Lisa Smith was a bright, young lawyer at a prestigious firm in NYC in the early nineties when alcoholism started to take over her life. What was once a way of escaping her insecurity and negativity became a means of coping with the anxiety and stress of an impossible workload. Girl Walks Out of a Bar is Smith's darkly comic and wrenchingly honest story of her formative years, the decade of alcohol and drug abuse, divorce, and her road to recovery. Smith describes how her spiraling circumstances conspired with her predisposition to depression and self-medication, nurturing an environment ripe for addiction to flourish. Girl Walks Out of a Bar is a candid portrait of alcoholism through the lens of gritty New York realism. Beneath the façade of success lies the reality of addiction.
From the glittering skyscrapers of Manhattan’s media elite to the slacker haven of a fashionably low-rent L.A. bar, Strawberry Saroyan traces her journey from girl- to womanhood, as well as from fantasy to reality. A powerful and profoundly postmodern coming-of-age story, with a voice reminiscent of Liz Phair’s one moment and Mary McCarthy’s the next, Girl Walks into a Bar explores Saroyan’s struggle not only with who she is and who she wants to be but also with who she is in the context of what she’s supposed to embody: the iconic, media-promulgated “girl,” a twenty-first-century version of Audrey Hepburn standing outside Tiffany’s looking at diamonds. Girl Walks into a Bar takes a handful of the most striking and formative episodes of Saroyan’s life and brings them to the page as a filmmaker might, zooming in on the crucial “scenes”: Saroyan losing her virginity, starting her own riot-grrrly magazine, falling in dysfunctional love. Yet all the while she’s trailed by that other black-clad girl, the Platonic ideal of so many modern young women’s fantasies. Will the two ever meet? That question lies at the heart of Saroyan’s genre-bending memoir. Girl Walks into a Bar promises to be one of the most memorable debuts of the year.
How will your night out end? You make the rules. You're at one of the hottest bars in town, all dressed up for a fabulous girls' night out with your best friend, when she cancels. What do you do now? In this novel, YOU make the decisions. Will you do body shots with a rock star? Cozy up to the hot bartender? Follow a mysterious woman to a rather unusual exhibition? Investigate a suave millionaire's box of tricks? Take a joyride with a buff bodyguard? Or maybe what you want is closer to home than you realize. . . . So many options. . . . All you have to do is choose.
It's the future. But only slightly. There are blackouts. No one knows what's causing them, but that doesn't stop people going missing in them. Now Steph and Bell, a schoolgirl and barmaid, have to search for their missing friend, until the outside world starts infecting the theatre that stands around them. Schoolgirl Steph walks into the seedy, empty bar where Bell works. Bell is dressed with everything short and low, and there are no longer any regulars at her bar. Whatever has happened to create this dystopian world remains a mystery, but we learn that there are frequent blackouts, people regularly go missing and women are being killed. Steph is looking for her friend Charlotte, a girl who also at some point walked into Bell's bar but then went missing. The relationship between Bell and Charlotte is unclear, as her conversations with Steph shift between truth, lies and fantasy. In this tense atmosphere, where there is a sense of growing fear, the play "forces the audience to turn detective not just to track down the elusive Charlotte but also to find meaning itself" (The Guardian). A Girl in a School Uniform (Walks into a Bar) is the third play by award-winning playwright Lulu Raczka and was produced at the West Yorkshire Playhouse in 2017 and the New Diorama Theatre in 2018.
When two gorgeous Scotsmen arrive in smalltown Georgia, innocent Highland Games lead to serious passion in this contemporary romantic comedy. Isabel Buchanan is fiery, funny, and never at a loss for words. But she is struck speechless when her mother returns from a trip to Scotland with a six-foot-tall, very handsome souvenir. Izzy’s mother is so infatuated by the fellow that Izzy has to plan their annual Highland Games all by herself. Well, not completely by herself. The Highlander’s strapping young nephew has come looking for his uncle . . . Alasdair Blackmoor has never seen a place as friendly as this small Georgia town—or a girl as brilliant and beguiling as Izzy. Instead of saving his uncle, who seems to be having a lovely time, Alasdair decides he’d rather help Izzy with the Highland Games. Show her how to dance like a Highlander. Drink like a Highlander. And maybe, just maybe, fall in love with a Highlander. But when the games are over, where do they go from here?
When her brother dies of AIDS and her husband dies of cancer in the same year, Rosemary is left on her own with two young daughters and antsy addiction demons dancing in her head. This is the nucleus of The Art of Losing It a young mother jerking from emergency to emergency as the men in her life drop dead around her; a high-functioning radio show host waging war with her addictions while trying to raise her two little girls who just lost their daddy; and finally, a stint in rehab and sobriety that ushers in a fresh brand of chaos instead of the tranquility her family so desperately needs. Heartrending but ultimately hopeful, The Art of Losing It is the story of a struggling mother who finds her way—slowly, painfully—from one side of grief and addiction to the other.
