Non-Fiction
| Title | Published | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|
| Stray | 2020 | Buy |
Standalone Novels
| Title | Published | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|
| Sweetbitter | 2016 | Buy |
Stephanie Danler published two books that each deal with hunger, desire, and the search for stability. Her debut novel Sweetbitter, released in 2016, follows Tess, a young woman who arrives in New York City and lands a job as a backwaiter at an upscale restaurant. The novel captures the restaurant industry’s physical demands, social hierarchies, and late-night excess with sensory precision. It became a bestseller and was adapted for television.
Her second book, Stray, published in 2020, is a memoir about returning to her hometown in California to confront her troubled family history. Where Sweetbitter was fiction steeped in autobiography, Stray is autobiography told with a novelist’s eye for detail and structure. Together the two books establish Danler as a writer interested in how people use places, relationships, and physical experience to build or escape their identities.