Leading Soviet commentator Vladimir Pozner reflects on his nation from Stalin to perestroika, the evolution of the Communist party, past "cultural genocide," and the world's emergence from Cold War thinking

The life story of this daring news reporter, globetrotter, and advocate for women's rights is presented chronologically from birth to death.

A sophisticated coming-of-age memoir tracing a modern Holly Golightly from girl- to womanhood and from fantasy to realityFrom the glittering skyscrapers of Manhattan's media elite to the slacker haven of a fashionably low-rent L. A. bar, Strawberry Saroyan traces her journey not only from girl- to womanhood, but from fantasy to reality. A powerful and profoundly post-modern coming of age story, with a voice reminiscent of Liz Phair one moment and Mary McCarthy the next, Girl Walks into a Bar explores Saroyan's struggle not only with who she is and who she wants to be, but also who she is in the context of what she's supposed to embody: the iconic media-promulgated 'girl', a 21st-century version of Audrey Hepburn standing outside Tiffany's looking at diamonds. episodes of Saroyan's life and brings them to the page as a filmmaker might, zeroing in on the crucial 'scenes': losing her virginity, starting her own riot grrly magazine, falling in dysfunctional love. Yet all the while, she's trailed by that other black-clad girl, the Platonic ideal of so many modern young women's fantasies. Will they ever meet? That question lies at the heart of Saroyan's genre-bending meoir. Girl Walks into a Bar promises to be one of the most memorable debuts of the year. Strawberry Saroyan was born in 1970 and grew up in California. After graduating from Barnard, she was an editor at Conde Nast Traveler. Her writing has appeared in Salon, Elle and Vogue. She lives in Los Angeles.

During a career spanning more than forty years, the award-winning journalist and broadcaster Robin Lustig has lived in, worked in and reported from more than eighty countries. Now, in Is Anything Happening?, he tells the inside story of the triumphs and disasters he experienced along the way. He describes coming under fire in Pakistan and crashing the bongs of Big Ben on Remembrance Sunday. He was in Berlin on the day Germany was re-unified, and in Moscow for the final day of the Soviet Union. He also met some of the world's most revered, and reviled, political leaders, from Nelson Mandela to the 'butcher of Bosnia', Radovan Karadzic. And Lustig famously presented a special news programme covering the sudden death of Diana, Princess of Wales, just hours after the announcement was made. In this highly personal memoir, both funny and poignant, Lustig describes growing up as the son of refugees from Nazi Germany, retracing the journeys of his immigrant forebears, and standing on the very spot where his grandmother was murdered by a Nazi death squad in 1941. After more than thirty years of reporting from and about the Middle East - including three years based in Jerusalem for The Observer - he reflects on the continuing conflict between Israelis and Palestinians and reaches a startling and controversial conclusion: that the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 may well have been a mistake for both Jews and non-Jews.

Austria experienced remarkable economic and social growth in the years following World War II, especially considering the troubled nature of its politics. A small, land-locked country, Austria has emerged as the European Union's fourth richest state, yet it still wrestles with old decisions and demons. Merging personal observation with rich historical scholarship, a renowned journalist and award-winning memoirist tracks Austria's unique trajectory, beginning the origins of its peoples and following through to the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian empire in 1918. Paul Lendvai investigates whether Austrians have come to terms with Hitler s Anschluss and the Waldheim affair and how they have met the challenge of Jorg Haider s radical right-wing ascendancy. Lendvai identifies a positive moral toughness, internal cohesion, and social discipline within Austria, especially during the years of occupation and subsequent crises, such as the Hungarian Revolution, the Prague Spring, and the Yugoslav wars. A probing study of Austria's long quest for nationhood, this volume offers a firsthand look at the factors and players that have influenced an evolving power.Praise for the German edition: Daring, exciting, unmasking...Lendvai presents hitherto hardly known facts and] incredible details.& mdash; NEWS (Vienna Weekly)Lendvai seeks to explain what Austria is like. He has succeeded exactly in this endeavor.& mdash; Die Wel

Poppy, newly recruited cub reporter at the Downingham Post, is determined to prove to the editor that he's wrong in his belief that 'Women are a nuisance in the office'. He certainly doesn't think she's a nuisance when it's time for the tea round - a job which never fails to fall to the only female reporter. What Poppy lacks in experience, she makes up for in spirit and ambition. She'll make the Downingham Post the best regional newspaper there is - even if she occasionally gets the names wrong in court hearings. Life, for a single professional woman in the post-war years, certainly has its challenges - from finding a room, when the tyrannical landlady doesn't consider Poppy to be quite respectable, to changing her editor's deeply entrenched ways. This semi-autobiographical novel, recounted with Monica Dickens's wit, warmth and wry observation, will charm all who read it.

CBS News correspondent Bob Simon recounts his captivity in Iraq during the Persian Gulf War in 1991.

"An entertaining and openhearted tale of a naïf eventually getting to understand a complex, glittering, beautiful and often cruel society - at least a little. When Simon Kuper left London for Paris in his early thirties, he wasn't planning to make a permanent move. Paris, however, had other plans. Kuper has grown middle-aged there, eaten the croissants, seen his American wife through life-threatening cancer, taken his children to countless football matches on freezing Saturday mornings in the city's notorious banlieues, and in 2015 lived through two terrorist attacks on their neighborhood. Over two decades of becoming something of a cantankerous Parisian himself, Kuper has watched the city change. This century, it has globalized, gentrified, and been shocked into realizing its role as the crucible of civilizational conflict. Sometimes it's a multicultural paradise, and sometimes it isn't. This decade, Parisians have lived through a sequence of shocks: terrorist attacks, record floods and heatwaves, the burning of Notre Dame, the storming of the city by gilets jaunes, and then the pandemic. Now, as the Olympics come to town, France is busy executing the "Grand Paris" project: the most serious attempt yet to knit together the bejewelled city with its neglected suburbs. This is a captivating memoir of the Paris of today, without the Parisian cliches"--

