An impressive undertaking, written with remarkable distance and control, Them functions on two different levels. It’s a biography of two glittering figures: Gray’s stepfather, Alexander Lieberman, editorial director of the Condé Nast publishing empire, and her mother, a flamboyant Russian émigré hat designer known as "Tatiana of Saks." It’s also a memoir of growing up in their shadows. And it’s fun because it brings back a romantic, post-war New York in which all women wore fanciful hats.
Failed dinner parties, church jumble-sales, rainy days, endless cups of tea, and single women in cardigans and tweeds working on ‘the dustier fringes of the academic world’—this is the world of the gently comic and rueful British novelist Barbara Pym. Pym has a sly, almost devilish sense of humor and a feel for the grayness of day-to-day living. Excellent Women is probably her most famous book and a good place to start.
A Writer's Life is a beautifully crafted look at writing and writers' block:
the book is largely about projects of Talese's that failed and ideas that fizzled
out or were rejected by publishers. The sections about his attempt to write
a book about the restaurant business are especially vivid and moving. A
fascinating--as well as open and vulnerable--account of one person's writing process.
Falling Palace: A Romance of Naples
by Dan Hofstadter Alfred A. Knopf
Our Price: $24.00
This is a lovely, lyrical book: Hofstadter’s descriptions of Naples are gorgeous, his style is refined without being self-conscious, and throughout the book there are profiles of colorful characters, pitch-perfect in their precision and comic timing.
