Art Biography

From actor Cary Elwes, who played the iconic role of Westley in The Princess Bride, comes a first-person account and behind-the-scenes look at the making of the cult classic film filled with never-before-told stories, exclusive photographs, and interviews with costars Robin Wright, Wallace Shawn, Billy Crystal, Christopher Guest, and Mandy Patinkin, as well as author and screenwriter William Goldman, producer Norman Lear, and director Rob Reiner.

Mindy Kaling has lived many lives: the obedient child of immigrant professionals, a timid chubster afraid of her own bike, a Ben Affleck–impersonating Off-Broadway performer and playwright, and, finally, a comedy writer and actress prone to starting fights with her friends and coworkers with the sentence “Can I just say one last thing about this, and then I swear I’ll shut up about it?”

From breakout stand-up comedian Iliza Shlesinger comes a subversively funny collection of essays and observations on a confident woman's approach to friendship, singlehood, and relationships. "Girl Logic" is Iliza's term for the way women obsess over details and situations that men don't necessarily even notice. She describes it as a characteristically female way of thinking that appears to be contradictory and circuitous but is actually a complicated and highly evolved way of looking at the world.

Walt Disney was a true visionary whose desire for escape, iron determination, and obsessive perfectionism transformed animation from a novelty to an art form, first with Mickey Mouse and then with his feature films–most notably Snow White, Fantasia, and Bambi.

The contemporary art market is an international juggernaut, throwing off multimillion-dollar deals as wealthy buyers move from fair to fair, auction to auction, party to glittering party. But none of it would happen without the dealers - the tastemakers who back emerging artists and steer them to success, often to see them picked off by a rival. Dealers operate within a private world of handshake agreements, negotiating for the highest commissions. Michael Shnayerson, a longtime contributing editor to Vanity Fair, writes the first-ever definitive history of their activities.

إنّهما سيرتان متكاملتان؛ سيرة ذاتية خاصة بالكاتب، وسيرة غيرية متعلقة بالأديب، وفي نفس الوقت هي رواية فنية تعتمد على التخييل والالتفات والتشويق والاستطراد والاهتمام بصناعة البيان وبلاغة التصوير، وهذا مما يجعل "طه حسين" أحد رواد الأدب العربي الحديث الأفذاذ، كما أن في هذه السيرة إدانة لجيل من المثقفين العرب الذين قصدوا أوروبا بحثًا عن العلم واستكمالًا لدراساتهم العليا، فانبهروا بحضارة الغرب، ولكنهم بدلًا من أن يستفيدوا من العلوم والمعارف والآداب، سقطوا في الغواية والرذيلة وفتنة الخطيئة، و انغمسوا في بوتقة الشر والفساد، والانسياق الأعمى للغرب والإيمان بفلسفته المادية المحضة وأفكاره المنحلة....

Though Anderson Cooper has always considered himself close to his mother, his intensely busy career as a journalist for CNN and CBS affords him little time to spend with her. After she suffers a brief but serious illness at the age of ninety-one, they resolve to change their relationship by beginning a yearlong conversation unlike any they have ever had before. The result is a correspondence of surprising honesty and depth in which they discuss their lives, the things that matter to them, and what they still want to learn about each other.

Leslie Jamison has become one of our most beloved contemporary voices, a scribe of the real, the true, the complex. But while Jamison has never shied away from challenging material—scouring her own psyche and digging into our most unanswerable questions across four books—Splinters enters a new realm. In her first memoir, Jamison turns her unrivaled powers of perception on some of the most intimate relationships of her life: her consuming love for her young daughter, a ruptured marriage once swollen with hope, and the shaping legacy of her own parents’ complicated bond.

Blending wisdom from the past, practices of intentionality and community, and Whittaker's signature engaging communication style, Reconnected will inspire and equip you to reset your life in a tech-saturated world. It's time to take back control of your life from technology and recover the lost art of being human. You were made for more. This is how you start living again.

The Lonely Life details the first 50-plus years of Davis' life - her Yankee childhood, her rise to stardom in Hollywood, the birth of her beloved children, and the uncompromising choices she made along the way to succeed. The book was updated with new material in the 1980s, bringing the story up to the end of Davis' life - all the heartbreak, all the drama, and all the love she experienced at every stage of her extraordinary life.