In the course of the same old race I find myself writing about knowing some people--how fame seems to set some people apart from us, once known: I was astonished by Ernest Hemingway's small, weak handshake when we were introduced at Scribners by John Hall Wheelock and by the jolt of force with which Elie Wiesel squeezed my hand. How long ago seems knowing, too: when I first meet Isaac Singer he asks me, "Who is Mr. Saul Bellow?" We're on the Upper West Side in his apartment next to the funeral parlor. A yellow parakeet hops around on Singer's bald forehead. Singer's great comic story of faith, "Gimpel the Fool," has only recently been published from Yiddish into English in a translation by Saul Bellow. They're both still a long way from Stockholm. "Do you know him? Can you tell me who this Mr. Bellow is?" he asks. It was not always possible to guess Singer's motives in acting as though he was not impressed with worldly reputations. His features of a medieval Polish saint, even to a faint white-haired tonsure effect around the crown of his skull, were backlit by the glowing monitor from his mischievous incubus.--from the Preface These are Richard Elman's candid snapshots in prose of the various, mostly literary celebrities he encountered during his four decades as a working writer and journalist--among them Isaac Bashevis Singer, Tillie Olsen, Bernard Malamud, Faye Dunaway, Hunter S. Thompson, and other important artists and writers who were Elman's teachers and, occasionally, adversaries. Engagingly written and never superficial, these portraits and anecdotes in many cases strike to the center of each subject's art. To many readers, these persons are just "names"; Elman brings them to life while never simplifying or overdramatizing their work.

Novelist and Time correspondent Nick McDonell brings this stunning account back from the latest iteration of the War in Iraq--an engrossing, ground-level report on the conflict still unfolding under its second commander-in-chief. Traveling to Baghdad and then to Mosul with the 1st Cavalry Division, McDonell offers an unforgettable look at the way things stand now--at the translators stranded in a country that doesn't look kindly on their cooperation, at the infantrymen struggling to make something out of the soft counterinsurgency missions they call chai-ops , at the commanders inured to American journalists and Iraqi officials both--and what the so-called "end of major combat operations" means for where they're going.

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice. One of Library Journal 's Best Books of 2020. One of our most beloved writers reassess the electrifying works of literature that have shaped her life I sometimes think I was born reading . . . I can’t remember the time when I didn’t have a book in my hands, my head lost to the world around me. Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-reader is Vivian Gornick’s celebration of passionate reading, of returning again and again to the books that have shaped her at crucial points in her life. In nine essays that traverse literary criticism, memoir, and biography, one of our most celebrated critics writes about the importance of reading—and re-reading—as life progresses. Gornick finds herself in contradictory characters within D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers , assesses womanhood in Colette’s The Vagabond and The Shackle , and considers the veracity of memory in Marguerite Duras’s The Lover . She revisits Great War novels by J. L. Carr and Pat Barker, uncovers the psychological complexity of Elizabeth Bowen’s prose, and soaks in Natalia Ginzburg, “a writer whose work has often made me love life more.” After adopting two cats, whose erratic behavior she finds vexing, she discovers Doris Lessing’s Particularly Cats . Guided by Gornick’s trademark verve and insight, Unfinished Business is a masterful appreciation of literature’s power to illuminate our lives from a peerless writer and thinker who “still read[s] to feel the power of Life with a capital L.”

Norma Barzman is a blacklisted writer living in Southern France. Henry Myers is her beloved cousin, a former member of the Algonquin circle who has found his writing talent diminished with age, and is living an isolated life in New York City. When Norma invites Henry to Italy to realize their mutual dream of traveling together to Cremona to write about the mysterious origins of violin making, neither one could have anticipated the explosive consequences of their journey. But their adventure opens a Pandora's box of long-suppressed emotions, family secrets, and forces each to reassess their feelings towards each other, and themselves.

Milton Shulman has been a much-loved and outspoken arts critic for the Express and then the Evening Standard for forty years. These are his witty, anecdotal memoirs on the careers, interviews and encounters over the years. His broadcasts on Stop the Week as well as frequent radio and TV appearances have made him a nationwide figure.

International fashion icon Jeanne Beker dishes on her life on and off the runway More than 30 years ago, Jeanne Beker set out to live a life that was not just great, but extraordinary . In Finding Myself in Fashion , she recalls some of the high and low points of the turbulent past decade. Personally, she dealt with heartbreak (the end of her marriage) and rediscovered romance. Professionally, she suffered setbacks that became learning experiences leading to new career paths. She travelled the world with FQ Magazine ; witnessed epic events and conducted intimate interviews as a fashion reporter; launched her own clothes labels; wrote newspaper columns; and hosted or appeared on innumerable television shows. Through it all, both at home and at work, she stuck to her youthful resolution. This is Jeanne's candid account of a life lived to the max.

When Cosmo Landesman's American parents decided to move their young family to London in the swinging sixties, it was not to pursue a quieter life on this side of the pond. Quite the reverse: it was out of unbridled, unashamed lust for fame and fortune. But things did not go according to plan, and as a child Cosmo found himself charged with raising his starstruck parents and trying to cope with the publicity stunt of their 'open marriage'. Over the years he wrote press releases, blurbs and proposals for their plays, film treatments, novels, book ideas and demo tapes. He found himself playing the roll of creative midwife, personal manager, publicist, psychoanalyst and apologist. Not any more. In this hilarious memoir he finally lays bare his extraordinary childhood and the twists and turns of his parents' bizarre desire for the spotlight - and how they were always doomed to failure.