In The House of Untold Stories, every page is a door, and every door leads to a new tale of heartbreak, triumph, horror, or imagination. Wander into an enchanted mansion of pocket universes and miniature tales, where each door leads to a micro-fiction story. With tales about anger thieves, a deadly pizza delivery service, haunted music boxes, and more, each room will take you on an unexpected journey.
In The House of Untold Stories, every page is a door, and every door leads to a new tale of heartbreak, triumph, horror, or imagination. Wander into an enchanted mansion of pocket universes and miniature tales, where each door leads to a micro-fiction story. With tales about anger thieves, a deadly pizza delivery service, haunted music boxes, and more, each room will take you on an unexpected journey.
A novel centered on the journey of the Turner family and its thirteen siblings, particularly the eldest and youngest, as they face the ghosts of their pasts--both an actual haint and the specter of addiction--the imminent loss of their mother, and the necessary abandonment of their family home in struggling Detroit.
Alan Bennett's first collection of prose since Writing Home takes in all his major writings over the last ten years. The title piece is a poignant family memoir with an account of the marriage of his parents, the lives and deaths of his aunts and the uncovering of a long-held family secret. Bennett, as always, is both amusing and poignant, whether he's discussing his modest childhood or his work with the likes of Maggie Smith, Thora Hird and John Gielgud. Also included are his much celebrated diaries for the years 1996 to 2004. At times heartrending and at others extremely funny, Untold Stories is a matchless and unforgettable anthology. Since the success of Beyond the Fringe in the 1960s Alan Bennett has delighted audiences worldwide with his gentle humour and wry observations about life. His many works include Forty Years On, The Lady in the Van, Talking Heads, A Question of Attribution and The Madness of King George. The History Boys opened to great acclaim at the National in 2004, and is winner of the Evening Standard Award, the South Bank Award and the Critics' Circle Award for Best New Play. 'Perhaps the best loved of English writers alive today.' Sunday Telegraph Untold Stories is published jointly with Profile Books.
Return to the world of the Invisible Library for Irene's most perilous mission yet . . . Librarian Spy Irene is heading into danger. Not for the first time, but could this be her last? She’s tasked with a terrifyingly dangerous solo mission to eliminate an old enemy, which must be kept secret at all costs. But even more troubling news emerges. Multiple worlds are disappearing – and the Library may have something to do with it. Determined to uncover the truth behind the vanished worlds, Irene and her friends must descend into the unplumbed depths of the Library. And what they find will change everything they know. This may be Irene’s most dangerous assignment of her hazardous career. The Untold Story is the unputdownable eighth book in the Invisible Library fantasy series by Genevieve Cogman. Praise for the series: ‘I absolutely loved this’ – N. K. Jemisin, author of The Fifth Season ‘Irene is a great heroine: fiery, resourceful and no one’s fool’ – Guardian ‘Brilliant and so much fun. Skullduggery, Librarians and dragons – Cogman keeps upping the ante on this delightful series!’ – Charles Stross, author of the Merchant Princes series
From the New York Times bestselling author of Spearhead and A Higher Call comes an unflinching, brutal, and relentless firsthand chronicle of United States Marine Corps' actions in the Pacific during World War 2. Following fifteen Marines from the Pearl Harbor attack, through battles with the Japanese, to their return home after V-J Day, Adam Makos and Marcus Brotherton have compiled an oral history of the Pacific War in the words of the men who fought on the front lines. With unflinching honesty, these Marines reveal harrowing accounts of combat with an implacable enemy, the friendships and camaraderie they found--and lost--and the aftermath of the war's impact on their lives. With unprecedented access to the veterans, rare photographs, and unpublished memoirs, Voices of the Pacific presents true stories of heroism as told by such World War II veterans as Sid Phillips, R. V. Burgin, and Chuck Tatum--whose exploits were featured in the HBO(R) miniseries, The Pacific--and their Marine buddies from the legendary 1st Marine Division. Includes rare photos
No one interested in fashion, style, or the high-flying intrigues of café society will want to miss Christopher Petkanas’s exuberantly entertaining oral biography Loulou & Yves: The Untold Story of Loulou de La Falaise and the House of Saint Laurent. Dauntless, “in the bone” style made Loulou de La Falaise one of the great fashion firebrands of the twentieth century. Descending in a direct line from Coco Chanel and Elsa Schiaparelli, she was celebrated at her death in 2011, aged just sixty-four, as the “highest of haute bohemia,” a feckless adventuress in the art of living—and the one person Yves Saint Laurent could not live without. Yves was the most influential designer of his times; possibly also the most neurasthenic. In an exquisitely intimate, sometimes painful personal and professional relationship, Loulou was his creative right hand, muse, alter ego and the virtuoso behind all the flamboyant accessories that were a crucial component of the YSL “look.” For thirty years, until his retirement in 2002, Yves relied on Loulou to inspire him, make him laugh and talk him off the ledge—the enchanted formula that brought him from one historic collection to the next. Yves’s many tributes shape Loulou’s memory, as if everything there was to know about this fugitive, Giacometti-like figure could be told by her clanking bronze cuffs, towering fur toques, the turquoise boulders on her fingers and her working friendship with the man who put women in pants. But another, darker story lifts the veil on Loulou, a classic “number two” with a contempt for convention, and exposes the underbelly of fashion at its highest level. Behind Yves’s encomiums are a pair of aristocrat parents—Loulou’s shiftless French father and menacingly chic English mother—who abandoned her to a childhood of foster care and sexual abuse; Loulou’s recurring desperation to leave Yves and go out on her own; and the grandiose myths surrounding her family. Loulou felt that her life had been kidnapped by the operatic workings of the House of Saint Laurent, and in her last years faced financial ruin. Loulou & Yves unspools an elusive fashion idol—nymphomaniacal, heedless and up to her bracelets in coke and Boizel champagne—at the core of what used to be called “le beau monde.”
