Best Advice Books For The Recent Grad

Finding the perfect gift for a recent graduate, be from college or high school, can be tricky. Why not give a little advice mixed in with life lessons they can learn from, with these books from our sister company Simon & Schuster.

The Opposite of Loneliness: Essays and Stories
By Marina Keegan

Marina Keegan’s star was on the rise when she graduated from Yale in May 2012. She had a play that was to be produced at the New York Fringe Festival and a job waiting for her at The New Yorker. Tragically, five days after graduation, Marina died in a car crash. Days later, her deeply moving last essay for The Yale Daily News, “The Opposite of Loneliness,” went viral, receiving more than 2 million hits. Marina left behind a rich, deeply expansive body of work that, like the title essay, captures the hope, uncertainty and possibility of her generation. The Opposite of Loneliness is an assemblage of Marina’s essays and stories that articulate the universal struggle that all of us face as we figure out what we aspire to be.

For Fans Of: George Saunders’ Congratulations, by the way

The Promise of a Pencil: How an Ordinary Person Can Create Extraordinary Change
By Adam Braun

The inspiring memoir of a young man—named one of Forbes’s “30 Under 30” and Wired Magazine’s “50 People Who Are Changing the World”—who traded a lucrative career in finance to found Pencils of Promise, an innovative organization that started with $25 and has now built more than 150 schools around the world. This is required reading for anyone who believes that one person’s determination is all it takes to change the world.

For Fans Of: Three Cups of Tea

The Priority List: A Teacher’s Final Quest to Discover Life’s Greatest Lessons
By David Menasche

School is out, but there are still critical lessons to learn. Revered by his students for his fearless spirit and rebellious nature, when thirty-four year old David Menasche was diagnosed with brain cancer, teaching was something that he just couldn’t quit. He traveled the country to reunite with his former students and hear what moments and bits of knowledge stuck with them from their time in his class. Drawn from those interactions, The Priority List is a remarkable book of insights that explores many of life’s biggest themes—love, wealth, family, ambition, and friends—and asks us all to consider what really matters.

For Fans Of: The Last Lecture

One Question: Life-Changing Answers from Today’s Leading Voices
By Ken Coleman

If you had an opportunity to sit down with a favorite celebrity, a sports idol, or a hero, what would you ask? How do Hall of Fame basketball coaches learn from failure? What do former U.S. presidents say is the key to connecting with people? How do Emmy-winning comedians deal with rejection? Interviewer and commentator Ken Coleman decided to find out for himself. Based on the popular blog, “One Question with Ken Coleman,” this book invites readers to peer over the shoulder of a master interviewer as he delivers carefully crafted questions and collects answers guaranteed to surprise, challenge, and inspire.

For Fans Of: Katie Couric’s The Best Advice I Ever Got

The Intern’s Handbook: A Thriller
By Shane Kuhn

John Lago is a very bad guy. But he’s the very best at what he does. And what he does is infiltrate top-level companies and assassinate crooked executives while disguised as an intern. Interns are invisible. That’s the mantra behind HR, Inc., an elite “placement agency” that doubles as a network of assassins-for-hire, taking down high-profile executives who wouldn’t be able to remember an intern’s name if their lives depended on it. This tongue-in-cheek, Tarantino-esque assassination thriller is the perfect gift for millennials who are just entering the workforce.

For Fans Of: Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club

Joy of Cooking
By Irma Rombauer, Marion Rombauer Becker, and Ethan Becker

Seventy-five years and nine revisions after it was first published, Joy of Cooking has taught generations of Americans how to cook, answered countless kitchen and food questions, and averted many a cooking crisis. Joy of Cooking remains the greatest teaching cookbook ever written, with a new focus on everything from knife skills to splitting cake layers, from setting a table to making tamales. This edition brings back the encyclopedic chapter “Know Your Ingredients,” which novices and pros alike depend on, and features a brand new “Nutrition” chapter. The brand new Joy of Cooking app features thousands of recipes, reference materials, and photos.

For Fans Of: Your mom’s lasagna, your grandmother’s dumplings, and Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking