EBookClubs

Read Books & Download eBooks Full Online

EBookClubs

Read Books & Download eBooks Full Online

Book The Dollhouse

    Book Details:
  • Author : Fiona Davis
  • Publisher : Penguin
  • Release : 2016-08-23
  • ISBN : 1101985003
  • Pages : 370 pages

Download or read book The Dollhouse written by Fiona Davis and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2016-08-23 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Enter the lush world of 1950s New York City, where a generation of aspiring models, secretaries, and editors live side by side in the glamorous Barbizon Hotel for Women while attempting to claw their way to fairy-tale success in this debut novel from the New York Times bestselling author of The Lions of Fifth Avenue. “Rich both in twists and period detail, this tale of big-city ambition is impossible to put down.”—People When she arrives at the famed Barbizon Hotel in 1952, secretarial school enrollment in hand, Darby McLaughlin is everything her modeling agency hall mates aren't: plain, self-conscious, homesick, and utterly convinced she doesn't belong—a notion the models do nothing to disabuse. Yet when Darby befriends Esme, a Barbizon maid, she's introduced to an entirely new side of New York City: seedy downtown jazz clubs where the music is as addictive as the heroin that's used there, the startling sounds of bebop, and even the possibility of romance. Over half a century later, the Barbizon's gone condo and most of its long-ago guests are forgotten. But rumors of Darby's involvement in a deadly skirmish with a hotel maid back in 1952 haunt the halls of the building as surely as the melancholy music that floats from the elderly woman's rent-controlled apartment. It's a combination too intoxicating for journalist Rose Lewin, Darby's upstairs neighbor, to resist—not to mention the perfect distraction from her own imploding personal life. Yet as Rose's obsession deepens, the ethics of her investigation become increasingly murky, and neither woman will remain unchanged when the shocking truth is finally revealed.

Book The Barbizon

Download or read book The Barbizon written by Paulina Bren and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2022-03-15 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From award-winning author Paulina Bren comes the "captivating portrait" (The Wall Street Journal) of New York's most famous residential hotel--The Barbizon--and the remarkable women who lived there. Welcome to New York's legendary hotel for women. Liberated from home and hearth by World War I, politically enfranchised and ready to work, women arrived to take their place in the dazzling new skyscrapers of Manhattan. But they did not want to stay in uncomfortable boarding houses. They wanted what men already had--exclusive residential hotels with maid service, workout rooms, and private dining. Built in 1927, at the height of the Roaring Twenties, the Barbizon Hotel was designed as a luxurious safe haven for the "Modern Woman" hoping for a career in the arts. Over time, it became the place to stay for any ambitious young woman hoping for fame and fortune. Sylvia Plath fictionalized her time there in The Bell Jar, and, over the years, it's almost 700 tiny rooms with matching floral curtains and bedspreads housed, among many others, Titanic survivor Molly Brown; actresses Grace Kelly, Liza Minnelli, Ali MacGraw, Jaclyn Smith; and writers Joan Didion, Gael Greene, Diane Johnson, Meg Wolitzer. Mademoiselle magazine boarded its summer interns there, as did Katharine Gibbs Secretarial School its students and the Ford Modeling Agency its young models. Before the hotel's residents were household names, they were young women arriving at the Barbizon with a suitcase and a dream. Not everyone who passed through the Barbizon's doors was destined for success--for some, it was a story of dashed hopes--but until 1981, when men were finally let in, the Barbizon offered its residents a room of their own and a life without family obligations. It gave women a chance to remake themselves however they pleased; it was the hotel that set them free. No place had existed like it before or has since. "Poignant and intriguing" (The New Republic), The Barbizon weaves together a tale that has, until now, never been told. It is both a vivid portrait of the lives of these young women looking for something more and a "brilliant many-layered social history of women's ambition and a rapidly changing New York through the 20th century" (The Guardian).

