Of all the Roman poets, Horatius Flaccus (65 BC to 8 BC) is undoubtedly the greatest. His vast corpus of work (the Epodes, Satires, Odes, Epistles and the Ars Poetica) spanned all aspects of Roman life: politics, the arts, religion, and the authority of the emperor, while his poems about friendship, philosophy, love and sex still have considerable universal appeal. For two thousand years he has been kept alive by scholars who have felt a great affinity with the benign personality that emerges. But not since Fraenkel's life of Horace in 1957 has a substantial biography of the poet been undertaken. This book makes a real attempt to present a complete picture of the life of Horace and the world in which he lived. It considers the details of Horace's romantic liaisons and why he never married, what the status of his father - a freedman - meant to the poet, and his distinctive brand of philosophy.

Waiting for Daisy is about doing all the thinsg you swore you'd never do to get something you hadn't even been sure you wanted. It's a real-life journey of loss, love, anger and redemption. Told with raw candour and a rare wit that marks Waiting for Daisy as a future classic, Peggy Orenstein's story begins when she tells her new husband that she's not certain she ever wants to be a mother. It ends six years later after she's done almost everything humanly possible to have a baby. Along the way she visits an ex-boyfriend who now has fifteen children, encounters 'parasite singles' in Tokyo (women who are rejecting marriage and motherhood in favour of shopping sprees and foreign travel), and shares stories with women survivors of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima. The world's professional women are only now beginning to become aware of the risks and realities of 'having it all', and Orenstein's poignant saga unfolds as infertility is developing scarily into a boom industry, with many thousands of women a year seeking treatment.

P.F. Sloan was one of the most prolific and influential geniuses to emerge from the golden age of the 60s. From his little studio at Dunhill Records, Sloan was a veritable hit-machine, writing and playing guitar for The Mamas & The Papas (that's Sloan's infectious guitar lick on 'California Dreamin'), Barry McGuire (the brilliant and controversial 'Eve Of Destruction'), Johnny Rivers (the iconic 'Secret Agent Man'), The Turtles, The Grass Roots, Herman's Hermits, The Fifth Dimension, The Searchers, and more. P.F. Sloan was everywhere. And then he disappeared. With a foreword by British singer-songwriter Rumer and an afterword by Creed Bratton, the Grass Roots guitarist turned star of The Office, What's Exactly The Matter With Me? is a revelatory memoir of an extraordinary life through the most fascinating years of American and British musical and pop culture. Beginning with a chance meeting with Elvis Presley, this is the story of a boy whose only love was music--of dreams, success, destruction, and miraculous resurrection. Along the way we encounter The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Byrds, Bob Dylan, Buffalo Springfield, The Beach Boys, and more, as well as UFOs and psychiatric hospitals. This is the dangerous ride and inspiring story of one of the greatest songwriters in popular music--and also one of the most elusive and mysterious.

"With the same candor that has characterized his life, Otto Preminger--actor, director, producer, and now writer--exposes himself (in writing) as well as an impressive line-up of show business folk in this engrossing memoir. As one of Hol1ywood's pre-eminent directors with 36 films and 32 stage productions to his credit, Preminger reveals the funny, outrageous, and often exasperating moments of his career, and his association with the eccentric, the gracious, the wealthy, the egomaniacal--'the stars.' Beginning his career as an apprentice of Max Reinhardt, Preminger became an instant success as an actor and then as a director. Hollywood called and he went there in 1935. His outspoken manner clashed with the autocratic studio moguls. He was forced to return to New York and find work directing plays on Broadway. He rebounded in 1944 to begin his stormy and remarkably creative period in Hollywood with Laura, his first all-out hit, starring Gene Tierney, Clifton Webb, and Dana Andrews. Preminger gives an inside glimpse at shooting such films as Daisy Kenyon with Joan Crawford (whom he considers a remarkable, independent, and generous woman); River of No Return, starring Marilyn Monroe; the all-black productions of Carmen Jones and Porgy and Bess, both accused of being racist; The Man With the Golden Arm, with Frank Sinatra and Kim Novak; plus such legendary films as Anatomy of a Murder (James Stewart, Lee Remick, and George C. Scott), Exodus (Paul Newman, Eva Marie Saint), Advise and Consent (Henry Fonda and Charles Laughton), The Cardinal (Tom Tryon, Romy Schneider), Hurry Sundown (Jane Fonda, Michael Caine, Diahann Carroll and Faye Dunaway), and In Harm's Way (John Wayne). Making no bones about naming enemies or exalting his friends, Preminger elaborates on the blacklisting during the fifties and includes his own critique of the critics. Preminger gives us a little more insight into his friend Tallulah Bankhead and her affinity for shocking behavior (with a few choice examples), as well as his opinion of Howard Hughes (a fascinating man, but not all that eccentric). He sets the record straight on a number of his love affairs and marriages, and divulges the story of his relationship with Gypsy Rose Lee and their child, who after Gypsy's death emerged as Erik Preminger. Leaving few stones unturned, this unique "Otto-biography" zooms in on Hollywood through the eyes of one of its most active and highly creative personalities--Preminger!"--Jacket.