She was the most famous woman in the world. She died tragically, too young, in a terrible accident. The world mourned. Monica Ali, the beloved author of Brick Lane, explores the extraordinary question: what if she hadn't died? Lydia lives in a nondescript town somewhere in the American Midwest. She's a nice, normal woman - if strikingly beautiful. She lives a nice, normal life: her friends are normal, her job is normal, her hobbies are normal. Her friends and boyfriend adore her. But her past is shrouded in mystery. Who is Lydia? Where does she come from? And why is her English accent so posh? Lydia is a woman with secrets. Extraordinary secrets. She might even be the most famous woman on the planet... a woman whose death the world mourned by millions. Who is she? *~*~* Praise for Untold Story*~*~* 'A beautiful, gripping accomplishment, a treat for the heart and the head, and will be a joy to readers who believe in the possibility that a book can transform your basic sense of life' Andrew O'Hagan 'A terrific, clever, multi-layered and subtle book (and let's not forget - hugely entertaining)' Joanne Harris 'Haunting and intensely readable, this is something between a thriller and a ghost story' Lady Antonia Fraser 'A startlingly intelligent, perceptive and entertaining piece of fiction. It's quite brilliant' Henry Sutton, Daily Mirror 'Thoughtful, compassionate... a suspenseful and gripping read' Suzi Feay, Financial Times 'Ali's third-person princess is a very convincing and sympathetic figure... extremely skilfully done' Tibor Fischer, Observer
The defining, behind-the-scenes chronicle of one of the most extraordinary, beloved, and dominant pop cultural entities in America’s history -- Marvel Comics – and the outsized personalities who made Marvel including Martin Goodman, Stan Lee, and Jack Kirby. “Sean Howe’s history of Marvel makes a compulsively readable, riotous and heartbreaking version of my favorite story, that of how a bunch of weirdoes changed the world…That it’s all true is just frosting on the cake.” —Jonathan Lethem For the first time, Marvel Comics tells the stories of the men who made Marvel: Martin Goodman, the self-made publisher who forayed into comics after a get-rich-quick tip in 1939, Stan Lee, the energetic editor who would shepherd the company through thick and thin for decades and Jack Kirby, the WWII veteran who would co-create Captain America in 1940 and, twenty years later, developed with Lee the bulk of the company’s marquee characters in a three-year frenzy. Incorporating more than one hundred original interviews with those who worked behind the scenes at Marvel over a seventy-year-span, Marvel Comics packs anecdotes and analysis into a gripping narrative of how a small group of people on the cusp of failure created one of the most enduring pop cultural forces in contemporary America.
It's 1942. The novelist John Steinbeck needs character witnesses to sign his application to carry a gun in New York. He's received a threatening phone call and feels the need for self-protection. He's a relative newcomer to the Empire State - most of his close friends live back in California, so finding people to sign could be difficult for the controversial author. Feeling time is of the essence, he begins his search for character witnesses in the idyllic village of Palisades, where he makes his home. The Application is one of sixteen tales in Steinbeck: The Untold Stories examining the emotional and psychological toll extracted for writing the truth as Steinbeck saw it, in works such as Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath. From his days in Salinas and Los Gatos and Pacific Grove on California's Monterey Peninsula to his later years in New York, we meet the people who were important in his life as well as the dark specters of those who opposed him and what he was writing. The stories look at his friends and contemporaries and those who outlived him. Henry, for instance, a boyhood pal who decades later sees John again in a visit to Henry's Salinas service station under cover of darkness. Or Lily, an old high school classmate who invites him to an impromptu reunion that turns dangerous for John and the other participants gathered in a park. Artists, too, were important in his world. The young couple he gave money to so they could explore Mexico and "learn to paint out loud." The painter, a giant of a man, who on a summer night carried Steinbeck out of his home after an argument on labor issues. The famous film actress who accompanies him on a nervous drive, from Los Angeles up the Salinas Valley in the light of day. There were those who had little or no contact with him but were influenced and moved by his work. Beau, a charismatic chainsmoking cowboy who proudly felt he inspired the creation of a Steinbeck character. The terminally ill book collector Paul, who finds temporary escape from his worries and responsibilities by searching for Steinbeck first editions. The wanderer Bill who arrives in Monterey and is befriended by those who knew Steinbeck and instruct him in the legacy. Or the gentle woman who looks back seventy years recalling her famous marine biologist father's relationship with the writer - as well as with his own children. These and other stories are further brought to life by the gritty, character-driven illustrations of artist C. Kline. Images such as John's mother Olive gathering flowers while remembering a sad day in her youth. A young sailor off an aircraft carrier drinking with two American strangers in a Greek bar while a political coup is underway. A Big Sur trapper tearfully parting with a mountain lion named Flora. Or the writer explaining to a ghost he has no home and never did. These stories and characters provide pathos and humor to the portrait of a great writer dealing with his memories and fears. And - as Steinbeck once described it in a letter to a friend - the powerful desire to begin again and return to the ocean tide pools and star-gazing of his youth.
