It's a still a mystery, and a much debated topic, among theater enthusiasts as to why "Merrily We Roll Along" flopped, especially since Sondheim's other productions, which include "Into the Woods," "Follies," "Sweeney Todd," and "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum," have been so endearing and extraordinarily successful. In this Kindle Single, Pogrebin muses on why the show didn't get off the ground at the same time that she takes the reader on passionate, introspective journey, examining the importance of this very special moment in her life.Abigail Pogrebin is the author of Stars of David: Prominent Jews Talk About Being Jewish (Broadway Books 2007), and One And The Same: My Life as an Identical Twin and What I've Learned About Everyone's Struggle to Be Singular (Doubleday 2009). Pogrebin has written for many national publications, and has produced for Mike Wallace at "60 Minutes." She lives in New York City with her husband and two children.

    Veteran journalist Pete Hamill never covered just politics. Or just sports. Or just the entertainment business, the mob, foreign affairs, social issues, the art world, or New York City. He has in fact written about all these subjects, and many more, in his years as a contributor to such national magazines as Esquire, Vanity Fair, and New York, and as a columnist at the New York Post, the New York Daily News, the Village Voice, and other newspapers. Seasoned by more than thirty years as a New York newspaperman, Hamill wrote on an extraordinarily wide variety of topics in powerful language that is personal, tough-minded, clearheaded, always provocative. Piecework is a rich and varied collection of Hamill's best writing, on such diverse subjects as what television and crack have in common, why winning isn't everything, stickball, Nicaragua, Donald Trump, why American immigration policy toward Mexico is all wrong, Brooklyn's Seventh Avenue, and Frank Sinatra, not to mention Octavio Paz, what it's like to realize you're middle-aged, Northern Ireland, New York City then and now, how Mike Tyson spent his time in prison, and much more. This collection proves him once again to be among the last of a dying breed: the old-school generalist, who writes about anything and everything, guided only by passionate and boundless curiosity. Piecework is Hamill at his very best.

    Why, specifically?”“I like to build things.”As of the time of writing, more than ten million copies of E L James’ “Fifty Shades of Grey” have been sold worldwide. Whether you find this notion inspiring or terrifying, there’s no escaping the fact that, as literary events go, “Fifty Shades of Grey” is at least...significant. And books that are...significant...deserve to be subjected to thorough critical and textual analysis. By taking it apart into teeny tiny small pieces and put those pieces under a spiteful and mean-spirited microscope, we may all just learn something about the elusive nature of the bestseller,“Lighter Shades of Grey” is a chapter-by-chapter dissection of “Fifty Shades of Grey”, cataloguing unusual leaps of logic, surprising deductions, exciting exchanges of dialogue, recurrent motifs and stand-out moments, that will allow you to better appreciate / enjoyably ruin for others the “Fifty Shades” experience. It also provides definitive answers to questions such as “How often does Ana say ’oh my’?”, “How often do people’s mouths fall open in surprise?” and “Is Christian Grey a diagnosable psychopath?”Building on the viral hit blog-entry, “Fifty Things That Annoy Me About Fifty Shades Of Grey”, “Lighter Shades of Grey” is the perfect snarky companion to this year’s most inexplicable blockbuster. (Approximately 31,000 words; 30 pictures)

    The miracle in the mundane.One day, while browsing an antique store in Helena, Montana, photographer Tyler Knott Gregson stumbled upon a vintage Remington typewriter for sale. Standing up and using a page from a broken book he was buying for $2, he typed a poem without thinking, without planning, and without the ability to revise anything.He fell in love.Three years and almost one thousand poems later, Tyler is now known as the creator of the Typewriter Series: a striking collection of poems typed onto found scraps of paper or created via blackout method. Chasers of the Light features some of his most insightful and beautifully worded pieces of work—poems that illuminate grand gestures and small glimpses, poems that celebrate the beauty of a life spent chasing the light.

    Three weeks later, John's cousin Anthony Radziwill died of cancer. In this moving and candid memoir, Carole Radziwill, Anthony's widow, tells her story.

    How To Be A Public Author will take the debate to another level. It will get everyone talking – and laughing – even more about Britain’s biggest annual book bonanza.Francis Plug is a troubled and often drunk misfit who causes chaos and confusion wherever he goes – and where he most likes to go is to real author events, collecting signatures from the likes of Salman Rushdie, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Eleanor Catton.As he adds to this collection of signed Booker first editions, Francis – a wannabe author himself – is also helpfully writing a self-help manual. This is devised with the novice writer in mind, and full of sage wisdom and useful tidbits to help ease freshly published novelists into the demands and rigors of author events, readings, and general life in the public eye.So, “If you’re provided with a hands-free mic, clipped to your lapel, don’t forget to turn it off when you visit the toilet, or if you need to vomit before your event.” Likewise, it’s always good to be wary of the germs of fans – and “considering the use of elbow-length dishwashing gloves at book signings, and a large, easy-wipe kitchen apron.” And so too, cultivating a photographic ‘look’ for the many publicity shots you will be subjected to is also a good idea – Francis’s personal choice being that of Macaulay McCulkin in Home Alone.With advice like this, and Francis’ warm and deranged personality, How To Be A Public Author will prove ESSENTIAL reading for anyone with an interest in the literary world.How To Be A Public Author is a brilliant slapstick comedy, blurring fact and fantasy to astonishing effect, and it is also a surprising and touching meditation on loneliness and finding a place in the world. The Man Booker Prize becomes a springboard to explore what it means to be an author – and a human being – in the twenty-first century.

