Showing results by publisher "Simon & Schuster Audio" in Authors

Everyone knows Judy Blume. Her books have garnered her fans of all ages for decades and sold tens of millions of copies. But why were people so drawn to them? And why are we still talking about them now in the 21st century? In The Genius of Judy, her remarkable story is revealed as never before, beginning with her as a mother of two searching for purpose outside of her home in 1960s suburban New Jersey.

In the aftermath of 9/11, Kevin Hazzard felt that something was missing from his life - his days were too safe, too routine. A failed salesman turned local reporter, he wanted to test himself, see how he might respond to pressure and danger. He signed up for emergency medical training and became, at age 26, a newly minted EMT running calls in the worst sections of Atlanta. His life entered a different realm - one of blood, violence, and amazing grace.

Survival Math is both a personal reckoning and a vital addition to the national conversation about race. Mitchell explores the Portland of his childhood, tracing the ways in which his family managed their lives in and around drugs, prostitution, gangs, and imprisonment as members of a tiny black population in one of the country’s whitest cities. He discusses sex work and serial killers, gangs and guns, near-death experiences, composite fathers, the concept of “hustle,” and the destructive power of drugs and addiction on family.

The story of Mary Poppins, the quintessentially English and utterly magical children's nanny, is remarkable enough. She flew into the lives of the unsuspecting Banks family in a children's book that was instantly hailed as a classic, then became a household name when Julie Andrews stepped into the starring role in Walt Disney's hugely successful and equally classic film. Now she is a Broadway sensation all over again. But the story of Mary Poppins's creator, as this first biography reveals, is just as unexpected and remarkable.

In a brilliant, nuanced, and wholly original collection of essays, the best-selling and award-winning author of Brooklyn and The Empty Family offers a fascinating exploration of famous writers’ relationships to their families and their work.From Jane Austen’s aunts to Tennessee Williams’s mentally ill sister, the impact of intimate family dynamics can be seen in many of literature’s greatest works. In New Ways to Kill Your Mother, Colm Tóibín traces and interprets those family ties.

Stephen Kuusisto was born legally blind - but he was also raised in the 1950s and taught to deny his blindness in order to "pass" as sighted. Stephen attended public school, rode a bike, and read books pressed right up against his nose. As an adult, he coped with his limited vision by becoming a professor in a small college town, memorizing routes for all of the places he needed to be. Then, at the age of 38, he was laid off. With no other job opportunities in his vicinity, he would have to travel to find work.

M. John Harrison has produced one of the greatest bodies of fiction of any living British author, encompassing space opera, speculative fiction, fantasy, and magical and literary realism. But is there even an M. John Harrison and if so, where do we find him? This is the question the author asks in this memoir-as-mystery, turning for clues to forty years of notetaking: “A note or it never happened. A note or you never looked.” Are these notebooks records of failed presence?

Ray Bradbury was one of the best-known writers and creative dreamers of our time. His enduring legacy as a storyteller, novelist, and space-age visionary radiated out into popular adaptations for stage, film, and television, and now the fascinating narratives and insights of his personal and professional correspondence are revealed for the first time. Remembrance offers the first sustained look at his life in letters from his late teens to his ninth decade.

In Girls of Tender Age, Mary-Ann Tirone Smith fully articulates with great humor and tenderness the wild jubilance of an extended French-Italian family struggling to survive in a post-World War II housing project in Hartford, Connecticut.

When ABC News' Good Morning America asked its viewers to write essays describing true-life experiences, the network never imagined receiving more than 20,000 pages of inspiring stories. After a panel of best-selling authors and editors chose three finalists, America was given the opportunity to vote on which aspiring author's story would be published. This audiobook is the result of the most ambitious search ever conducted to publish an extraordinary life story.

In this “vivid...lovely and inviting” (The New York Times) coming-of-age memoir - the “best piece of nature writing since H Is for Hawk” (Neil Gaiman) - a young man saves a baby magpie as his estranged father is dying, only to find that caring for the bird saves him.

From the moment his new golden retriever puppy jumped into his arms, Edward Grinnan and his wife, Julee, were in love with her. Edward didn't know it yet, but Millie would change his life. In this moving memoir, Edward Grinnan writes about his life with Millie - from their first joyous meeting through her struggle with cancer and eventual heartbreaking death. Edward shares how her sensitivity, unconditional love, and innate goodness helped him discover those qualities in himself and put his complicated past in perspective.

Following his divorce, down-and-out writer and Mississippi exile Lee Durkee holed himself up in a Vermont fishing shack and fell prey to a decades-long obsession with Shakespearian portraiture. It began with a simple premise: despite the prevalence of popular portraits, no one really knows what Shakespeare looked like. That the Bard of Avon has gotten progressively handsomer in modern depictions seems only to reinforce this point.

In the public imagination, Ernest Hemingway looms larger than life. But the actual person behind the legend has long remained elusive. Now, his son Patrick shares the letters they exchanged over two decades, offering a glimpse into how one of America’s most iconic writers interacted with his children. These letters reveal a father who wished for his children to share his interests—hunting, fishing, travel—and a son who was receptive to the experiences his father offered.

Evelyn Ryan was an enterprising woman who kept poverty at bay with wit, poetry, and perfect prose during the "contest era" of the 1950s and 1960s. From her frenetic supermarket shopping spree - worth $3,000 today - to her clever entries worthy of Erma Bombeck, Dorothy Parker, and Ogden Nash, Evelyn Ryan's story shows how a winning spirit will triumph over the poverty of circumstance.

"Bird Cloud” is the name Annie Proulx gave to 640 acres of Wyoming wetlands and prairie and 400-foot cliffs plunging down to the North Platte River. On the day she first visited, a cloud in the shape of a bird hung in the evening sky. Proulx also saw pelicans, bald eagles, golden eagles, great blue herons, ravens, scores of bluebirds, harriers, kestrels, elk, deer and a dozen antelope

Was the popularity of this program due to the luck of the Irish or the talent of Frank McCourt? Listen to what the critics are calling "a hard-nosed but lyrical conclusion to the story begun in Angela's Ashes" and "a refreshing Frank McCourt." Also available in unabridged version.

Even as a young girl, growing up in the Bronx, Mary Higgins Clark knew she wanted to be a writer. The gift of storytelling was a part of her Irish ancestry, so it followed naturally that she would later use her sharp eye, keen intelligence, and inquisitive nature to create stories.

In the autumn of 1994, Michael Korda was diagnosed as having prostate cancer. For several years, he had been examined, tested, and medicated, always with the assurance that everything was all right - until it wasn't. But the discovery of the actual cancer was only the beginning of his ordeal.

New York's Chelsea Hotel may no longer be home to its most famous denizens - Andy Warhol, Leonard Cohen, and Patti Smith, to name a few - but the eccentric spirit of the Chelsea is alive and well. Meet the family Rips: father Michael, a lawyer turned journalist with a penchant for fine tailoring; mother Sheila, a former model and world-renowned artist who matches her welding outfits with couture; and daughter Nicolaia, a precocious high school junior at work on a record of her peculiar "youth".