Surfing Summers

Kelly Cutrone has long been mentoring women on how to make it in one of the most competitive industries in the world. She has kicked people out of fashion shows, forced some of reality television's shiny stars to fire their friends, and built her own company—one of the most powerful PR firms in the fashion business—from the ground up. Through it all, she has refused to be anything but herself.

Kelly writes in her trademark, no-bullshit style, combining personal and professional stories to share her secrets for success without selling out. Let's face it: this is a different world than the one in which our mothers grew up, and Kelly has created a real girl's guide to making it in today's world. Offering a wake-up call to women everywhere, she challenges us to stop the dogged pursuit of the “perfect life” and discover who we are and what we really want. Then she shows us how to go out there and get it. Much of our culture teaches us to muzzle our inner voice and follow the crowd; Kelly enables us to stop pretending and start truly living.

With chapters on how to find your tribe (those like-minded souls who make your heart sing), how sometimes a breakdown is really a breakthrough, and how there is no such thing as perfection, Kelly also shares practical advice, such as how to create a personal brand and how sometimes you have to fake it to make it.

Raw, hilarious, shocking, but always the honest truth, If You Have to Cry, Go Outside calls upon you to gather up your courage like an armful of clothes at a McQueen sample sale and follow your soul wherever it takes you. Whether you're just starting out in the world or looking to reinvent yourself, If You Have to Cry, Go Outside will be the spark you need to figure out what you have to say to the world—and how you're going to say it.

Written at the end of the 19th century, the book predates so many things: truly high rise New York or Chicago, and more importantly the American embracing of Freudian concepts of psychoanalysis and treatment of depression.

Carrie enters the book as a young naive girl who sees the big city - 500,000 people - in Chicago. Like other characters of this great time, the citys harsh backdrop can stifle youth and decay spirit. Unlike Upton Sinclairs Jurgis Rudkus of The Jungle, Carrie quickly escapes the demeaning and devouring sweat shops of the windy city. How? Basically by being the feminine sex. And, like no good girl from the midwest would do - she is from Wisconsin - she boards with dapper Charles Drouet. Her rooming relationship is not like the 21st or 22nd century girl who boards, but the cohabitation under the guise of false marriage would easily amount to great scandal within the community - hence Drouet and Carrie must keep their false marriage a secret unknown by anyone.

Drouet is then confronted by the married George Hurstwood, who basically gives up a very comfortable life, wife and family in Chicago for Carrie. A greater sacrifice than he can manage. He first runs away with Carrie to Montreal, marries her before his own divorce is complete, adopts a false surname for the marriage, and moves with Carrie to New York where he finds work easily, but at a job which provides much less income, reward or prestige. And, during these times, Carrie who never enjoyed fruits of comfort, has no complaints.

It is then that the lives of simple Carrie and sophisticated George furnicularly move - she ascends slowly while depression catches Hurstwood by surprise and slowly eats away at his esteem until she becomes the breadwinner and he the lost soul. Many aspects of this relationship remind me of F. Scott Fitzgeralds tragic tale about Dick and Nicole Diver in Tender is the Night. Very poignant difference between these great American novels is 34 years in time. Fitzgerald, who wrote when the concepts of Freud and psychoanalysis had well matured for a much clearer understanding, incorporates the same in great detail to treat a mental illness similar to that of Hurstwood.

Amateurs of psychology, after reading this book, can clearly assert that Hurstwoods demise is classically caused by severe depression - he hides in his apartment, agoraphobic to a certain extent, he has an appetite reduction and he has a clear loss of hygiene. He may not be Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov of Dostoevskys Crime and Punishment, but his disease is equally deadly.

Reading a book of this size often can be difficult. But, this is not a book often read. Dreiser is a great story teller. And, his loyal socialist emotions erupt from the pages as he, like Sinclair, boldly depicts the tremendously unequal worlds of large metropolitan areas of America at this time. And, as displayed in these pages, Dreiser artistically shows how the inequality can be within the same family, within the marriage, within the nucleus of the family fabric.

Tucker Max’s third and final book in his series of stories about his drunken debauchery and ridiculous antics. What began as a simple sentence on an obscure website, “My name is Tucker Max, and I am an asshole,” and developed into two infamously genre-defining books, I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell and Assholes Finish First, ends here.

But as you should expect from Tucker by now, he is going out with a bang—literally and figuratively. In this book, you’ll learn:

* How to live and work in Cancun, while still enrolled in Law School,

* Why Halloween is really awesome,

* How to subtly torture a highstrung roommate until he explodes with furious anger over a misplaced condiment,

* What really happened when a dirty pageant girl tried to sue Tucker because he told the truth,

* Why you should never accept a homemade treat from a hippie with a van, and

* What happens when Tucker turns sexting into a sport.

Stuffed full of ridiculous stories of bad decisions, debauchery, and sexual recklessness, Assholes Finish First starts where I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell left off, then proceeds to "some next-level shit."

You already know how women react to confidence, game, and vodka, but what happens when you add money and fame to the mix? You get answers to the hard questions you've never thought of asking:

• What's it like to have sex with a midget? What about two midgets?

• What does it do to a man to watch a 19-year-old do wind sprints to sober up, so that she can have sex with you before her twin sister does?

• At what number of virgins does deflowering them stop being fun and start feeling like a job?

• When a girl you met three hours ago decides to tattoo your name on her body, what is the appropriate reaction?

The answers are inside, they are absurd and hilarious, and they are the product of one man's experiences:

When Chelsea Handler needs to get a few things off her chest, she appeals to a higher power -- vodka. You would too if you found out that your boyfriend was having an affair with a Peekapoo or if you had to pretend to be honeymooning with your father in order to upgrade to first class. Welcome to Chelsea's world -- a place where absurdity reigns supreme and a quick wit is the best line of defense.

In this hilarious, deliciously skewed collection, Chelsea mines her past for stories about her family, relationships, and career that are at once singular and ridiculous. Whether she's convincing her third-grade class that she has been tapped to play Goldie Hawn's daughter in the sequel to Private Benjamin, deciding to be more egalitarian by dating a redhead, or looking out for a foulmouthed, rum-swilling little person who looks just like her...only smaller, Chelsea has a knack for getting herself into the most outrageous situations. Are You There, Vodka? It's Me, Chelsea showcases the candor and irresistible turns of phrase that have made her one of the freshest voices in comedy today.

Mindy Kaling has lived many lives: the obedient child of immigrant professionals, a timid chubster afraid of her own bike, a Ben Affleck–impersonating Off-Broadway performer and playwright, and, finally, a comedy writer and actress prone to starting fights with her friends and coworkers with the sentence “Can I just say one last thing about this, and then I swear I’ll shut up about it?”
 
Perhaps you want to know what Mindy thinks makes a great best friend (someone who will fill your prescription in the middle of the night), or what makes a great guy (one who is aware of all elderly people in any room at any time and acts accordingly), or what is the perfect amount of fame (so famous you can never get convicted of murder in a court of law), or how to maintain a trim figure (you will not find that information in these pages). If so, you’ve come to the right book, mostly!
 
In Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?, Mindy invites readers on a tour of her life and her unscientific observations on romance, friendship, and Hollywood, with several conveniently placed stopping points for you to run errands and make phone calls. Mindy Kaling really is just a Girl Next Door—not so much literally anywhere in the continental United States, but definitely if you live in India or Sri Lanka.