Beloved author Elizabeth Gilbert returns to fiction with a unique love story set in the New York City theater world during the 1940s. Told from the perspective of an older woman as she looks back on her youth with both pleasure and regret (but mostly pleasure), City of Girls explores themes of female sexuality and promiscuity, as well as the idiosyncrasies of true love. In 1940, nineteen-year-old Vivian Morris has just been kicked out of Vassar College,...

""She was one of the world's four best comediennes, "" said Milton Berle, ""but she lived a life of personal disaster."" Martha Raye sang, danced, and joked her way into the spotlight of the entertainment world with a career that spanned seven decades and encompassed everything from vaudeville to television commercials to entertaining U.S. troops. Take It from the Big Mouth, the first full-fledged biography of the multi-talented performer, explores...

Banned at the time of its initial release and made by blacklisted filmmakers, this bold, radical film tells the story of Mexican-American workers who call a strike over the unsafe work conditions and unequal wages they receive in comparison to their white co-workers at a Zinc mine in New Mexico.Ramon Quintero (Juan Chacon) organizes the strike but is shown to be a hypocrite, treating his pregnant wife (Rosaura Revueltas) with similar unfairness. However,...

In rural north Georgia two decades after the Civil War, thirteen-year-old Lulu Hurst reaches high into her father's bookshelf and pulls out an obscure book, The Truth of Mesmeric Influence. Deemed gangly and undesirable, Lulu wants more than a lifetime of caring for her disabled baby brother, Leo, with whom she shares a profound and supernatural mental connection. Lulu begins to "captivate" her friends and family, controlling their thoughts and actions...

Sammy Davis Jr. lived a storied life. Adored by millions over a six-decade-long career, he was considered an entertainment icon and a national treasure. But depite lifetime earnings that topped $50 million, Sammy died in 1990 near bankruptcy, His estate was declared insolvent, and there was no possibility of ever using Sammy's name or likeness again. It was as if Sammy had never existed. Years later his wife Altovise was living in poverty when she...

In 1881, Jacci Reed is only five years old when a man attempts to kidnap her from the steamboat her mother, Irena, works on. Badly wounded during the confrontation, Irena takes Jacci aboard the Kingston Floating Palace, a showboat tied up beside them. There, Jacci's actor grandfather tends to her mother and Jacci gets a first taste of the life she will come to lead. Fifteen years later, Jacci is an actress aboard the Kingston Floating Palace, and...

In this book, Angelou details what brought her mother to send her away, and unearths the well of emotions she experienced long afterward as a result. For the first time, she reveals the triumphs and struggles of being the daughter of Vivian Baxter, an indomitable spirit whose petite size belied her larger-than-life presence, a presence absent during much of the author's early life. When her marriage began to crumble, Vivian famously sent three-year-old...

Nicknamed Mr. Show Business, Sammy Davis Jr. was a consummate performer who sang, danced, and acted on film, television, radio, and the stage for over six decades. In this intimate volume, the entertainment legend's story comes to life through rare family photos and a narrative based on conversations between Davis and his daughter Tracey.

Everybody starts somewhere, and once upon a time Luigi Lemoncello was a twelve-year-old boy in a large family who dreamed of being a showman; he gets his first chance working for a famous barker at a summer carnival where a mysterious puzzle leads him and his friends on a treasure hunt.