Book American Art in the Barbizon Mood

Download or read book American Art in the Barbizon Mood written by Peter Bermingham and published by . This book was released on 1975 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Book The Barbizon School of Painters

Download or read book The Barbizon School of Painters written by David Croal Thomson and published by . This book was released on 1902 with total page 438 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Book The Barbizon School and 19th Century French Landscape Painting

Download or read book The Barbizon School and 19th Century French Landscape Painting written by Jean Bouret and published by . This book was released on 1973 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Book Come Fly the World

    Book Details:
  • Author : Julia Cooke
  • Publisher : Houghton Mifflin
  • Release : 2021
  • ISBN : 0358251400
  • Pages : 293 pages

Download or read book Come Fly the World written by Julia Cooke and published by Houghton Mifflin. This book was released on 2021 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A lively, unexpected portrait of the jet-age stewardesses serving on iconic Pan Am airways between 1966 and 1975"--

Book The Greengrocer and His TV

    Book Details:
  • Author : Paulina Bren
  • Publisher : Cornell University Press
  • Release : 2011-08-15
  • ISBN : 0801462142
  • Pages : 265 pages

Download or read book The Greengrocer and His TV written by Paulina Bren and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2011-08-15 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia brought an end to the Prague Spring and its promise of "socialism with a human face." Before the invasion, Czech reformers had made unexpected use of television to advance political and social change. In its aftermath, Communist Party leaders employed the medium to achieve "normalization," pitching television stars against political dissidents in a televised spectacle that defined the times. The Greengrocer and His TV offers a new cultural history of communism from the Prague Spring to the Velvet Revolution that reveals how state-endorsed ideologies were played out on television, particularly through soap opera-like serials. In focusing on the small screen, Paulina Bren looks to the "normal" of normalization, to the everyday experience of late communism. The figure central to this book is the greengrocer who, in a seminal essay by Václav Havel, symbolized the ordinary citizen who acquiesced to the communist regime out of fear. Bren challenges simplistic dichotomies of fearful acquiescence and courageous dissent to dramatically reconfigure what we know, or think we know, about everyday life under communism in the 1970s and 1980s. Deftly moving between the small screen, the street, and the Central Committee (and imaginatively drawing on a wide range of sources that include television shows, TV viewers' letters, newspapers, radio programs, the underground press, and the Communist Party archives), Bren shows how Havel's greengrocer actually experienced "normalization" and the ways in which popular television serials framed this experience. Now back by popular demand, socialist-era serials, such as The Woman Behind the Counter and The Thirty Adventures of Major Zeman, provide, Bren contends, a way of seeing—literally and figuratively—Czechoslovakia's normalization and Eastern Europe's real socialism.

Book The Masterpiece

    Book Details:
  • Author : Fiona Davis
  • Publisher : Penguin
  • Release : 2019-07-09
  • ISBN : 152474297X
  • Pages : 385 pages

Download or read book The Masterpiece written by Fiona Davis and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2019-07-09 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this captivating novel, New York Times bestselling author Fiona Davis takes readers into the glamorous lost art school within Grand Central Terminal, where two very different women, fifty years apart, strive to make their mark on a world set against them. For most New Yorkers, Grand Central Terminal is a crown jewel, a masterpiece of design. But for Clara Darden and Virginia Clay, it represents something quite different. For Clara, the terminal is the stepping stone to her future. It is 1928, and Clara is teaching at the lauded Grand Central School of Art. Though not even the prestige of the school can override the public's disdain for a "woman artist," fiery Clara is single-minded in her quest to achieve every creative success—even while juggling the affections of two very different men. But she and her bohemian friends have no idea that they'll soon be blindsided by the looming Great Depression...and that even poverty and hunger will do little to prepare Clara for the greater tragedy yet to come. By 1974, the terminal has declined almost as sharply as Virginia Clay's life. Dilapidated and dangerous, Grand Central is at the center of a fierce lawsuit: Is the once-grand building a landmark to be preserved, or a cancer to be demolished? For Virginia, it is simply her last resort. Recently divorced, she has just accepted a job in the information booth in order to support herself and her college-age daughter, Ruby. But when Virginia stumbles upon an abandoned art school within the terminal and discovers a striking watercolor, her eyes are opened to the elegance beneath the decay. She embarks on a quest to find the artist of the unsigned masterpiece—an impassioned chase that draws Virginia not only into the battle to save Grand Central but deep into the mystery of Clara Darden, the famed 1920s illustrator who disappeared from history in 1931.

