New York City in the 1970s was the setting for Taxi Driver , Annie Hall , and Saturday Night Fever , the nightmare playground for Son of Sam and The Warriors , the proving grounds for graffiti, punk, hip-hop, and all manner of other public spectacle. Musicians, artists, and writers could subsist even in Manhattan, while immigrants from the world over were reinventing the city in their own image. Others, fed up with crime, filth and frustration, simply split. Fast-forward three decades and today New York can appear a glamorous metropolis, with real estate prices soaring higher than its skyscrapers. But is this fresh-scrubbed, affluent city really an improvement on its grittier--and more affordable--predecessor? Taking us back to the streets where eccentricity and anomie were pervasive, New York Calling unlocks life in the unpolished Apple, where, it seemed, anything could happen. All five boroughs­­--the Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, and Staten Island--comprising hundreds of neighborhoods and the interlaced worlds of politics, crime, drugs, sex, and mischief, are explored with a love of the city unclouded by romance yet undimmed by cynicism. Acclaimed historian Marshall Berman and journalist Brian Berger gather here a stellar group of writers and photographers who combine their energies to weave a rich tale of struggle, excitement, and wonder. John Strausbaugh explains how Uptown has taken over Downtown, as Tom Robbins examines the mayors and would-be mayors who have presided over the transformation. Margaret Morton chronicles the homeless, while Robert Atkins offers a personal view of the city's gay culture and the devastating impact of aids. Anthony Haden-Guest and John Yau offer insiders' views of the New York art world, while Brandon Stosuy and Allen Lowe recount their discoveries of the local rock and jazz scenes. Armond White and Leonard Greene approach African-American culture and civil rights from perspectives often marginalized in so-called polite conversation. Daily life in New York has its dramatic moments too. Luc Sante gives us glimpses of a city perpetually on the grift, Jean Thilmany and Philip Dray share secrets of Gotham's ethnic enclaves, Richard Meltzer walks, Jim Knipfel rides the subways, and Robert Sietsema criss-crosses the city, indefatigably tasting everything from giant Nigerian tree snails to Fujianese turtles. It's a long way from old Brooklyn to the new Times Square. But New York Calling reminds us of what has changed--and what's been lost --along the way.

The Memory of All That is Katharine Weber’s memoir of her extraordinary family. Her maternal grandmother, Kay Swift, was known both for her own music (she was the first woman to compose the score to a hit Broadway show, Fine and Dandy ) and for her ten-year romance with George Gershwin. Their love affair began during Swift’s marriage to James Paul Warburg, the multitalented banker and economist who advised (and feuded with) FDR. Weber creates an intriguing and intimate group portrait of the renowned Warburg family, from her great-great-uncle, the eccentric art historian Aby Warburg, whose madness inspired modern theories of iconography, to her great-grandfather Paul M. Warburg, the architect of the Federal Reserve System whose unheeded warnings about the stock-market crash of 1929 made him “the Cassandra of Wall Street.” As she throws new light on her beloved grandmother’s life and many amours, Weber also considers the role the psychoanalyst Gregory Zilboorg played in her family history, along with the ways the Warburg family has been as celebrated for its accomplishments as it has been vilified over the years by countless conspiracy theorists (from Henry Ford to Louis Farrakhan), who labeled Paul Warburg the ringleader of the so-called international Jewish banking conspiracy. Her mother, Andrea Swift Warburg, married Sidney Kaufman, but their unlikely union, Weber believes, was a direct consequence of George Gershwin’s looming presence in the Warburg family. A notorious womanizer, Weber’s father was a peripatetic filmmaker who made propaganda and training films for the OSS during World War II before producing the first movie with smells, the regrettable flop that was AromaRama. He was as much an enigma to his daughter as he was to the FBI, which had him under surveillance for more than forty years, and even noted Katharine’s birth in a memo to J. Edgar Hoover. Colorful, evocative, insightful, and very funny, The Memory of All That is an enthralling look at a tremendously influential—and highly eccentric—family, as well as a consideration of how their stories, with their myriad layers of truth and fiction, have both provoked and influenced one of our most prodigiously gifted writers.

The romance of Charles Dickens's novels.

