In Stardust Lost, Stefan Kanfer brings the colorful Yiddish stage roaring back to life. Born of ancient traditions stretching back to the drama of the Old Testament, the Yiddish theater was a vibrant part of the immigrant experience. Kanfer invokes the energy, belief, and pure chutzpah it took to establish and run the thriving, influential theaters. He reveals the nightly drama and comedy that played out behind the scenes as well as onstage, and introduces all the players...

Stefan Kanfer, acclaimed biographer of Lucille Ball and Groucho Marx, now gives us the definitive life of Marlon Brando, seamlessly intertwining the man and the work to give us a stunning and illuminating appraisal. Beginning with Brando’s turbulent childhood, Kanfer follows him to New York where he made his star-making Broadway debut as Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire at age twenty-three. Brando then decamped for Hollywood, and Kanfer looks at each of Brando’s films ...

Humphrey Bogart: it’s hard to think of anyone who’s had the same lasting impact on the culture of movies. Though he died at the young age of fifty-seven more than half a century ago, his influence among actors and filmmakers, and his enduring appeal for film lovers around the world, remains as strong as ever. What is it about Bogart, with his unconventional looks and noticeable speech impediment, that has captured our collective imagination for so long? In this definitive biography, Stefan...

Actor Marlon Brando is perpetually fascinating, both for the power of the characters he portrayed and for his tumultuous personal life. Bestselling biographer Stefan Kanfer seamlessly intertwines the man and his work to give us this illuminating appraisal.Kanfer takes us from Brando’s troubled childhood to his arrival in New York in the 1940s, where he studied with the legendary Stella Adler and became, at age twenty-three, the star of Broadway in A Streetcar Named Desire....

As a movie actress Lucille Ball was, in her own words, "queen of the B-pluses." But on the small screen she was a superstar—arguably the funniest and most enduring in the history of TV. In this exemplary biography, Stefan Kanfer explores the roots of Lucy's genius and places it in the context of her conflicted and sometimes bitter personal life.Ball of Fire gives us Lucy in all her contradictions. Here is the beauty who became a master of knock-down slapstick; the control ...

The legendary talk show host's humorous reminiscences and pointed commentary on the great figures he has known, and culture and politics today.For years, Dick Cavett played host to the nation's most famous personalities on his late-night talk show. In this humorous and evocative book, we get to hear Cavett's best tales, as he recounts great moments with the legendary entertainers who crossed his path and offers his own trenchant commentary on contemporary American c...

Frank Sinatra was the best-known entertainer of the twentieth century—infinitely charismatic, lionized and notorious in equal measure. But despite his mammoth fame, Sinatra the man has remained an enigma. Now James Kaplan brings deeper insight than ever before to the complex psyche and turbulent life behind that incomparable voice, from Sinatra’s humble beginning in Hoboken to his fall from grace and Oscar-winning return in From Here to Eternity. Here at last is the biographer who...

The New York Times –bestselling autobiography from the beloved Academy and Tony Award–winning actress.From London's glittering West End to Broadway's bright lights, from her Academy Award-winning role as Elizabeth I in Shakespeare in Love to "M" in the James Bond films, Judi Dench has treated audiences to some of the greatest performances of our time in such classics as Hamlet, Henry V, and

Award-winning sports writer Jane Leavy follows her New York Times runaway bestseller Sandy Koufax with the acclaimed, definitive sports biography of baseball icon Mickey Mantle.The legendary Hall-of-Fame outfielder was a national hero for a generation of baseball fans in mid-century America, a god in pinstripes during his record-setting career with the New York Yankees. But public revelations of alcoholism, infidelity, and family strife badly tarn...

In American Rebel, bestselling author and acclaimed film historian Marc Eliot examines the ever-exciting, often-tumultuous arc of Clint Eastwood's life and career.As a Hollywood icon, Clint Eastwood--one of film's greatest living legends--represents some of the finest cinematic achievements in the history of American cinema. Eliot writes with unflinching candor about Eastwood's highs and lows, his artistic successes and failures, and the fascinating, compl...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERParis, 1938. As the shadow of war darkens Europe, democratic forces on the Continent struggle against fascism and communism, while in Spain the war has already begun. Alan Furst, whom Vince Flynn has called “the most talented espionage novelist of our generation,” now gives us a taut, suspenseful, romantic, and richly rendered novel of spies and secret operatives in Paris and New York, in Warsaw and Odessa, on the eve of World War ...

Mark Twain's final and uncensored masterpiece, presented in three volumes, is a landmark publication in American literature.**“Twain will begin to seem strange again, alluring and still astonishing . . . in ways that still resonate with us.”—New York Times“His crystalline humor and expansive range are a continuous source of delight and awe.”—Los Angeles Times Book Review**"I've struck it!" Mark Twain wrote in a 1904 letter to a fri...