Entertainment Women

Fifty years after her death, Hollywood icon Marilyn Monroe still beguiles the world, her image enthralling millions. Many books have attempted to explain her allure and tell her story, but none has succeeded as well as this work by acclaimed biographer Donald Spoto. Spoto’s exhaustive research uncovers a conspiracy of silence, allowing him to present the facts, free from often-repeated myths and speculation. Granted access to more than thirty-five thousand pages of formerly sealed files containing letters, diaries, appointment books, and other intimate papers, he also interviewed nearly two hundred people who had never before spoken on record.

The Indignities of Being a Woman candidly traces the history of womanhood and investigates how much things have really changed for womankind. By carefully x-raying areas such as body image, marriage, mental illness, fashion, and politics, this audiobook examines what it was like to be a woman in the past versus what it’s like now, when women are constantly told equality between the sexes exists but reality proves otherwise.

Cinema is full of neurotic personalities, but few things are more transfixing than a woman losing her mind onscreen. Horror as a genre provides the most welcoming platform for these histrionics: crippling paranoia, desperate loneliness, masochistic death-wishes, dangerous obsessiveness, apocalyptic hysteria. Unlike her male counterpart—the eccentric'—the female neurotic lives a shamed existence, making these films those rare places where her destructive emotions get to play.

Published under a pseudonym, J. K. Rowling's brilliant debut mystery introduces Detective Cormoran Strike as he investigates a supermodel's suicide in "one of the best books of the year" (USA Today), the first novel in the brilliant series that inspired the acclaimed HBO Max series C.B. Strike...

Gold Dust Woman gives "the gold standard of rock biographers" (the Boston Globe) his ideal topic: Nicks' work and life are equally sexy and interesting, and Davis delves deeply into each, unearthing fresh details from new, intimate interviews and interpreting them to present a rich new portrait of the star. Just as Nicks (and Lindsay Buckingham) gave Fleetwood Mac the "shot of adrenaline" they needed to become real rock stars - according to Christine McVie - Gold Dust Woman is vibrant with stories and with a life lived large and hard.

New York Times best-selling poet and multiplatinum singer-songwriter Jewel explores her unconventional upbringing and extraordinary life in an inspirational memoir that covers her childhood, rise to fame, marriage, and motherhood. She writes beautifully about growing up amid the natural wonders of Alaska, about pain and childhood trauma, and about discovering her own identity years after the entire world had discovered the beauty of her songs.

Reborn from modern Japan into a medieval fantasy realm where chastity norms between men and women are completely reversed, Faust is an anomaly—a rare male knight. Raised as a frontier lord, he clings to his old-world values, often putting him at odds with his new reality. From the queen's barely-there attire to a buxom duchess whose "diplomacy" borders on harassment, navigating court life is a daily trial. But on the battlefield, Faust is a warrior without equal—his skill alone can turn the tide of war.

From a wayward California girl growing up in the heart of the porn-born San Fernando Valley, Gina Gershon found herself on a journey that has been anything but traditional. Along the way, she had to learn how to spot the toxic types―in both her personal life and her career―and figure out how to dodge, outsmart, or hustle her way through. From the Valley to the slums of Beverly Hills to New York City, she was confronted with shady characters and sketchy situations, all the while fighting to protect her autonomy as a woman and as an actress with a decidedly unconventional path.

In 1960, she was a 17-year-old Brooklyn kid with plenty of talent but no connections and certainly no money; her mother brought her soup to make sure she stayed fed as she took acting classes and scraped out a living. Just four years later, Barbra Streisand was the top-selling female recording artist in America and the star of one of Broadway’s biggest hits. Now the acclaimed Hollywood biographer William Mann chronicles that dizzying ascent, telling the riveting behind-the-scenes story of how Streisand and her team transformed her from an unknown dreamer into a worldwide superstar.

For millennia, the sacred drummers of pre-Christian Mediterranean and western Asia were women. In this inspiring book, Layne Redmond, herself a renowned drummer, tells their history.

