V. S. Pritchett called her "a genius." Gore Vidal described her as a "beloved novelist of singular brilliance... Of all the Southern writers, she is the most apt to endure..." And Tennessee Williams said, "The only real writer the South ever turned out, was Carson." She was born Lula Carson Smith in Columbus, Georgia. Her dream was to become a concert pianist, though she'd been writing since she was sixteen and the influence of music was evident throughout...
"A remarkably poignant writer for our troubled times, Patti Davis writes about love, loss, and the power of redemption in this poetic letter to her long-gone parents"--
Genevieve (Gwen) Kingston's mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer when Gwen was just three years old. Defying the odds, she lived another eight years, during which time she filled a chest with gifts and letters to Gwen and her brother, Jamie, for every major milestone and birthday through age thirty. The day Gwen got her driver's license. The day she graduated from high school. Gwen is now in her thirties and, when Did I Ever Tell You? begins,...
"Cassidy Hutchinson's desk was mere steps from the most controversial president in recent American history. Now, she provides a riveting account of her extraordinary experiences as an idealistic young woman thrust into the middle of a national crisis, where she risked everything to tell the truth about some of the most powerful people in Washington"--
"Legendary filmmaker and celebrated author Werner Herzog tells in his inimitable voice the story of his epic artistic career in a long-awaited memoir that is as inventive and daring as anything he has done before. Werner Herzog was born in September 1942 in Munich, Germany, at a turning point in the Second World War. Soon Germany would be defeated and a new world would have to be made out the rubble and horrors of the war. Fleeing the Allied bombing...
"Award-winning playwright, screenwriter, and director David Mamet shares scandalous and laugh-out-loud tales from his four decades in Hollywood where he worked with some of the biggest names in movies. David Mamet went to Hollywood on top--a super successful playwright summoned west in 1980 to write a vehicle for Jack Nicholson. He arrived just in time to meet the luminaries of old Hollywood and revel in the friendship of giants like Paul Newman,...
"Despite being hailed as one of the best guitarists of his era, George Harrison, particularly in his early decades, battled feelings of inferiority. He was often the butt of jokes from his bandmates owing to his lower-class background and, typically, was allowed to contribute only one or two songs per Beatles album out of the dozens he wrote. Now, acclaimed Beatles biographer Philip Norman examines Harrison through the lens of his numerous self-contradictions....
"During childhood summers in Louisiana, Andre Dubus III's grandfather taught him that men's work is hard. As an adult, whether tracking down a drug lord in Mexico as a bounty hunter or grappling with privilege while living with a rich girlfriend in New York City, Dubus worked--at being a better worker and a better human being. In Ghost Dogs, Dubus's nonfiction prowess is on full display in his retelling of his own successes, failures, triumphs, and...
From international drag superstar and pop culture icon RuPaul, comes his most revealing and personal work to date--a brutally honest, surprisingly poignant, and deeply intimate memoir of growing up Black, poor, and queer in a broken home to discovering the power of performance, found family, and self-acceptance. A profound introspection of his life, relationships, and identity, The House of Hidden Meanings is a self-portrait of the legendary icon...
A fresh portrait of the man behind James Bond, and his enduring impact, by an award-winning biographer with unprecedented access to the Fleming family papers.
"From the James Beard Award-winning blogger behind The Everywhereist come hilarious, searing essays on how food and cooking stoke the flames of her feminism. When celebrity chef Mario Batali sent out an apology letter for the sexual harassment allegations made against him, he had the gall to include a recipe-for cinnamon rolls, of all things. When Geraldine DeRuiter decided to make the recipe, she happened to make food journalism history along with...
If you would have told a young John Stamos flipping burgers at his dad's fast-food joint that one day he'd be a household name and that, at the height of his success, he'd be living alone, divorced, with no kids, high on a cocktail of forgetting, he might've asked, "You want fries with that?" John burst onto the scene in General Hospital, propelling him into the teen idol stratosphere, a place that's often a point of no return. But Stamos beat the...
"Jonna Hiestand Mendez began her CIA career as a "contract wife," a second-class citizen who was hired as a convenience to her husband, a young officer stationed in Switzerland. She needed his permission to open a bank account or shut off the gas to her apartment, and she performed menial duties for the CIA. Despite battling sexism at all levels of the agency, Mendez's talent for espionage was clear, and she soon took on bigger and more significant...
To become the most revered basketball player in America, it wasn’t enough for Michael Jordan to merely excel on the court. He also had to become something he never intended: a hero. Reconstructing the defining moment of Jordan’s career-winning his first NBA championship during the 1990-1991 season-sports historian Johnny Smith examines Jordan’s ubiquitous rise in American culture and the burden he carried as a national symbol of racial progress....
From internationally renowned writer and Booker Prize winner Salman Rushdie, a searing, deeply personal account of enduring--and surviving--an attempt on his life thirty years after the fatwa that was ordered against him. Speaking out for the first time, and in unforgettable detail, about the traumatic events of August 12, 2022, Salman Rushdie answers violence with art, and reminds us of the power of words to make sense of the unthinkable. Knife is...
This immersive biography of the legendary director of films such as 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Shining and A Clockwork Orange is based on new research and interviews with family members and those who worked with him.
"H Is for Hawk meets Joan Didion in the Pyrocene in this arresting combination of memoir, natural history, and literary inquiry that chronicles one woman's experience of life in Northern California during the worst fire season on record. Told in luminous, perceptive prose, The Last Fire Season is a deeply incisive inquiry into what it really means-now-to live in relationship to the elements of the natural world. When Manjula Martin moved from the...