inspired by the downbeat storytelling and cool aesthetics of noir. Mixed with the urban settings of a lot of noir and the light and dark interplay gave me a lot to work with.

• Eleanor and Park
• Rainbow Rowell
• Kendra
• Coe Booth
• Every Day
• David Levithan
• The First Part Last
• Angela Johnson
• Where Things Come Back
• John Corey Whaley
• Playing in the Dark, Whiteness and the Literary Imagination
• Toni Morrison
• Why We Broke Up
• Daniel Handler
• Forgive Me, Leonard Peacock
• Matthew Quick

Bruce Hale

• Exciting, funny, and occasionally gross. What more could you want?

• The Hunger Games, The Hunger Games, Book 1

• Intense stuff — reality TV taken to the extreme — but I couldn't put it down.

• The Absolutely True Diary of A Part-Time Indian

• Funny, touching, and fascinating — plus it has excellent cartoons.

• Out from Boneville, Boneville Series, #1

• Love the drawings, love the characters, love the stories.

• Whales On Stilts

• Straight-out wacky, hilarious stuff.

Patrick Jones

• Coyote Steals the Blanket, A Ute Tale

• A trickster tale about a coyote, a blanket, and a rock. Hot times in the desert.

• Dangerous Girls

• Or anything by Stine. The man's a genius. Don't believe me: this is about twin teen girls vampires one hot summer. Do the math.

• Hidden Talents

• This has it all: humor, adventure, smart mouth teen boys, stupid rules to rebel against, and fire.

• Scholastic Book Of Lists

• When you don’t have time for chapters or even paragraphs, choose bullets. Bullet points that is.

• Scary Stories 3

• Nothing wrong with the first two volumes, but this is "just delicious!" Don't read this during lunch or before or after.

• Strong to the Hoop

• A 10-year-old gets a chance to play with the big boys. Read this and you'll feel the sweat fly off the pages.

• The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock and Roll, The Definitive History of the Most Important Artists and Their Music

• By the Rolling Stone editors. An earlier edition of this book was my Bible at age 17. Everything you need to know.

Micol Ostow

• The Haunting of Hill House
• Shirley Jackson

• "The ne plus ultimate haunted house story, I like to think of Amity's Gwen as sort of a modern spin on Eleanor, a young woman seeing and experiencing ghostly things, whose mind and perceptions can't be trusted."

• We Have Always Lived in the Castle
• Shirley Jackson

• "A slow-burner filled with atmosphere. Merricat is the platonic ideal of an unreliable narrator."

• The Shining
• Stephen King

• "A suggestible man, prone to violence, isolated in a hotel that exerts evil force over his will... Jack Torrance is to Amity's Connor as Hill House's Eleanor is to Gwen."

• Tighter
• Adele Griffin

• "A modern take on The Turn of the Screw, Griffin draws from chilling source material and makes it her own for today's teen readers."

• To Die For
• Joyce Maynard

• "A dark and twisty thriller (the movie's great, too) that serves up multiple POV's on a platter. I spent a lot of time poring over the many distinct voices of that book."

• The Maddaddam trilogy
• Margaret Atwood

• "Epic and sprawling, boldly visionary, and still she manages to tie all of her narrative threads together by the series' conclusion. To spend ten minutes in that woman's head!"

• Dangerous Girls
• Abigail Haas

• "Pacing, pacing, pacing. Totally un-put-downable."

• The Amityville Horror
• Jay Anson

• "(That one probably goes without saying.)"

• We Were Liars
• E.Lockhart

• "The pages turn and the ending twists!"