"The adventures of Samak, a trickster-warrior hero of Persia's thousand-year-old oral storytelling tradition, are beloved in Iran. Samak is an ayyar, a warrior who comes from the common people and embodies the ideals of loyalty, selflessness, and honor-a figure that recalls samurai, ronin, and knights yet is distinctive to Persian legend. His exploits-set against an epic background of palace intrigue, battlefield heroics, and star-crossed romance between a noble prince and princess-are as deeply rooted in Persian culture as are the stories of Robin Hood and King Arthur in the West. However, this majestic tale has remained little known outside Iran. Translated from the original Persian by Freydoon Rassouli and adapted by Prince of Persia creator Jordan Mechner, this timeless masterwork can now be enjoyed by English-speaking readers. A thrilling and suspenseful saga, Samak the Ayyar also offers a vivid portrait of Persia a thousand years ago. Within an epic quest narrative teeming with action and supernatural forces, it sheds light on the lives of ordinary people and their social worlds. This is the first complete English-language version of a treasure of world culture. The translation is grounded in the twelfth-century Persian text while paying homage to the dynamic culture of storytelling from which it arose"--

First published thirty years ago, John Berger's tender and bittersweet novel is a book of dreams of freedom and romance, dreams that intoxicate and redeem, dreams that have the power to exalt their dreamers or dash them against hard truth.It is the unforgettable, often comical portrait of a dreamer, one William Corker, the genteel proprietor of a London employment agency, who, in his sixty-third year, has just moved out of the house he shared with his overbearing sister. As Corker takes his first steps into a life of passions, Berger creates a character of astonishing depth and liveliness—a man whose fantasies and ambitions are at once splendid and tragic.

The Portrait of a Lady is arguably Henry James's most appealing and accessible novel. The introduction to this volume of specially written essays, first published in 1990, situates the novel in its cultural and historical context: its treatment of a modern woman 'affronting' her destiny, its relation to the contemporary controversy over 'morality' in fiction, its use of an Italian setting, and its late nineteenth century elegiac mood. It also discusses James's revisions of the novel and his late Preface. The essays that follow deal with the place of Portrait in the tradition of modern narrative, its relation to popular women's fiction on the question of marriage, the influence of James's 'family romance' and his brother William, and the character of Isabel Archer seen from a psychoanalytic point of view.

Here are heartfelt writings from some renowned names in lesbian and gay literature, as well as some debut appearances. These essays explore a kind of love uncomplicated by romance, but surprisingly sensual. As the writers pursue their relationships with the oposite sex, they ultimately lay bare the nature of friendship itself.

From the bestselling author of the memoir Permanent Midnight and the novel I, Fatty comes a long-awaited collection of short stories. Jerry’s Stahl’s perverse, yet often touching tales, many of which first appeared in publications ranging from Playboy to the Pushcart Prize to Best Erotic Fiction, plumb the depths of eccentric romance, sex-starved adolescence, mid-life crisis, and family dysfunction. From a teenager’s tryst with a recently widowed middle-aged woman on an airplane, to a dissatisfied dentist’s attempt to find freedom on the road with a much younger woman, all the way to an intensely erotic love affair between an ex-junkie and an ex-circus midget with a sexual obsession with vegetables, this collection never fails to arouse and surprise. With a disarmingly immediate prose style, Stahl finds great eroticism, humor, and humanity in the wildest of encounters.

"In Bitter Bronx, one of our most gifted and original novelists depicts a world before and after modern urban renewal destroyed the gritty sanctity of a land made famous by Ruth, Gehrig, and Joltin' Joe. Bitter Bronx is suffused with the texture and nostalgia of a lost time and place, combining a keen eye for detail with Jerome Charyn's lived experience. These stories are informed by a childhood growing up near that middle-class mecca, the Grand Concourse; falling in love with three voluptuous librarians at a public library in the Lower Depths of the South Bronx; and eating at Mafia-owned restaurants along Arthur Avenue's restaurant row, amid a "land of deprivation…where fathers trundled home…with a monumental sadness on their shoulders." In "Lorelei," a lonely hearts grifter returns home and finds his childhood sweetheart still living in the same apartment house on the Concourse; in "Archy and Mehitabel" a high school romance blossoms around a newspaper comic strip; in "Major Leaguer" a former New York Yankee confronts both a gang of drug dealers and the wreckage that Robert Moses wrought in his old neighborhood; and in three interconnected stories―"Silk & Silk," "Little Sister," and "Marla"―Marla Silk, a successful Manhattan attorney, discovers her father's past in the Bronx and a mysterious younger sister who was hidden from her, kept in a fancy rest home near the Botanical Garden. In these stories and others, the past and present tumble together in Charyn's singular and distinctly "New York prose, street-smart, sly, and full of lurches" (John Leonard, New York Times)".--Dust jacket.

