Recommendations based on "The Dream Endures California Enters the 1940s"

The first biography of Shirley Hazzard, the author of The Transit of Venus and a writer of “shocking wisdom” and “intellectual thrill” (The New Yorker).Shirley Hazzard: A Writing Life tells the extraordinary story of a great modern novelist. Brigitta Olubas, Hazzard’s authorized biographer, has drawn, with great subtlety and understanding, on her fiction (itself largely based on Hazzard’s own experience); on an extensive archive of letters, diaries, and notebooks; and on the memories of surviving friends and colleagues to create this resonant portrait of an exceptional woman.This biography explores the distinctive times of Hazzard’s life, from her youth and middle age to her widowhood and years of decline, and traces the complex and intricate processes of self-fashioning that lay beneath Hazzard’s formidable, beguiling presence. Olubas shows us the places of Hazzard’s life, of which she wrote with characteristic lyricism: her childhood in Depression-era Sydney; her youth in postwar Hong Kong, New Zealand, and London; her years in New York in the 1950s, working at the United Nations and The New Yorker. Olubas also describes Hazzard’s long marriage to the writer Francis Steegmuller and their deep involvement in postwar Naples and Capri. Rare photographs from Hazzard’s collection and elsewhere accompany the text.Hazzard was the last of a generation of self-taught writers, devotees of a great literary tradition, and her depth of perception and expressive gifts have earned her iconic status. Brigitta Olubas has brought her brilliantly alive, enhancing and deepening our understanding of the singular woman who created some of the most enduring fiction of the past sixty years.As Dwight Garner wrote in The New York Times, “Hazzard’s stories feel timeless because she understands, as she writes in one of them: ‘We are human beings, not rational ones.’” Here, in Shirley Hazzard, is the story of a remarkable human being.

The first authorised biography of eternal legend Elizabeth Taylor.Known for her glamorous beauty, soap-opera personal life and magnetic screen presence, Elizabeth Taylor was the twentieth century’s most famous film star. Including unseen photographs and unread private reflections, this authorised biography is a fascinating and complete portrait worthy of the legend and her legacy.Elizabeth Taylor captures this intelligent, empathetic, tenacious, volatile and complex woman as never before, from her rise to massive fame at the age of twelve in National Velvet to becoming the first actor to negotiate a million-dollar salary for a film, from her eight marriages and enduring love affair with Richard Burton to her lifelong battle with addiction and her courageous efforts as an AIDS activist.Using Elizabeth’s unpublished letters, diary entries and off-the-record interview transcripts as well as interviews with 250 of her closest friends and family, Kate Andersen Brower tells the full, unvarnished story of the classic Hollywood star who continues to captivate audiences the world over.

No artist has been more ruthlessly driven by his creative urge, nor more isolated by it from most ordinary sources of human happiness, than Vincent Van Gogh. A painter of genius, his life was an incessant struggle against poverty, discouragement, madness and despair. Lust for Life skilfully captures the exciting atmosphere of the Paris of the Post-Impressionists and reconstructs with great insight the development of Van Gogh's art. The painter is brought to life not only as an artist but as a personality and this account of his violent, vivid and tormented life is a novel of rare compassion and vitality.

Spoiled Southern belle Scarlett O'Hara never stops loving the married Ashley Wilkes even as she faces the hardships of life during the Civil War and the changes brought about by Reconstruction. Reprint.

The poet and visual artist Mina Loy (1882-1966) has long had an underground reputation as an exemplary avant-gardist. Born in London of mixed Jewish and English parentage, and a much photographed beauty, she moved in the pivotal circles of international modernism - in Florence as Gertrude Stein's friend and Marinetti's lover; in New York as Marcel Duchamp's co-conspirator and Djuna Barnes's confidante; in Mexico with her greatest love, the notorious boxer-poet Arthur Cravan; in Paris with the Surrealists and Man Ray. Carolyn Burke's riveting, authoritative biography brings this highly original and representative figure wonderfully alive, in the process giving us a new picture of modernism - and one woman's important contribution to it.