For sixty-four years, Isaac Stern has been a great--and greatly loved--performing artist, famous for his profound music-making, his gusto for life, his passionate dedication to sharing his knowledge and wisdom with younger musicians, and his determination in a good cause (Stern is, after all, The Man Who Saved Carnegie Hall). Indeed, there is no more revered musician in the world than Isaac Stern, revered not only as a great violinist but as a warm and generous personality and as a crucial figure and spokesperson in the world of the arts. Brought to America from Russia when he was ten months old, Stern grew up in San Francisco and was quickly recognized as an extraordinary talent. He began performing publicly while still very young, and was soon touring across the country and around the world. His fame escalated when he led the fight to save Carnegie Hall, and again when he was the subject of the Academy Award-winning documentary film From Mao to Mozart. In this book he shares with us both his personal and his artistic experiences: the story of his rise to eminence; his feelings about music and the violin; his rich emotional life; his great friendships and collaborations with colleagues such as Leonard Bernstein and Pablo Casals; his background as an ardent supporter of Israel; his ideas and beliefs about art, life, love, and the world we live in. At seventy-nine, Stern's mind, his wit, and his spirit are as strong as ever, and they are conveyed to us in the most sympathetic and articulate way by Chaim Potok. The two men spent a year talking and sharing their perceptions, and the result is a book in which Stern's voice comes through with complete conviction and persuasiveness. The man on the page is the musician and humanitarian we have loved and admired for so long. Here is the most readable and revealing musical autobiography of the decade.

"Charity Tillemann-Dick was a vivacious young American soprano studying at the celebrated Franz Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest when she received devastating news: her lungs were failing, her heart was three and a half sizes too big, and she would die within five years. Inexplicably, despite her fatal pulmonary condition, she could still sing. Medical experts advised Charity to abandon her musical dreams, but if her time was running out, she wanted to spend it doing what she loved. In just three years, she endured two double lung transplants. Teetering between life and death, she slowly learned to breathe, walk, talk, eat, and sing again. With new lungs and fierce determination, she eventually fell in love, rebuilt her career, and reclaimed her life. Over a decade after her diagnosis, she has a chart-topping album, performs around the globe, and is a leading voice for organ donation. Weaving Charity's extraordinary tale of triumph with those of opera's greatest heroines, The Encore illuminates the indomitable human spirit. It's the story of confronting devastating challenges with love: the intimate love of a mother for her daughter, a man for a woman, a doctor for her craft, and a singer for her music. Ultimately, grace from God and strangers enabled the work of love to save one young woman's breath and allowed her to reclaim her life"--Inside dust jacket.

Edward Cooper was a hard man to know. Dour and exuberant by turns, his moods dictated the always-uncertain climate of the Cooper household. Now - balding, octogenarian - he makes an unlikely literary muse. But to his now middle-aged son, he looms larger than life, an overwhelming, baffling presence. Edward Cooper made his name as a divorce attorney in LA whose cases were devoured by the tabloids. Now, he is slowly succumbing to dementia. As Bernard attempts to forge a coherent picture of his family history, he uncovers Edward's lawsuits against other family members, and recalls the itemized invoice his father once sent him for the total cost of his upbringing, for the sum of two million dollars. 'Bernard Cooper's The Bill from My Fathe r is a glorious cornucopia of love and pain. Not only is Cooper an exemplary writer but he can parse an emotion down to its most resonant note. This memoir amazes' Alice Sebold, author of The Lovely Bones 'Cooper is a beautiful writer . . . his book is in a class of its own . . . Somehow, this is a story about all parents and their grown-up children and how they manage to keep going through all the insults and mixed messages and botched attempts to express love' Observer 'Cooper's wry, rueful memoir of a lifetime's wrangling with the old guy is memorably moving, emotionally disciplined, devilish in the detail and smartly funny. Read it now' The Times