"The archetypal student-teacher romance is cleverly turned on its head for the post-#MeToo era in this striking new play by the acclaimed author of What a Young Wife Ought to Know and Bunny. Jon, a star professor and author, is racked with self-loathing after his third marriage crumbles around him when he finds himself admiring a student--a girl in a red coat. The girl, nineteen-year-old Annie, is a big fan of his work, and also happens to live down the street. From their doorways to his office to hotel rooms, their mutual admiration and sexual tension escalates under Jon's control to a surprising conclusion that will leave you wanting to go back and question your perceptions of power as soon as you finish."--

A romantic drama with music inspired by the days of music hall and beyond, from the author of the modern classic Kindertransport. It is 1919. The Great War is over and Poppy Wright arrives in London from the north of England to make her mark in the world. Deep in the heart of the East End she finds work in Smith's tailor and costumiers workshop, where she meets dashing chauffeur George, and falls in love. This is a time of change and opportunity, emerging from the losses of war, when all are questioning who they are and what roles they can play in forging a new, modern era. It's time to ditch the corset and discover who really wears the trousers. Poppy + George is a beguiling romance that draws on a world of female impersonators, popular song and double entendre. It was first performed at the Watford Palace Theatre in February 2016.

George Oppenheimer's brief summation: "It skirts about the fairy story of , but never settles for long in one mold. There is social comment on conformity and other failings of our modern civilization; there is satire of the mores of the rich and the not so rich; there is also pure, unadulterated, old-fashioned romance, a commodity too rarely hawked from our contemporary stage. The story deals largely with the conflict between summer visitors to the South Shore of Long Island and two of the permanent residents who become entangled in their lives. The visitors, rich, sophisticated, conventional (although they would bridle at the word), have come for the wedding of a lovely young girl and a highly eligible young man. There is, however, one deterrent to this eminently suitable alliance. The bride-to-be keeps falling asleep, especially on those occasions when her intended discusses their secure and predictable future. During one of these naps another young man, poor, unambitious and unshackled, kisses the girl and wakes her up with a vengeance. From then on, there is a battle between the kissing boy's mother, as free a soul as her son, and the two mothers of the prospective bride and groom. And in the middle is caught an attractive man, who is inextricably involved with both camps."

Part memoir, part fashion history, part social commentary, Alexandra Shulman's Sunday Times bestseller explores the meaning of clothes and how we wear them, with a new preface on how recent world events have changed our relationship with clothes 'Warm, thought-provoking and honest.' - Victoria Hislop 'Clever, emotionally intelligent, reveling in style without making us yearn to shop.' - The Times 'Self-deprecating and stylish, this is sure to become a classic.' - Vanity Fair 'It's funny, honest and in typical Shulman style mixes high and low effortlessly. We don't know many people who can write about bras, Donald Tusk and Madeleine Albright all in the same sentence.' - A Little Bird 'Scintillating reading.' - The Spectator 'Alexandra Shulman's style is unaffected, immediate and hilariously dry. She's brilliant at observing everyday feelings in a joy-sparking turn of phrase.' - Helena Bonham Carter - ' Clothes... and other things that matter is a book not only about clothes but about the way we live our lives. From childhood onwards, the way we dress is a result of our personal history. In a mix of memoir, fashion history and social observation I am writing about the person our clothes allows us to be and sometimes the person they turn us into.' - Alexandra Shulman In Clothes... and other things that matter , Alexandra Shulman delves into her own life to look at the emotions, ambitions, expectations and meanings behind the way we dress. From the bra to the bikini, the trench coat to trainers, the slip dress to the suit, she explores their meaning in women's lives and how our wardrobes intersect with the larger world - the career ladder, motherhood, romance, sexual identity, ambition, failure, body image and celebrity. By turns funny, refreshingly self-deprecating and often very moving, this startlingly honest memoir from the ex-Editor of British Vogue will encourage women of all ages to consider what their own clothes mean to them, the life they live in them and the stories they tell.

Sun. Sin. Sex. Scandal - St. Tropez! For the rich and famous, it's not always fun in the sun... Having recently ended an abusive marriage, the beautiful and filthy rich Contessa Carlotta di Ponti looks to find true love on the beautiful French beaches of the Côte d'Azur. And what better place to find love than the playground of the wealthy and beautiful, the exquisite enclave of St. Tropez. With the annual party season kicking into high gear at billionaire Harry Silver's palatial mansion, tragedy soon strikes paradise. Among the high fashion, nude sunbathing and heavy drinking a bad oyster, a fatal wasp sting, and a faulty cliff railway have changed the mood of the party-goers. Death is in the air and these appear to be no accidents. Is there something far more sinister coming down upon the wealthy party-goers of the usually festive St. Tropez? The gorgeous detective Gabrielle Poulpe makes it her mission to save the day, as well as the financial security of the town, and find the murderer in their midst. Otherwise, life in this sanctified corner of France could change forever. Can Gabrielle find the suspect before they strike again? St. Tropez is known as the ultimate playground of the rich and famous and thrives on the mega-money spent here, but now, it's riddled with threats from within which is scaring everyone away...

