Entertainment Memoir

Sarah Polley’s work as an actor, screenwriter, and director is celebrated for its honesty, complexity, and deep humanity. She brings all of those qualities along with her exquisite storytelling chops to these six essays. Each one captures a piece of Polley’s life as she remembers it, while at the same time examining the fallibility of memory, the mutability of reality in the mind, and the possibility of experiencing the past anew, as the person you are now but were not then. As Polley writes, the past and present are in a “reciprocal pressure dance.”

Van Halen's rise in the 1980s was one of the most thrilling the music world had ever seen - their mythos an epic party, a sweaty, sexy, never-ending rock extravaganza. During this unparalleled run of success, debauchery, and drama, no one was closer to the band than Noel Monk. Throughout Van Halen's meteoric rise and abrupt halt, this confidant, fixer, friend, and promoter saw it all and lived to tell. Now, for the first time, he shares the most outrageous escapades.

Tomson Highway was born in a snowbank on an island in the sub-Arctic, the 11th of 12 children in a nomadic, caribou-hunting Cree family who traversed the tundra by dogsled and lived off the land. In Permanent Astonishment, one of the greatest writers of our time animates the magical world of his northern childhood, paying tribute to a way of life that few have experienced and fewer still have chronicled.

In the chapters of Never Sniff a Gift Fish, McManus will teach you the wisdom that is usually shared only in the close ranks of modern-day hunters and gatherers. To complete your arsenal, McManus also includes "The Hunter's Workout Guide" and a special "Family Camper's Dictionary". Exercises like the hindquarter shuffle will make you move like a hunter. And phrases like "Yip-yip-yip-Owoooooo!" will help you sound like one, too.

This touching and hilarious memoir is 100 percent Carol Burnett—funny, irreverent, and irresistible.Carol Burnett is one of the most beloved and revered actresses and performers in America. The Carol Burnett Show was seen each week by millions of adoring fans and won twenty-five Emmys in its remarkable eleven-year run.

Where do comedians come from? Why is it that one person is a funny bloke down the pub while another actually makes a living by standing up in front of an audience telling jokes? And where does all that material come from? Well, young Lee McKillop used to wonder that too. Growing up in his parents’ pub, small and wiry in a world of bigger and chunkier specimens, Lee quickly learned that cracking jokes was a way to get attention.

Richard Marx is one of the most accomplished singer-songwriters in the history of popular music. His self-titled 1987 album went triple platinum and made him the first male solo artist (and second solo artist overall after Whitney Houston) to have four singles from their debut crack the top three on the Billboard Hot 100. His follow-up, 1989’s Repeat Offender, was an even bigger smash, going quadruple platinum and landing two singles at number one.

By the acclaimed author of Pictures at a Revolution and Five Came Back comes a magnificent biography of one of the most protean creative forces in American entertainment history, a life of dazzling highs and vertiginous plunges - some of the worst largely unknown until now. Mark Harris explores, with brilliantly vivid detail and insight, the life, work, struggle, and passion of an artist and man in constant motion.

Do What You Want's principal storytellers are the four voices that define Bad Religion: Greg Graffin, a Wisconsin kid who sang in the choir and became an LA punk rock icon while he was still a teenager; Brett Gurewitz, a high school dropout who founded the independent punk label Epitaph Records and went on to become a record mogul; Jay Bentley, a surfer and skater who gained recognition as much for his bass skills as for his antics on and off the stage.

Receptionist Pam Beesly and accountant Angela Martin had very little in common when they toiled together at Scranton’s Dunder Mifflin Paper Company. But, in reality, the two bonded in their very first days on set and, over the nine seasons of the series’ run, built a friendship that transcended the show and continues to this day.

In the 1950s, Confidential magazine, America's first celebrity scandal magazine, revealed Hollywood stars' secrets, misdeeds, and transgressions in gritty, unvarnished detail. Deploying a vast network of tipsters to root out stars' sexual affairs, drug use, and sexuality, publisher Robert Harrison destroyed celebrities' carefully constructed images and built a media empire. Confidential became the best-selling magazine on American newsstands in the 1950s, surpassing Time, Life, and the Saturday Evening Post. Confidential's spectacular rise was followed by an equally spectacular fall.

That stammer. Those basset-hound eyes. That bone-dry wit. There has never been another comedian like Bob Newhart. In this, his first audiobook ever, Newhart gives his brilliant and bemused twist on a multitude of topics, including flying, the trials of a family holiday in a Winnebago, and more serious subjects, such as golf. And, of course, there are side-splittingly funny stories from his life and career. Who else has a drinking game named after him? ("Hi, Bob!")

The definitive autobiography from Eve, the multiplatinum, Grammy Award®-winning, Emmy®-nominated rapper, singer-songwriter, actor, mother, philanthropist, and entrepreneur.

In 1963, 30-year-old Friedman - who had recently quit his job as a Boston advertising executive and returned to his hometown of New York to become a theatrical producer - opened a coffee house for Broadway performers called the Improvisation. His goal? Simply to make a living, and if all went according to plan, to also make enough professional contacts to be able to mount his first Broadway show within a year's time. Later shortened to the Improv, its first West 44th Street location was in a seedy section of Manhattan's Hell's Kitchen.

In the nearly two years since Anthony Bourdain's death, no one else has come close to filling the void he left. His passion for and genuine curiosity about the people and cultures he visited made the world feel smaller and more connected. Despite his affable, confident, and trademark snarky TV persona, the real Tony was intensely private, deeply conflicted about his fame, and an enigma even to those close to him. Tony’s devoted crew knew him best, and no one else had a front-row seat for as long as his director and producer, Tom Vitale.

As the son that worked by his dad’s side, Brian Proctor was often asked what it was like to grow up as Bob Proctor’s son. In My Father Knew the Secret, Brian answers that question by sharing stories, lessons, and deeply personal experiences, in an easy-to-listen conversation that lets you into the private world of Bob Proctor. You will find many benefits within this audiobook as you learn from behind-the-scenes wisdom and strength.

Anyone who has seen Sharon Gless act in Cagney & Lacey, Queer as Folk, Burn Notice, and countless other shows and movies, knows that she’s someone who gives every role her all. She holds nothing back in Apparently There Were Complaints, a hilarious, deeply personal memoir that spills all about Gless’s five decades in Hollywood.

Charlie Chaplin made an amazing 71 films by the time he was only 33 years old. He was not only known as the world’s first international movie star, but as a comedian, film director, and a man ripe with scandal, accused of plagiarism, communism, pacifism, liberalism, and anti-Americanism. He seduced young women, marrying four different times, each time to a woman younger than the next. In this animated biography of Chaplin, Joyce Milton reveals to us a life riddled with gossip and a struggle to rise from an impoverished London childhood to the life of a successful American film star.

Kathleen Hanna’s band Bikini Kill embodied the punk scene of the 90s, and today her personal yet feminist lyrics on anthems like “Rebel Girl” and “Double Dare Ya” are more powerful than ever. But where did this transformative voice come from? In Rebel Girl, Hanna’s raw and insightful new memoir, she takes us from her tumul­tuous childhood to her formative college years and her first shows. As Hanna makes clear, being in a punk “girl band” in those years was not a simple or safe prospect.

Leah was first thrust under the reality television microscope when her teen pregnancy was documented on MTV's groundbreaking series 16 and Pregnant. Since then, fans of Teen Mom 2 have watched her life play out on the small screen. She has learned to live under the harsh glare of media scrutiny, yet there is a truth behind the reality that the cameras have never revealed.