Dani Shapiro's Top Ten List

Author Photo And Bio
Photo by Michael Maren

Dani Shapiro (born 1962) is a bestselling American novelist and memoirist. Her memoir Slow Motion: A Memoir of a Life Rescued by Tragedy (1998) focuses on the challenges she faced after dropping out of Sarah Lawrence College – trying to work as a model and actress in New York, being kept as a mistress by an older man, using drugs – and the change inspired by her parents’ car accident. Her other memoirs are Devotion (2010), in which she draws on her Orthodox Jewish background and other sources to ponder the meaning of life at mid-life, and Still Writing: The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life (2013). Her novels include Family History (2003), which tells the story of a family beset by an unspeakable tragedy, and Black + White (2007), about a daughter who flees from then years later reunites with her famous mother who is dying of cancer. To learn more, visit her official website.

1. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (1925).
2. Stop-Time by Frank Conroy (1967).
3. Saturday by Ian McEwan (2005).
4. Sleepless Nights  by Elizabeth Hardwick (1979).
5. Speedboat by Renata Adler (1976).
6. The Furies by Janet Hobhouse (1993).
7. Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter (2013).
8. Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates (1961).
9. Daniel Deronda by George Eliot (1874–76).
10. Runaway by Alice Munro (2004).