    The East Village, NYC, 1976. A 26-year-old starving poet needs $60. What else to do but register with a temp agency as a house cleaner? The excitement never wanes as he is catapulted into the everyday yet unimaginable worlds behind closed (apartment) doors. Bob knows one thing: dirt will always win. Clients are a bit more unpredictable, he discovers, as he comes to terms with eccentric domestic habits and intimate dramas; weird vibes and strange discoveries; appreciation, dependency, dismissal...and seduction. Even if he's asked to clean up a loft the size of the Strand - and he is, and it's above the legendary bookstore - he coffees up with a donut, fortifies himself with some (pocketed) weed, and sets out anew, with disarming insight, originality, and humor. With alternate chapters devoted to practical cleaning tips, Cleaning Up New York is a quirky reinvention in the tradition of George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London, Studs Terkel's chronicles of the working class, and Mrs. Beeton's Book of Household Management; its narrator a spiritual descendent of Candide, Ida Tarbell, and Holden Caulfield.

    Even the most predictable of us sometimes defy expectations. Other times life plays tricks on us. We find ourselves characters in a farce. As an award-winning actor and comic writer, Rebecca Front has always been fascinated by life's little quirks. Impossible Things Before Breakfast is a collection of true stories about surprising turns of events, bizarre misunderstandings and improbable life lessons. We learn, among other things, how to prepare for a role as a villainous 'she-mountain' when you're five-foot-four, why beach holidays require military-precision planning, and the joys of wearing a cape. Combining elegant writing, wry humour and genuine insight, this brilliant new collection is about lifting the lid on ordinary life and feasting on the impossible.

    The joys and travails of building a home in Baja California.

    Old Mr. Flood is his story about a retired house wrecker who plans to live to 115 years old on a diet of fresh seafood, harbor air and the occasional Scotch whiskey.

    This work reveals the growth of an artist who saw no artificial boundary between art and the paying job and who succeeded in putting her indelible stamp on the visual imagination.

    His story begins here—before the homemade goat milk soaps and hand-gathered honeys, before his memoir of the city mouse’s move to the country, The Bucolic Plague—in I Am Not Myself These Days,  with “plenty of dishy anecdotes and moments of tragi-camp delight” (WashingtonPost).

    You’ll be comforted and inspired by these miraculous stories about messages from heaven and love that doesn’t die.When our loved ones leave this world, our connection with them does not end. Their physical presence may be gone, but not their spirit. They send us signs from beyond, come to us in dreams, or deliver messages to us in a variety of surprising and heartwarming ways. You’ll find comfort and inspiration in these miraculous true accounts by ordinary people who have had extraordinary experiences. Read about answered prayers, divine messengers, guardian angels, premonitions, and unexplainable coincidences. This collection will comfort and inspire anyone who has lost a loved one. It will deepen your faith, renew your hope, and open your eyes to the miracles around you.

    Considered one of American’s most brilliant writers by the journalism community, this long-awaited book debut presents Labash at his very best. A latter day Leibling, Labash’s collection will take its place alongside books by writers such as Calvin Trillin and P.J. O’Rourke..• A unique voice that’s well-connected: Labash’s well-informed insights, self-deprecating wit, and provocative candor feature regularly in The Weekly Standard and have also appeared in Washingtonian Magazine , American Spectator , and on Slate.com. Extremely well-liked and respected, his media contacts are many and varied. He has declined invitations to appear on everything from HBO Sports to Meet the Press —but is finally willing to make the rounds. As LA Weekly wrote after his Detroit piece, “it’s not new to give props to Matt Labash.”.• Remarkable collection: Full of wit, insight, and a trenchant grasp of the American scoundrel, Labash’s masterful profiles of men on the nation’s fringe—Pirate Kingfish Gov. Edwin Johnson, The Right Reverend Dr. Al Sharpton, Dirty Trickster Roger Stone—are published alongside devastating pieces on such dead or dying cities as Detroit and New Orleans; work celebrating such joyous, but overlooked pockets of American culture as Revival music and Rebirth Brass Band; and scathing, hilarious briefs on the nation’s great phonies—Michael Moore, Louis Farrakhan, Donald Trump to name a few..

    Disco and salsa. The loft jazz scene and the downtown composers known as Minimalists. In the mid-1970s, New York City was a laboratory where all the major styles of modern music were reinvented--all at once, from one block to the next, by musicians who knew, admired, and borrowed from one another. Crime was everywhere, the government was broke, and the city's infrastructure was collapsing. But rent was cheap, and the possibilities for musical exploration were limitless.Love Goes to Buildings on Fire is the first book to tell the full story of the era's music scenes and the phenomenal and surprising ways they intersected. From New Year's Day 1973 to New Year's Eve 1977, the book moves panoramically from post-Dylan Greenwich Village, to the arson-scarred South Bronx barrios where salsa and hip-hop were created, to the Lower Manhattan lofts where jazz and classical music were reimagined, to ramshackle clubs like CBGBs and The Gallery, where rock and dance music were hot-wired for a new generation. As they remade the music, the musicians at the center of the book invented themselves: Willie Colón and the Fania All-Stars renting Yankee Stadium to take salsa to the masses, New Jersey locals Bruce Springsteen and Patti Smith claiming the jungleland of Manhattan as their own, Grandmaster Flash transforming the turntable into a musical instrument, David Byrne and Talking Heads proving that rock music "ain't no foolin' around." Will Hermes was there--venturing from his native Queens to the small dark rooms where the revolution was taking place--and in Love Goes to Buildings on Fire he captures the creativity, drive, and full-out lust for life of the great New York musicians of those years, who knew that the music they were making would change the world.