Jed and Martha agree to raise orphaned Daniel to Jed's delight. Martha lets her grief for her two lost daughters ruin her joy of having Daniel to love until Christmas Eve and love wins out.

Critics in Britain are already raving about Charlotte Mendelson’s excoriatingly funny yet deeply humane novel about a glamorous London family that happens to be falling apart. The Rubins are the perfect family. They’re wonderfully happy and very glamorous. The mother, Claudia, is the ultimate Jewish a powerful rabbi known for her charm, brains, and determination. Now this dynastic Jewish family is getting ready to marry off the perfect eldest son. History, community, and even gastronomy unite the guests lucky enough to attend this joyous occasion. But when the groom -- one minute before exchanging vows -- bolts with the wrong woman, the myths that have defined this family take on darker overtones. Mendelson’s astonishing eye for detail, as well as her just-right balance of plot and character, makes the unfolding of this story an uncommon treat. In a marvelously compressed style that also bursts with life, she reveals how all four adult Rubin children, and their parents, struggle with huge secrets, sexual frustration and sexual experimentation, and many betrayals. Charlotte Mendelson opens a window on a realm rarely explored in British the complicated world of English Jewry. But to watch this seemingly blessed family drastically, disastrously fall apart before regaining balance is to understand that their struggles -- like all of ours -- are universal ones.

In Ariosto's epic 16th-century poem Orlando Furioso, the beautiful Angelica, chained, naked, to a rock and menaced by a sea monster is rescued by the valiant Ruggiero, riding a 'hippogriff', the offspring of a griffin and a mare - an entirely imaginary winged creature (as readers of Harry Potter know). Volatore, as this hippogriff calls himself, has escaped the poem in which he has been confined for centuries and is determined to find his Angelica, even if it takes him to the 21st century and involves some shape-shifting. He lands in contemporary San Francisco and the first person he sets eyes on is Angelica Greenberg, the Jewish owner of a San Franciscan art gallery, who has just dumped her fiance. Volatore rises to her window and they hit it off big-time. But no sooner have they met and fallen in love than events conspire to separate the two so that Volatore must not only seek Angelica but also find the perfect form in which to consummate his undying love. The first is too masculine, the second not enough so, but will the third be just right, and how will Angelica reconcile the imaginary and the real in the perfect lover?

James and Katherine are at a wedding in London. They spend a while watching and waiting. Speak. Exchange phone numbers. Meet up the following week... From then on not everything goes to plan. It is the 1990s, the end of the money-for-nothing years. James is a man with a varied past - entrepreneur, gambler, film producer, former dot com millionaire - now living alone in Bloomsbury. Katherine is married, but separated, working at an interim job in a city hotel. The relationship is beset with difficulties from the beginning, both external and of their own making. They are distracted- James with the latest in a long line of schemes, drawing him into the world of gambling and horse racing, Katherine by her husband, a photographer and paparazzo, who has suddenly reappeared. Narrated from different perspectives and at different times by both James and Katherine, and by a series of peripheral characters, March is a kaleidoscopic and complex portrait of a relationship, of contemporary England, and of the ebb and flow of money.Instantly recognisable and unbearably real, it is a love story unlike any you will have read.

American cancer specialist Dr. Alex Cousins is on a covert mission to the USSR. His task: to save the life of Soviet Politburo Chief Viktor Moiseyevich Dimitrov. But the tenuous alliance between the two crumbles one night. Alex stumbles upon Dimitrov's sinister plans for a nuclear strike on China. The Russians dispatch Alex on a six-thousand-mile journey aboard the infamous Trans-Siberian Express - thus ensuring he won't get home in time to warn the US of the imminent attack.As the train lumbers east across snow-cloaked mountains, watchful eyes rest on the American doctor. Surrounding him are people beaten and broken by life, each drawn to this emperor of trains in search of a brighter future. But most curious is Anna Petrovna Valentinova, the hauntingly beautiful history professor.The Trans-Siberian Express roars onward through a cavern of hopes and memories. A train attendant yearns for love, a persecuted Jewish couple runs to a new home, and a passionate romance transcending political barriers unfolds under KGB surveillance.