""Acclaimed author and feisty nonagenarian Hotchner's witty ruminations about the art of living well into old age...with brio and a touch of his trademark sass, Hotchner writes about rediscovering love after 75, finding joy in a scrappy African gray parrot he named after his longtime friend, Ernest Hemingway, and going on his very first safari at age 88." - Kirkus Reviews When youngsters in their seventies and eighties, nervously lurching toward the horizon of ninety, ask me, "What's the secret?" That's what I tell them: "O.J. in the morning, gin and tonic at night." You don't have to be in your seventies or eighties to enjoy A. E. Hotchner's elixir for aging happily, but after reading this charming collection of essays, you may wish you were. Nonagenarian, novelist, playwright, and biographer, Hotchner gives us heartfelt and laugh-out-loud anecdotes that describe his unique reflections on the aging process. His musings cover everything from the outlandish commercials that target the older generation (Viagra, Cialis, and Flomax) to suggestions on adapting the tennis game for seniors (he suggests lowering the net by two inches and moving all outer lines two feet inward) to the advantages of having a pet (his pet parrot often tells guests to "kiss my ass"). He can equally capture the headier side of aging, which is bittersweetly revealed in his piece about divorce. With his disarming, eloquent voice and dry sense of humor, Hotch illuminates life's wisdoms through his optimistic, witty, and romantic outlook, all the while maing you feel, well, not unhappy about growing older. O.J. in the Morning, G&T at Night is a book of courageous advice, humorous wisdom, and, above all, good strategies for how to stay young at heart"--

Son of pioneer movie producer Harry Rapf, Maurice Rapf grew up in Hollywood in that city's golden age. After moving from independent filmmaking to Warner Bros., in 1924 the senior Rapf joined Louis Mayer and became one of the founding members of MGM. Hence, movies were a huge influence in Maurice Rapf's early life. After graduating from college, Rapf worked as a screenwriter for major Hollywood studios, but, in 1947, he left Hollywood, never to work for a major studio again. On numerous occasions, he was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee as an alleged communist, although he never made a public confession or denial. As a result he was blacklisted from the industry and forced to begin a new career in the East. He eventually became a movie critic and film studies professor. Maurice Rapf knows movies and the movie business as an insider, from first-hand experience, not from books. His autobiography is the story of one person's interaction with an evolving Hollywood. Rapf witnessed the historical progression of movie production: from silents to sound, from a fun-loving frontier community to a huge and fiercely competitive industry, from an apolitical never-never land to a community very much aware of-and nervous about-its social responsibility in a period of economic depression and in a period of world peace seriously threatened by the aggression of fascism. Of interest to students and teachers of film studies, of American history, and of American popular culture, as well as anyone who loves movies.

"In The Damned Don't Cry -- They Just Disappear, literary historian and Lamba Award--winning novelist Harlan Greene has created a portrait of a nearly forgotten Southern writer, unearthing information from archives, rare books, film libraries, and small-town newspapers. Greene brings Harry Hervey (1900-1951) to life and explicates his works to reveal him as a hardworking writer and master of many genres, bravely unwilling to conform to conventional values. As Greene illustrates, Hervey's novels, short stories, nonfiction books, and film scripts contain complex mixtures of history and thinly disguised homoerotic situations and themes. They blend local color, naturalism, melodrama, and psychological and sexual truths that provide a view of the circles in which he moved. Living openly with his male lover in Savannah, Georgia, and Charleston, South Carolina, Hervey set novels in these cities that scandalized the locals and critics as well. He challenged the sexual mores of his day, sometimes subtly and at other times brazenly presenting texts that told one story to gay male readers, while still courting a mainstream audience. His novels and nonfiction may have been coded and thus escaped detection in their day, but twenty-first-century readers can decipher them easily" --

