Winner of the 2018 PEN America Award in Drama As Tolstoy said, “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” In The House in Scarsdale, playwright Dan O'Brien traces the roots of his family's particular unhappiness to learn why his parents and siblings cut him off years ago. The more Dan learns about his family, the more mysterious the circumstances surrounding their estrangement become, until his world is shaken when rumours surface that his real father might be another member of the family. Is his pathological pursuit of the truth worth the risk? Or should he follow the advice of a psychic and make his life a never-finished work of art?
In Scarsdale Dan O'Brien applies to his own early life the same honesty and insight that were evident in his prize-winning War Reporter. Growing up in a family scarred by past trauma, he makes a bid for freedom - 'in love with myself and this young stray's life' - only to be pulled back into the orbit of the place he had sought to escape. Gradually, possibilities for a more lasting change unfold.
Drawing on O’Brien’s experience of cancer and of childhood abuse, and on his ongoing collaboration with a war reporter, the four essays in A Story that Happens—first written as craft lectures for the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and the US Air Force Academy—offer hard-won insights into what stories are for and the reasons why, "afraid and hopeful," we begin to tell them.
From the acclaimed, award-winning author of Thank You, Mr. Nixon comes a “hilariously funny and seriously important” novel (Amy Tan) about American multiculturalism and a Chinese American teenager doing her best to fit in–even if it means converting to Judaism. In these pages, acclaimed author Gish Jen introduces us to teenaged Mona Chang, who in 1968 moves with her newly prosperous family to Scarshill, New York. Here, the Chinese are seen as "the new Jews." What could be more natural than for Mona to take this literally—even to the point of converting? As Mona attends temple "rap" sessions and falls in love (with a nice Jewish boy who lives in a tepee), Jen introduces us to one of the most charming and sweet-spirited heroines in recent fiction, a girl who can wisecrack with perfect aplomb even when she's organizing the help in her father's pancake house. On every page, Gish Jen sets our received notions spinning with a wit as dry as a latter-day Jane Austen's.
Scarsdale, New York, is a small community with a large reputation. Long before it had gained general recognition as a source of fad diets and the presumed site of sensational murders, it was well-known in upper-middle-class circles for the rigor of its zoning, the excellence of its schools, the splendor of its houses, and the wealth of its residents. Indeed, Scarsdale is, what one observer has called, "a sort of utopia"--a capitalistic version of the ideal community. In this clear and well-written study, Professor Carol O'Connor explains how Scarsdale came to be the classic rich suburb. Using a wide range of sources--from local newspapers, to village and school board records, to real estate deeds and census tracts--she shows how its residents have invested time, effort, and their own tax dollars in making Scarsdale a wealthy, attractive, convenient community. She also discusses the question of who rules in Scarsdale and examines one group, its domestic servants, who, at least in the past, have played an important but invisible role. Professor O'Connor analyzes the reaction of residents to national events, from their unquestioning nationalism in the First World War to the deep divisiveness of the Vietnam era. What emerges in these pages is not simply a chronicle of what occurred in Scarsdale, but an insightful perspective on many national trends of the twentieth century.
Winner of the 2020 Peter C. Rollins Book Award Longlisted for the 2020 Moving Image Book Award by the Kraszna-Krausz Foundation Named a 2019 Richard Wall Memorial Award Finalist by the Theatre Library Association Herman J. (1897–1953) and Joseph L. Mankiewicz (1909–1993) wrote, produced, and directed over 150 pictures. With Orson Welles, Herman wrote the screenplay for Citizen Kane and shared the picture’s only Academy Award. Joe earned the second pair of his four Oscars for writing and directing All About Eve, which also won Best Picture. Despite triumphs as diverse as Monkey Business and Cleopatra, and Pride of the Yankees and Guys and Dolls, the witty, intellectual brothers spent their Hollywood years deeply discontented and yearning for what they did not have—a career in New York theater. Herman, formerly an Algonquin Round Table habitué, New York Times and New Yorker theater critic, and playwright-collaborator with George S. Kaufman, never reconciled himself to screenwriting. He gambled away his prodigious earnings, was fired from all the major studios, and drank himself to death at fifty-five. While Herman drifted downward, Joe rose to become a critical and financial success as a writer, producer, and director, though his constant philandering with prominent stars like Joan Crawford, Judy Garland, and Gene Tierney distressed his emotionally fragile wife who eventually committed suicide. He wrecked his own health using uppers and downers in order to direct Cleopatra by day and finish writing it at night, only to be very publicly fired by Darryl F. Zanuck, an experience from which Joe never fully recovered. For this award-winning dual portrait of the Mankiewicz brothers, Sydney Ladensohn Stern draws on interviews, letters, diaries, and other documents still in private hands to provide a uniquely intimate behind-the-scenes chronicle of the lives, loves, work, and relationship between these complex men.
“Michael Gross’s new book…packs [in] almost as many stories as there are apartments in the building. The Jackie Collins of real estate likes to map expressions of power, money and ego… Even more crammed with billionaires and their exploits than 740 Park” (Penelope Green, The New York Times). With two concierge-staffed lobbies, a walnut-lined library, a lavish screening room, a private sixty-seat restaurant offering residents room service, a health club complete with a seventy-foot swimming pool, penthouses that cost almost $100 million, and a tenant roster that’s a roll call of business page heroes and villains, Fifteen Central Park West is the most outrageously successful, insanely expensive, titanically tycoon-stuffed real estate development of the twenty-first century. In this “stunning” (CNN) and “deliciously detailed” (Booklist, starred review) New York Times bestseller, journalist Michael Gross turns his gimlet eye on the new-money wonderland that’s sprung up on the southwest rim of Central Park. Mixing an absorbing business epic with hilarious social comedy, Gross “takes another gossip-laden bite out of the upper crust” (Sam Roberts, The New York Times), which includes Denzel Washington, Sting, Norman Lear, top executives, and Russian and Chinese oligarchs, to name a few. And he recounts the legendary building’s inspired genesis, costly construction, and the flashy international lifestyle it has brought to a once benighted and socially déclassé Manhattan neighborhood. More than just an apartment building, 15CPW represents a massive paradigm shift in the lifestyle of New York’s rich and famous—and is a bellwether of the city’s changing social and financial landscape.
