When I was a child, I grew up in a very crowded house in suburbia with three sisters. Reading was the best way to escape all the mayhem. By the age of eight I was reading my parents’ novels, whatever books I could find. I wanted to move to a big city like the ones in their novels. At night I would tell myself Cinderella-type stories where I lived in a fabulous apartment and got to be the heroine. I took a class at Harvard Extension, and the professor read my story aloud to the group. From that day on I was hooked.
This book about five girls that live in New York City is so special because it was written in the fifties by a 25-year-old woman who worked in the publishing industry.
In 1958 when opportunities for women were limited the story resonated with a generation of women making their way in a male-dominated world. It explored dating, sex, infidelity, and sexual harassment in an honest way that changed the face of women’s fiction forever. Last year when it was rereleased by Penguin Classics I grabbed a copy, and it was even better than I remembered.
Rona Jaffe's beloved novel about 1950s NYC women in the workplace that paved the way for the #MeToo movement and iconic cultural touchstones like Sex and the City and Mad Men, now for the first time in Penguin Classics, in a 65th anniversary edition with an introduction by New Yorker staff writer Rachel Syme
A Penguin Classic
When Rona Jaffe’s superb page-turner was first published in 1958, it changed contemporary fiction forever. Some readers were shocked, but millions more were electrified when they saw themselves reflected in its story of five young employees of a New York publishing company. Sixty-five…
I was driving across country to move to Miami. When we stopped in Austin, I picked up a copy of Back to Blood by Tom Wolfe.
I was thrilled to find a novel about the city I was moving to. A thick book meticulously researched I settled back and immersed myself into a brilliant novel about multicultural Miami. The Cuban police officer, a Creole professor, Russian criminals, artists from Miami Art Basel, retired New York Yentas, and many more call Miami home.
It was a great primer for my move. That first year I went to Art Basel, visited Little Havana for pastries, and celebrated my birthday at a Russian nightclub all because of Back to Blood.
As a police launch speeds across Miami's Biscayne Bay - with officer Nestor Camacho on board - Tom Wolfe is off and running. Into the feverous landscape of the city, he introduces the Cuban mayor, the black police chief, an ambitious young journalist and his Yale-marinated editor; a psychiatrist who specialises in sex addiction and his Latina nurse by day, mistress by night - until lately, the love of Nestor's life; a refined, and oh-so-light-skinned young woman from Haiti and her Creole-spouting, black-gang-banger-stylin' little brother; a billionaire porn addict, crack dealers in the `hoods, `de-skilled' conceptual artists at the Miami…
I lived in Palm Springs for a long time. My husband and I loved to go to Los Angeles, where we would roam the neighborhoods.
My favorite book about Los Angeles is Shopgirl a thin novel written by Steve Martin, yes that Steve Martin, the actor. I love his writing; it is so spare he doesn’t waste a word. What happens when new-to-the-city aspiring artist Miabelle begins to date the wealthy older Ray Porter.
This book isn’t about how to marry a millionaire but an honest look that captures the loneliness mixed with exhilaration that a young woman faces when she moves to a place where she doesn’t know anyone. I carry this book with me every place I move because I want to keep the real Los Angeles close to me.
'A delicate, poignant modern romance about a shy shopgirl' Richard Corliss
Mirabelle Buttersfield spends her days selling expensive evening gloves in Beverly Hills' finest store, and her nights watching television and drawing darkly gothic pictures.
Adrift in the world and lonely, she has few customers, so spends most of her time leaning on the counter staring into space. But then two men enter her life: Jeremy, a roadie for a band, and Mr Ray Porter, a middle-aged millionaire who invites her out to dinner.
Funny, tender, and insightful, Shop Girl is a coming of age story set against the backdrop…
I lived in Atlanta for a while and this is a great novel about the New South. Reading this novel is like taking a master class in real estate investing.
As with every Tom Wolfe novel it is a huge sprawling book that explores where all classes and races that inhabit a huge city intersect. Charles Croker a prosperous real estate investor is deeply in debt but that doesn’t stop the demands of his much younger trophy wife. Race relations are shattered when Fareek Fanon a star running back for a local college is accused of raping a girl from a prominent family.
Wolfe’s attention to detail paints a full picture of a city in the midst of change.
A dissection of greed-obsessed America a decade after The Bonfire of the Vanities and on the cusp of the millennium, from the master chronicler of American culture Tom Wolfe
Charlie Croker, once a fabled college football star, is now a late-middle-aged Atlanta real estate entrepreneur-turned conglomerate king. His expansionist ambitions and outsize ego have at last hit up against reality. Charlie has a 28,000 acre quail shooting plantation, a young and demanding second wife and a half-empty downtown tower with a staggering load of debt. Wolfe shows us contemporary America with all the verve, wit, and insight that have made…
I remember reading this novel and laughing out loud. It inspired a decade of chick lit and inspired three movies.
Bridget Jones first appeared in Bridget Jones’s Diary Column in The Independent newspaper. A modernization of Jane Austin’s Pride and Prejudice. It convinced a generation of women that if they moved to London, they could meet their own Mr. Darcy. This famous line from the book sums up life in the big city, “It is a truth universally acknowledged that when one part of your life starts going okay, another falls spectacularly to pieces.”
Follow Bridget as she changes careers, falls in and out of love, loses and gains weight, and has a jolly old time, you will too.
A dazzlingly urban satire on modern relationships? An ironic, tragic insight into the demise of the nuclear family? Or the confused ramblings of a pissed thirty-something?
As Bridget documents her struggles through the social minefield of her thirties and tries to weigh up the eternal question (Daniel Cleaver or Mark Darcy?), she turns for support to four indispensable friends: Shazzer, Jude, Tom and a bottle of chardonnay.
Welcome to Bridget's first diary: mercilessly funny, endlessly touching and utterly addictive.
Helen Fielding's first Bridget Jones novel, Bridget Jones's Diary, sparked a phenomenon that has seen…
Hannah Clein will always remember the day she went to a department store with her mother to buy her first bra as her last best day, “B.C.” before the cancer. She considered herself an ordinary child who loved challah bread, reading, and her family. We follow Hannah over three decades, as she navigates the tricky transition from girlhood to womanhood. All her life, she just wants to belong. Be normal. In a tale that explores a woman’s complicated relationships with her body we learn the psyche is a funny thing.
The Perfect Breasts is a personal and raw short story about boobs, written to honor breast cancer awareness month. All proceeds from Kindle Unlimited to every book bought will be donated to cancer research.
The Pact is a contemporary fiction novel about Australian sisters, Samantha and Annie, who are doubles tennis champions. This story amplifies the usual sibling issues and explores their professional partnership and personal relationships – similarities, differences, motivation, competition, abandonment, and grief – and how they each respond to the stress of constantly being under the media spotlight.
What happens when, at the pinnacle of fame, it all falls apart?
With dreams shattered and egos destroyed, how do they cope?
I have an older sister and although our rapport isn’t as dramatic, or as close, for that matter, I was able…