"An honest look at life's second half from Everybody Loves Raymond TV sitcom star and comic Brad Garrett"--

A lively, idiosyncratic, witty look at the heart of our political process by a man who has crossed over from observer to activist, to become one of our newest members of parliament. Boris Johnson, celebrated for his blonde thatch of hair as well as for his brilliant writing in the newspapers, and much liked for his appearances on television and radio, took notes throughout his period as prospective candidate and the election campaign. The result is a book that is lovely and fascinating, outspoken and funny, and yet raises real questions about the democratic process. Have you ever wondered about becoming a Member of Parliament? Or why other people do? Or considered what the prospective parliamentary candidates do as they stump around the constituency - making speeches, kissing babies, knocking on front doors, providing newspaper copy? Or what difference it makes to us? Boris Johnson has been a candidate in two elections. As a journalist, he is used to writing about politicians. Now he is himself being interviewed. So what does it feel like, with the tables turned? In his own inimitable style, Boris Johnson writes about his views on the role of MPs and what they can achieve today. He comments on life on the stump, and the pleasure (mostly) of meeting voters, on political parties, current issues, and how to persuade people to vote - all interwoven with stories of what happened to him on his way to a meeting...

Dennis Altman first travelled from Australia to the United States when Lyndon Johnson was President, beginning a long obsession with the US. In the early 1970s he was involved in New York Gay Liberation; his 1971 study Homosexual: Oppression and Liberation, is widely regarded as a classic work in its field. In the 1980s Altman lived in San Francisco during the onset of the AIDS epidemic. Later he sat on the Australian National Council on AIDS and international organisations including, as president, the AIDS Society of Asia and the Pacific. The election of Donald Trump took place while Altman was back in California on one of his frequent visits. In this diarised memoir, moving between Australia, the United States, Europe and parts of Asia, Gore Vidal, James Baldwin, Susan Sontag, Christopher Isherwood and many others people a story of a half century of activism, intellectualism, friendship and conflict.

Writing a Jewish Life chronicles novelist Lev Raphael's struggle to claim both his religious and sexual identities, and the happiness he subsequently found. Until he reached his mid-20s, the author felt alienated from other Jews, ambivalent about his homosexuality; or as he puts it, "twice strange ... in each [community], different, lesser, ashamed." A son of Holocaust survivors, Raphael grew up in an unmistakably Jewish but nonreligious home. However, as an adult he initiated his own affiliations with Judaism: He had a bar mitzvah at age 30, went to Israel twice, and fell in love with a Jewish man. It was "coming out as a Jew,' he writes, that "ultimately made it possible for me to come out as a gay man and then work at uniting the two identities." Attesting to his journey is the contrast between his confused childhood and the joyful domestic life he now shares with his lover, Gersh, and their two sons.

Using "Sex and the single girl" by Helen Gurley Brown as a lesson plan, Anna David ventured out of her comfort zone in the hope of overcoming fears and insecurities that had haunted her for years.

"Manhattan is the tale of a young French scholar who travels to the United States in 1965 on a Fulbright Fellowship to consult the manuscripts of beloved authors. In Yale University's Beinecke Library, tantalized by the conversational and epistolary brilliance of a fellow researcher, she is lured into a picaresque and tragic adventure. Meanwhile, back in France, her children and no-nonsense mother await her return. A young European intellectual's first contact with America and the city of New York are the background of this story. The experience of Manhattan haunts this labyrinth of a book as, over a period of thirty-five years, its narrator visits and revisits Central Park and a half-buried squirrel, the Statue of Liberty and a never again to be found hotel in the vicinity of Morningside Heights: a journey into memory in which everything is never the same. Traveling from library to library, France to the United States, Shakespeare to Kafka to Joyce, Manhattan deploys with gusto all the techniques for which Cixous's fiction and essays are known: rapid juxtapositions of time and place, narrative and description, analysis and philosophical reflection. It investigates subjects Cixous has spent her life probing: reading, writing, and the "omnipotence-other" seductions of literature; a family's flight from Nazi Germany and postcolonial Algeria; childhood, motherhood, and, not least, the strange experience of falling in love with a counterfeit genius"--