From award-winning sports broadcaster and actress Jayne Kennedy comes a compelling, inspirational, and unflinchingly honest memoir about her rise in Hollywood and beyond.

From age 11, in 1974, until she left the show, in 1981, Melissa Anderson literally grew up before the viewers of Little House on the Prairie. Melissa, as Mary, is remembered by many as the blind sister - and she was the only actor in the series to be nominated for an Emmy. In The Way I See It, she takes listeners onto the set and inside the world of the iconic series created by Michael Landon, who, Melissa discovered, was not perfect, as much as he tried to be. In this memoir she also shares her memories of working with guest stars like Todd Bridges, Mariette Hartley, Sean Penn, Patricia Neal, and Johnny Cash.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER In these hilarious essays, the Saturday Night Live head writer and Weekend Update co-anchor learns how to take a beating. “I always wanted to punch his face before I read this book. Now I just want to kick him in the balls.”—Larry David A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR...

Elmore Thaddeus Nix, it's retirement time. Take that final physical and then it's adios to your old life and hello to the new. Wait. Not so fast. Sorry, Elmore. Your plan's about to change. It's Elmore's last day of work. As part of his retirement, he heads to the family doctor for the follow-up to a routine physical. That's when the universe shifts on its axis. Cancer. Then we find out that Elmore's wife lies at home with only days to live. The stroke of injustice falls hard.

AND SHE WAS: LIFE IN THE AFTERMATH is the unapologetic follow-up to We've Got Tonight: The Life and Time of Notorious Groupie Alycen Rowse-but this time, the spotlight turns inward. What happens after the backstage passes fade, the scandal cools, and the music turns static? What Happens when the woman everyone thinks they know has to rebuild her life in the echo of broken hearts, public scrutiny, and shattered dreams? In a world that loves to label women before it ever listens to them, Alycen picks up the pieces and redefines life behind the stage. With humor, grit, and raw self-awareness, ...

Best-selling biographer Jimmy McDonough tells the story of the small-town girl who grew up to be the woman behind the microphone, whose meteoric rise led to a decades-long career full of tragedy and triumph. Through a high-profile marriage and divorce, her dreadful battle with addiction and illness, and the struggle to compete in a rapidly evolving Nashville, Tammy Wynette turned a brave smile toward the world and churned out masterful hit songs though her life resembled the most heartbreaking among them.

No singer has been more mythologized and more misunderstood than jazz legend Billie Holiday, who helped to create much of the mystique herself with her autobiography, Lady Sings the Blues - and this authentic biography sets the record straight. Donald Clarke was given unrivaled access to a treasure trove of interviews from the 1970s with those who knew Lady Day in all stages of her short, tragic life - from her childhood in the streets and good-time houses of Baltimore, through the early days of success in New York and the years of fame, to her tragic decline.

From its first publication in 1992, Men, Women, and Chain Saws has offered a groundbreaking perspective on the creativity and influence of horror cinema since the mid-1970s. Investigating the popularity of the low-budget tradition, Carol Clover looks in particular at slasher, occult, and rape-revenge films. Although such movies have been traditionally understood as offering only sadistic pleasures to their mostly male audiences, Clover demonstrates that they align spectators not with the male tormentor, but with the females tormented.

Hattie McDaniel is best known for her performance as Mammy, the sassy foil to Scarlett O’Hara in the movie classic Gone with the Wind. Her powerful performance won her an Oscar® and bolstered the hopes of Black Hollywood that the entertainment industry was finally ready to write more multidimensional, fully realized roles for Blacks. But despite this victory, and pleas by organizations such as the NAACP and SAG, roles for Blacks continued to denigrate the African American experience.

ONE OF THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER'S 100 GREATEST FILM BOOKS OF ALL TIME The definitive portrait of one of the most important cultural figures in American history: Walt Disney. Walt Disney was a true visionary whose desire for escape, iron determination and obsessive perfectionism transformed...