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

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.

Almost There begins at that moment when Nuala O'Faolain's life began to change. It tells the story of a life in subtle, radical, and unforeseen renewal. It is a tale of good fortune chasing out bad - of an accidental harvest of happiness. But it is also a provocative examination of one woman's experience of the "crucible of middle age."

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".

As director of legendary Pommery Champagnes, Philippe Pozzo di Borgo was not generally someone in the habit of asking for help. Then, in 1993, an accident left him a quadriplegic. Passing his days hidden in his Paris townhouse, Philippe found himself the modern equivalent of an “untouchable.” The only person who seemed not to be bothered by Philippe’s condition was someone who had been marginalized his entire life - Abdel, the unemployed, uninhibited immigrant from the outskirts of society who would become Philippe’s caretaker.

Her Last Death begins as the phone rings early one morning in the Montana house where Susanna Sonnenberg lives with her husband and two young sons. Her aunt is calling to tell Susanna her mother is in a coma after a car accident. She might not live. Any daughter would rush the thousands of miles to her mother's bedside. But Susanna cannot bring herself to go. Her courageous memoir explains why.

The fifth of eight children, Chris Forhan was born into a family of silence. He and his siblings learned, without being told, that certain thoughts and feelings were not to be shared. On the evenings his father didn't come home, the rest of the family would eat dinner without him, his whereabouts unknown, his absence pronounced but not mentioned. And on a cold night in 1973, just before Christmas, Forhan's father killed himself in the carport. Forty years later Forhan "bravely considers the way he is and is not his father's son" (Larry Watson).

Following the hugely successful memoir of his boyhood, An Hour Before Daylight, Jimmy Carter remembers Christmas in Plains. This very special day provides a source of spiritual inspiration, respite, family ties, friendship, vacation fun, and the simplicity of community.

A luminous, true story, Name All the Animals is an unparalleled account of grief and secret love: the tale of a family clinging to the memory of a lost child, and a young woman struggling to define herself in the wake of his loss.

Double Double is a unique and honest dual memoir of alcoholism, a disease that affects nearly 45 million Americans each year. Now, award-winning mystery writer Martha Grimes and her son, Ken Grimes, offer two points of view on their struggles with alcoholism. In alternating chapters, they share their stories - stories of drinking, recovery, relapse, friendship, travel, work, success, and failure.

In Deck the Halls, Regan Reilly, the dynamic young sleuth featured in the novels of Carol Higgins Clark, meets Alvirah Meehan, the famous lottery winner and amateur detective who has appeared in several books by Mary Higgins Clark. Listen to the mother-daughter duo talk about how they collaborated to create this story of high stakes and detection played out against a holiday setting.

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.

For many people, Ernest Hemingway remains more a compilation of myths than a person: soldier, sportsman, lover, expat, and of course, writer. But the actual life underneath these various legends remains elusive; what did he look like as a laughing child or young soldier? How did the train tickets he held on his way from France to Spain or across the American Midwest transform him, and what kind of notes, for future stories or otherwise, did he take on these journeys? Ernest Hemingway: Artifacts from a Life answers these questions, and many others.

Written in the tradition of works by Joan Didion, bell hooks, Toni Morrison, and Eve Ensler, this “profoundly insightful and brilliantly inciting” (Dominique Morisseau, Obie Award-winning playwright) exploration of the soul of the United States - the past, the present, and the future Kevin Powell wants for us all, through the lens and lives of three major figures: his mother, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump.

Just as his music career was taking off, Juan Vidal received life-changing news: He’d soon be a father. Throughout his life, neglectful men were the rule - his own dad struggled with drug addiction and infidelity - a cycle that, inevitably, wrought Vidal with insecurity. At age 26, with only a bare grip on life, what lessons could he possibly offer a kid? Determined to alter the course for his child, Vidal did what he’d always done when confronted with life’s challenges. He turned to the counterculture.

A ruthless and illuminating exploration of the friendships that dominated, influenced, nourished, inspired, haunted - and sometimes tore her apart - Susanna Sonnenberg has written a book as searing and superb as her first book about her mother, Her Last Death. Childhood friendships, friendships with older women, friendships that play out with the passion and intensity of love affairs, the friendships between new mothers - each has its own subtleties, its own lessons that Sonnenberg examines and understands with astounding acuity.

In his late teens Tom Macher rebelled against a world that seemed stacked against him. Raised in a broken family and estranged from an absentee father suffering with AIDS, Macher turned to alcohol to escape the painful loneliness of his reality. In quick succession, he is kicked out of school, and then his mother's house, sent to a boys' home in Montana, and later, a halfway house in a truck-stop town of Louisiana. It was there that Macher encounters a community of young men struggling to survive.

The glamorous extravagances and devastating lows of her time in Hollywood are revealed as never before in this fresh new biography of Dorothy Parker—from leaving New York City to work on numerous classic screenplays such as the 1937 A Star Is Born to the devastation of alcoholism, a miscarriage, and her husband’s suicide. Parker’s involvement with anti-fascist and anti-racist groups, which led to her ultimate blacklisting, and her early work in the civil rights movement that inspired her to leave her entire estate to the NAACP are also explored as never before.