Brian Cuban was living a lie. With a famous last name and a successful career as a lawyer, Brian was able to hide his clinical depression and alcohol and cocaine addictions—for a while. Today, as an inspirational speaker in long-term recovery, Brian looks back on his journey with honesty, compassion, and even humor as he reflects both on what he has learned about himself and his career choice and how the legal profession enables addiction. His demons, which date to his childhood, controlled him through failed marriages and stays in a psychiatric facility, until they brought him to the brink of suicide. That was his wake-up call. This is his story. Brian also takes an in-depth look at why there is such a high percentage of problematic alcohol use and other mental health issues in the legal profession. What types of therapies work? Are 12-step programs the only answer? Brian also includes interviews with experts on the subject as well as others in the profession who are now in recovery. The Addicted Lawyer is both a serious study of addiction and a compelling story of redemption.
Now a major Amazon film directed by George Clooney and starring Ben Affleck, Tye Sheridan, Lily Rabe, and Christopher Lloyd, a raucous, poignant, luminously written memoir about a boy striving to become a man, and his romance with a bar, in the tradition of This Boy’s Life and The Liar’s Club—with a new Afterword. J.R. Moehringer grew up captivated by a voice. It was the voice of his father, a New York City disc jockey who vanished before J.R. spoke his first word. Sitting on the stoop, pressing an ear to the radio, J.R. would strain to hear in that plummy baritone the secrets of masculinity and identity. Though J.R.'s mother was his world, his rock, he craved something more, something faintly and hauntingly audible only in The Voice. At eight years old, suddenly unable to find The Voice on the radio, J.R. turned in desperation to the bar on the corner, where he found a rousing chorus of new voices. The alphas along the bar—including J.R.'s Uncle Charlie, a Humphrey Bogart look-alike; Colt, a Yogi Bear sound-alike; and Joey D, a softhearted brawler—took J.R. to the beach, to ballgames, and ultimately into their circle. They taught J.R., tended him, and provided a kind of fathering-by-committee. Torn between the stirring example of his mother and the lurid romance of the bar, J.R. tried to forge a self somewhere in the center. But when it was time for J.R. to leave home, the bar became an increasingly seductive sanctuary, a place to return and regroup during his picaresque journeys. Time and again the bar offered shelter from failure, rejection, heartbreak—and eventually from reality. In the grand tradition of landmark memoirs, The Tender Bar is suspenseful, wrenching, and achingly funny. A classic American story of self-invention and escape, of the fierce love between a single mother and an only son, it's also a moving portrait of one boy's struggle to become a man, and an unforgettable depiction of how men remain, at heart, lost boys. Named a best book of the year by The New York Times, Esquire, The Los Angeles Times Book Review, Entertainment Weekly, USA Today, NPR's "Fresh Air," and New York Magazine A New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, San Francisco Chronicle, USA Today, Booksense, and Library Journal Bestseller Booksense Pick Borders New Voices Finalist Winner of the Books for a Better Life First Book Award
Super-stylist Katie Grand is fashion’s contemporary heroine. This book is a visual history of her fearless career and looks to the future as she embarks on her new venture, The Perfect Magazine. Influential, visionary, daring, cool: Katie Grand has been setting fashion’s agenda for close to 25 years. Her career trajectory begs the question: Is there anything Grand can’t do? The gap-toothed former editor in chief of the era-defining English glossy LOVE, Grand has worked with and styled for the coolest brands and magazines of note. In this exceptional volume devoted to a career of singular moments that have redrawn the bound-aries of style—including pivotal editorials, magazine covers, advertising campaigns, runway, and private ephemera—Grand mines her rich past and tells us the story, in words and pictures, of her early rock ‘n’ roll years at The Face and Pop to becoming a key player on the global fashion stage to championing what were to become some of the biggest names in fashion (Cara Delevingne and Kendall Jenner). She gives us behind-the-scenes access to the stories and scandals behind some of contemporary fashion’s most provocative photos.
I don't have a damn thing in common with the beautiful rich girl who walks into my bar; she's southern class, fancy cars, and designer shoes. I've got a drunk for a mother, a cheater for a father, and a reputation for trouble I've more than earned. I look the other way, pretending I don't notice how perfect she is. She wouldn't give me the time of day anyway. Until she shatters that first impression and shows me she's so much more-everything I never thought I deserved. After a lifetime of being a disappointment, I want to prove to her that I'm better than my past. We have one tragic thing in common, and the thread that binds us together will tear us apart as it unravels. Are we strong enough to break through The Bars Between Us?