This is a self help-book like no other. Because you are not helping yourself, James Acaster is helping you. When James quit all forms of social media in 2019 he felt like he'd been born anew, but he was worried he'd suffer withdrawal and get lured back online to compete in a never ending popularity contest with only one possible winner (f--king Zuckerberg). He knew that in order to stay clean he'd have to replace everything social media used to give him with three-dimensional real-life activities.

Why did Agatha Christie spend her career pretending that she was 'just' an ordinary housewife, when clearly she wasn't? As Lucy Worsley says, 'She was thrillingly, scintillatingly modern'. Her life was 'modern' too: she went surfing in Hawaii, she loved fast cars, and she was intrigued by the new science of psychology, which helped her through devastating mental illness. So why—despite all the evidence to the contrary—did Agatha present herself as a retiring Edwardian lady of leisure?

Spanning the years between 1968 and 1976, these never-before-published letters show Thompson building his legend: running for sheriff in Aspen, Colorado; creating the seminal road book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas; twisting political reporting to new heights for Rolling Stone; and making sense of it all in the landmark Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72.

When Donna Morrissey left the only home she had ever known, an isolated Newfoundland settlement, at age 16, she was ready for adventure. She had grown up without television or telephones but had absorbed the tragic stories and comic yarns of her close-knit family and community. The death of her infant brother marked the family, and years later, Morrissey suffers devastating guilt about the accidental death of her teenage brother, whom she'd enticed to join her in the oilfields.

The Vanity Fair Diaries is the story of an Englishwoman barely out of her twenties who arrives in New York City with a dream. Summoned from London in hopes that she can save Condé Nast's troubled new flagship Vanity Fair, Tina Brown is immediately plunged into the maelstrom of the competitive New York media world and the backstabbing rivalries at the court of the planet's slickest, most glamour-focused magazine company. She survives the politics, the intrigue, and the attempts to derail her by a simple stratagem.

Throughout her childhood, Marion Farrant heard exotic stories of the sophisticated life her mother, Nancy, led aboard cruise ships and in Australia. Nancy’s world of furs, jewels, cigarette holders, and handsome men seemed miles away from the west-coast hamlet of Cordova Bay, where Marion lived with her aunt and uncle, running wild on the beach with her friends and enjoying weekend visits with her devoted father. But things changed the year she entered her teens. First, a package from Nancy arrived in the maila gift of sexy lingerie.

Could you write what you write if you weren’t so tiny, Joan? —Eve Babitz, in a letter to Joan Didion, 1972. Joan Didion, revealed at last… Eve Babitz died on December 17, 2021. Found in the wrack, ruin, and filth of her apartment, a stack of boxes packed by her mother decades before. The boxes were pristine, the seals of duct tape unbroken. Inside, a lost world. This world turned for a certain number of years in the late sixties and early seventies, and centered on a two-story rental in a down-at-heel section of Hollywood.

An award-winning journalist obsessed with obsession, Bianca Bosker’s existence was upended when she wandered into the art world—and couldn’t look away. Intrigued by artists who hyperventilate around their favorite colors and art fiends who max out credit cards to show hunks of metal they think can change the world, Bosker grew fixated on understanding why art matters and how she—or any of us—could engage with it more deeply.

In 1976, following years of harsh cutbacks to salaries and benefits at the New Yorker, editorial workers - the fact-checkers, copy editors, and other paraliteraries - finally took a stand and began a drive to unionize the storied magazine. But strong-willed longtime editor William Shawn's fierce resistance to unionization kicked off a stalemate between management and their subordinates.

The long-awaited memoir by Cameron Crowe—one of America’s most iconic journalists and filmmakers—revealing his formative years in rock and roll and bringing to life stories that shaped a generation, in the bestselling tradition of Patti Smith’s Just Kids with a dash of Moss Hart’s Act One. The Uncool is a joyful dispatch from a lost world, the real-life events that became Almost Famous, and a coming-of-age journey filled with characters you won’t soon forget.