USA Today bestselling author Jillian Cantor reimagines and expands on the literary classic The Great Gatsby in this atmospheric historical novel with echoes of Big Little Lies, told in three women’s alternating voices.On a sultry August day in 1922, Jay Gatsby is shot dead in his West Egg swimming pool. To the police, it appears to be an open-and-shut case of murder/suicide when the body of George Wilson, a local mechanic, is found in the woods nearby.Then a diamond hairpin is discovered in the bushes by the pool, and three women fall under suspicion. Each holds a key that can unlock the truth to the mysterious life and death of this enigmatic millionaire.Daisy Buchanan once thought she might marry Gatsby—before her family was torn apart by an unspeakable tragedy that sent her into the arms of the philandering Tom Buchanan.Jordan Baker, Daisy’s best friend, guards a secret that derailed her promising golf career and threatens to ruin her friendship with Daisy as well.Catherine McCoy, a suffragette, fights for women’s freedom and independence, and especially for her sister, Myrtle Wilson, who’s trapped in a terrible marriage.Their stories unfold in the years leading up to that fateful summer of 1922, when all three of their lives are on the brink of unraveling. Each woman is pulled deeper into Jay Gatsby’s romantic obsession, with devastating consequences for all of them.Jillian Cantor revisits the glittering Jazz Age world of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, retelling this timeless American classic from the women’s perspective. Beautiful Little Fools is a quintessential tale of money and power, marriage and friendship, love and desire, and ultimately the murder of a man tormented by the past and driven by a destructive longing that can never be fulfilled.

Dorothy Parker, more than any of her contemporaries, captured the spirit of her age in her writing. The decadent twenties and thirties in New York were a time of great experiment and daring for women. For the rich, life seemed a continual party, but the excesses took their emotional toll. With a biting wit and perceptive insight, Dorothy Parker examines the social mores of her day and exposes the darkness beneath the dazzle. Her own life exemplified this duality, for while she was one of the most talked-about women of her day, rich and gifted, she was also known as 'a masochist whose passion for unhapiness knew no bound.' Her brilliant dissection of the jazz Age in poetry and prose is collected in this volume along with articles and reviews.

Elizabeth Taylor: The Queen and I is a remarkable collection of Gianni Bozzacchi’s photographs of Elizabeth Taylor, most of them previously unpublished, capturing her as a film star, a woman, and a personal friend. It was 1965 when Bozzacchi, an impetuous twenty-two-year-old, was given the chance of a lifetime. The streetwise kid from Rome was sent to Africa as special photographer on the set of The Comedians, a movie starring Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Alec Guinness, and Peter Ustinov. As the film wrapped, Taylor offered Bozzacchi a job as her personal photographer. Elizabeth Taylor was the world’s most famous woman at the time and undoubtedly its most glamorous. Her marriage to Richard Burton claimed international attention, and together they were the quintessential jet-set couple. Bozzacchi was to work with Taylor and Burton for the next eleven years. They opened the door to their world for him , and his own talent, drive, and artistic style earned him extraordinary success. Publications wanted his services, as did the movie and fashion industries, celebrities, political figures, and the merely famous. Bozzacchi was awarded the honor of International Photographer of the Year three times and became a celebrity himself, the subject of magazine layouts and television interviews.

Their search for privacy took the Lindberghs from the United States to England and then France. Anne Lindbergh sets the record straight here on her husband's prewar visits to Germany. Introduction by the Author; Index; photographs. A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book

Thirty-three years after his death, Elvis Presley's extraordinary physical appeal, timeless music, and sexual charisma continue to captivate, titillate, and excite. Though hundreds of books have been written about the King, no book has solely explored his relationships with women and how they influenced his music and life . . . until now.Based largely on exclusive interviews with the many women who knew him in various roles—lover, sweetheart, friend, costar, and family member—Baby, Let's Play House presents Elvis in a new light: as a charming but wounded Lothario who bedded scores of women but seemed unable to maintain a lasting romantic relationship. While fully exploring the most famous romantic idol of the twentieth century, award-winning veteran music journalist Alanna Nash pulls back the covers on what Elvis really wanted in a woman and was tragically never able to find.