It's All About the Dress - What I Learned in Forty Years About Men, Women, Sex, and Fashion

Celebrity journalist Amelia Stone is the quintessential L.A. party girl. She goes to Hollywood's most exclusive, star-studded events, where she rubs shoulders (and occasionally more) with celebrities, stays out until all hours of the night, and indulges in the ultimate sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll existence. In short, she's got everything a party girl needs: the looks, the job, the lifestyle. And oh, yes, the out-of-control coke habit.

But it's hard to keep topping your own outrageous exploits, and after losing her job, her friends, and much of her mind (not to mention waking up in the hospital after combining five Ambien, four lines of Special K, and an inestimable amount of cocaine), Amelia makes the drastic decision to end her drug abuse. Sobriety, she finds, has its rewards: she starts seeing the man who could be her Mr. Right and gets hired by a big-name magazine to write a column detailing her wild adventures with the celebrity party crowd. And who could write it better? After all, she has plenty of experience to draw on.

There's just one little problem. Overnight, Amelia Stone has become the new face of Hollywood nightlife, and her editors—who don't know she's come clean—want her to play the part. As her popularity skyrockets and the film and TV agents start calling, the lure of her former fast-and-furious lifestyle begins to pull at her. Faced with the most exciting opportunity of her career, she must now decide to either save herself—or salvage her reputation as the ultimate party girl.

Acidly hilarious and achingly honest, Party Girl is a harrowing ride through the world of Hollywood excess with a heroine who's deliciously flawed. Whether snorting coke or crying in rehab, hooking up or breaking down, Amelia Stone makes her way across the treacherous grounds of addiction, self-destruction, and recovery without ever losing her sharp wit, unapologetic candor, or odds-defying optimism.

Anna David turns her reporter's eye for detail toward Tinseltown's seedy underbelly yet again and "eloquently and humorously unveil[s] what could be a new subgenre: Chick Lit with a Message" (New York Post).

Tired of gathering banal quotes from the B-list on the sidelines of the red carpet, Emma Swanson publicly yearns for a more substantial career but privately dreams of a hotshot boyfriend to transport her into the beating heart of the Hollywood scene. Instead, she meets Jessica—beautiful, cavalier, manipulative—who shamelessly trades sex for the gifts it can bring. Convinced that writing a story about Jessica and her ilk would seriously boost her journalistic cred, Emma soon finds herself sucked into a world where the luxuries of prettied-up prostitution may cost more than she ever expected.

Frances Mayes, whose enchanting #1 New York Times bestseller Under the Tuscan Sun made the world fall in love with Tuscany, invites us back for a delightful new season of friendship, festivity, and food, there and throughout Italy.

Marlene Dietrich’s life is one of the most fabulous in Hollywood history. She began her career in her native Berlin as a model, then a stage and screen actress during the silent era, becoming a star with the international success The Blue Angel. Then, under the watchful eye of the director of that film, her mentor Josef von Sternberg, she came to America and became one of the brightest stars in Hollywood. She made a series of acclaimed pictures—Morocco, Shanghai Express, Blonde Venus, Destry Rides Again, among many others—that propelled her to international stardom. With the outbreak of World War II, the fiercely anti-Nazi Dietrich became an American citizen and entertained Allied troops on the front lines. After the war she embarked on a new career as a stage performer, and with her young music director, the gifted Burt Bacharach—whom Chandler interviewed for the book—Dietrich had an outstanding second career.

Betty Halbreich, the director of Solutions at world-famous specialty store Bergdorf Goodman, brings her shopping and dressing expertise to readers in this bestselling classic.

Getting dressed every morning probably causes more trauma than anything else we do on a daily basis. No one understands this better than Betty Halbreich. She's seen firsthand that putting on clothes is as much—if not more—about the mind as it is about the body. Each day, her dressing room at Bergdorf Goodman is filled with women searching for something. They may think they're merely shopping for a new dress, but, as Betty knows, sometimes they're really shopping for a whole new life. Whatever these women are seeking, Betty is sure to help them find it.

With simple instructions and witty asides, Betty takes her experience out of the dressing room and puts it into readers' hands. Follow her through the years and through the stores as she sheds light on such fashion conundrums as how to break up with the color black, what to wear on "Casual Fridays," what "black-tie" really means, and how to wear just about any accessory.

Betty elevates shopping and dressing to an art form, yet she makes you realize how simple it really is to look fabulous. She is truly a fashion therapist, dispensing wisdom, wit, and advice on how to enhance your natural beauty, build a more confident self-image, and, most of all, have a little fun while doing it.

With more than 200 black-and-white illustrations

In the early 70s, an idealistic young man ? Brian Torff ? arrived in New York to pursue his passion for music. During an excursion to Long Island, Brian found his dream instrument: a 1775 re-built Nicola Galliano bass.

Such was the beginning of a career that led Torff from Café Carlyle to Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, the Kennedy Center, and the White House. He has toured worldwide with the greatest: from Frank Sinatra, Mel Torme, George Shearing, and Erroll Garner to Stephane Grappelli, Benny Goodman, Mary Lou Williams, and Marian McPartland.

As Brian notes, ?bass players do a lot of observing from the back of the bandstand.? It is this supportive role that qualifies Torff to share his insight into jazz music, and its many personalities. Torff takes us beyond the music by adding depth with his vision of American music, and paints vivid portraits of the musicians with whom he played.