We spend a lot of time thinking about what’s worth your attention, and that goes for books as much as any performance or art exhibit. Welcome to 1MC’s curated shelf: five categories, thirty titles, refreshed every season, and always linked to independent booksellers through Bookshop.org.
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The Green Room
Memoirs, biographies, scripts, and performance culture from the creators who make it. From Liza Minnelli finally telling her own story to director John Doyle inside the rehearsal room, these picks reflect the full breadth of what theater makes possible. We’ve also included two scripts currently on Broadway this spring, because Daniel Radcliffe in Every Brilliant Thing and Taraji P. Henson and Cedric the Entertainer in Joe Turner’s Come and Gone are too good to leave on the shelf — plus Broadway Nation for the bigger picture of how we got here.
Conversation Starters
Society, identity, culture, and the changemakers we can’t stop thinking about. From Judy Blume’s complicated legacy to Eddie Glaude’s unflinching case for a more honest America, this shelf spans biography, memoir, and cultural criticism from some of the most important voices writing today. Han Kang — fresh off her Nobel Prize — makes her English-language nonfiction debut in March, meditating on art, violence, and what it means to bear witness across cultures and generations.
Jesmyn Ward writes on grief and resilience, Namwali Serpell makes the case for what Toni Morrison’s work demands of us, and Kimberlé Crenshaw arrives in May with the memoir that puts a life’s work fighting for intersectional justice into her own words.
Liner Notes
Music biography, legacy, and culture. No skips. Every artist carries their life into the music—and every book on this shelf proves it. From Alice Coltrane’s spiritual transcendence to Bad Bunny’s cultural dominance, De La Soul’s Native Tongues roots to Ty Herndon’s hard-won honesty, and the Rolling Stones’ half-century of reinvention to Fab 5 Freddy’s front-row seat to hip-hop’s birth, these picks are intentionally genre-spanning and generation-crossing. Because the story of music is never just about the music.
Fresh Ink
Fiction worth clearing your schedule for. In John of John, Douglas Stuart sends a queer art school dropout home to the Outer Hebrides in Scotland, where his father’s silence and his own secrets are on a collision course. Tayari Jones’s Kin follows two women out of Louisiana into starkly different lives—one toward Spelman, the historically Black women’s college in Atlanta, one toward a mother who was never coming back. Xochitl Gonzalez sets Last Night in Brooklyn in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, in 2007, where a young Latina woman mistakes proximity to someone else’s ambition for a life of her own.
T Kira Madden’s Whidbey connects three women through one man—two he abused, one who loved him—after his murder sets them all in motion. Patrick Cottrell’s Afternoon Hours of a Hermit is an existential noir about a trans writer who returns home after his brother’s death (convinced he’s a detective), only to discover the gap between who we are and how we’re perceived is unbridgeable. And if you’re short on time, Lauren Groff’s Brawler—nine stories, each readable in a single sitting—asks the same question from nine different angles: what does it take to be both animal and god?
When Art Speaks
The stories behind the images, objects, and creatives who left their mark. Two of these six titles are the official records of once-in-a-generation New York exhibitions: the Met’s first comprehensive Raphael retrospective and the 82nd Whitney Biennial. The other four—Matisse, Frida Kahlo, photographer Lisette Model, and the disco-era image-making of A Night at the Disco—don’t need a museum to justify them.