It is 1955, and Colette Rossant, newly married, has just arrived in America with her husband Jimmy. She is bemused by American customs and most importantly by the food: the ubiquitous mayonnaise, the iceberg lettuce. But post-war New York is humming and they discover a whole new world in Greenwich Village; Colette slowly falls in love with her adopted country. When Jimmy and Colette buy a house downtown, Colette finds a place she can truly call home. It is in this house that they raise their four children and where Colette progresses from being a passionate cook to an acclaimed food writer. Madeleines in Manhattan is the story of her journey from young housewife to successful professional.

'The most life-affirming book ever written about death.' Sandi Toksvig 'One of the most powerful and helpful books about grief that you will ever read.' Anita Anand 'Grief is more than the price of love. It is love. We must learn not just to live with it, but to make it welcome.' Mother and daughter Anne Mayer Bird and Catherine Mayer were widowed within 41 days of each other on the eve of the pandemic, then locked down alone. Their profound isolation was broken just once a week, when Catherine visited Anne to care for her, at distance and in a mask. Together they found ways to navigate their loss and the startling questions and challenges that confronted them. In this memoir, Catherine also investigates the possibility that her husband, renowned musician Andy Gill, contracted Covid-19 when his band, Gang of Four, toured China in late 2019. Her main focus, however, is not on death, but on life and love. This is a captivating account of lives well lived, moving and spiked with black humour. It is interwoven with letters Anne wrote to her husband John to tell him of the astonishing and heartrending events since his death and her small triumphs in living independently. In sharing their insights and experiences, Catherine and Anne aim to help those who have lost or will lose people or who wish to know how best to support others in such circumstances. They also celebrate love--for John and Andy and each other. 'We are extraordinarily lucky, my mother and I. We have each other and we have this room. 'In this living room, we are learning to embrace the things we can't touch, each other and the lovely dead.'

In this memoir, dancer, choreographer, and filmmaker Yvonne Rainer traces her personal and artistic coming of age. Feelings Are Facts (the title comes from a dictum by Rainer's one-time psychotherapist) uses diary entries, letters, program notes, excerpts from film scripts, snapshots, and film frame enlargements to present a vivid portrait of an extraordinary artist and woman in postwar America. Rainer tells of a California childhood in which she was farmed out by her parents to foster families and orphanages, of sexual and intellectual initiations in San Francisco and Berkeley, and of artistic discoveries and accomplishments in the New York City dance world. Rainer studied with Martha Graham (and heard Graham declare, "when you accept yourself as a woman, you will have turn-out"--that is, achieve proper ballet position) and Merce Cunningham in the late 1950s and early 1960s, cofounded the Judson Dance Theater in 1962 (dancing with Trisha Brown, Steve Paxton, David Gordon, and Lucinda Childs), hobnobbed with New York artists including Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Morris (her lover and partner for several years), and Yoko Ono, and became involved with feminist and anti-war causes in the 1970s and 1980s. Rainer writes about how she constructed her dances--including The Mind Is a Muscle and its famous section, Trio A, as well as the recent After Many a Summer Dies the Swan--and about turning from dance to film and back to dance. And she writes about meeting her longtime partner Martha Gever and discovering the pleasures of domestic life. The mosaic-like construction of Feelings Are Facts recalls the composition-by-juxtaposition of Rainer's work in film and dance, displaying prismatic variations from what she calls her "reckless past" for our amazement and appreciation.

Robin Morgan is known as a prize-winning author, a political theorist, and a founder of the contemporary women's movement. But these adult accomplishments eclipsed an earlier fame. "Saturday's child has to work for a living," and Morgan has--since the age of two. She was a tot model, had her own radio show at age four, and was a child star on television, including on the popular series "Mama." Unlike most child actors, she emerged to reinvent a life filled with literary achievement and constructive politics.Here Morgan tells the whole story--the years as a child so famous she was named "The Ideal American Girl," her fight to become a serious writer, marriage to a fiery bisexual poet, motherhood, lovers (male and female), and decades working on civil rights, the radical underground, and global feminism. This is the intensely personal, behind-the-scenes story of her life.