Book Searching for Grace Kelly

    Book Details:
  • Author : Michael Callahan
  • Publisher : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
  • Release : 2015
  • ISBN : 0544313542
  • Pages : 289 pages

Download or read book Searching for Grace Kelly written by Michael Callahan and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2015 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1955 New York three spirited young women living at the famed Barbizon Hotel form an unlikely friendship and come of age in the glamorous post-war city that could make--or break--them.

Book Great French Paintings from the Clark

Download or read book Great French Paintings from the Clark written by James A. Ganz and published by Skira. This book was released on 2011 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Published on the occasion of a series of exhibitions that will travel throughout North America, Europe, and Asia from Feb. 2011 to Feb. 2014.

Book Nineteenth Century European Painting

Download or read book Nineteenth Century European Painting written by William Rau and published by Acc Art Books. This book was released on 2013-01-28 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents the historical context behind the 19th-century's artistic movements, including Romantic Painting, The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Realist Painting , Academic Painting, and Impressionist Painting.

Book The Civil War in 50 Objects

Download or read book The Civil War in 50 Objects written by Harold Holzer and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2013-05-02 with total page 519 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The American companion to A History of the World in 100 Objects, a fresh, visual perspective on the Civil War From a soldier’s diary with the pencil still attached to John Brown’s pike, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the leaves from Abraham Lincoln’s bier, here is a unique and surprisingly intimate look at the Civil War. Lincoln scholar Harold Holzer sheds new light on the war by examining fifty objects from the New-York Historical Society’s acclaimed collection. A daguerreotype of an elderly, dignified ex-slave; a soldier’s footlocker still packed with its contents; Grant’s handwritten terms of surrender at Appomattox—the stories these objects tell are rich, poignant, sometimes painful, and always fascinating. They illuminate the conflict from all perspectives—Union and Confederate, military and civilian, black and white, male and female—and give readers a deeply human sense of the war.

Book Ground of Your Own Choosing

Download or read book Ground of Your Own Choosing written by Beverly Ryle and published by . This book was released on 2008-11-01 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finding work in a today's changing times is like fighting a war. The "winning side" in this "war" is the one that knows how to positions itself where it has the advantage, the "ground of its own choosing."

Book Pain  Parties  Work

Download or read book Pain Parties Work written by Elizabeth Winder and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2013-04-16 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "I dreamed of New York, I am going there." On May 31, 1953, twenty-year-old Sylvia Plath arrived in New York City for a one-month stint at "the intellectual fashion magazine" Mademoiselle to be a guest editor for its prestigious annual college issue. Over the next twenty-six days, the bright, blond New England collegian lived at the Barbizon Hotel, attended Balanchine ballets, watched a game at Yankee Stadium, and danced at the West Side Tennis Club. She typed rejection letters to writers from The New Yorker and ate an entire bowl of caviar at an advertising luncheon. She stalked Dylan Thomas and fought off an aggressive diamond-wielding delegate from the United Nations. She took hot baths, had her hair done, and discovered her signature drink (vodka, no ice). Young, beautiful, and on the cusp of an advantageous career, she was supposed to be having the time of her life. Drawing on in-depth interviews with fellow guest editors whose memories infuse these pages, Elizabeth Winder reveals how these twenty-six days indelibly altered how Plath saw herself, her mother, her friendships, and her romantic relationships, and how this period shaped her emerging identity as a woman and as a writer. Pain, Parties, Work—the three words Plath used to describe that time—shows how Manhattan's alien atmosphere unleashed an anxiety that would stay with her for the rest of her all-too-short life. Thoughtful and illuminating, this captivating portrait invites us to see Sylvia Plath before The Bell Jar, before she became an icon—a young woman with everything to live for.

Book French San Francisco

    Book Details:
  • Author : Claudine Chalmers
  • Publisher : Arcadia Publishing
  • Release : 2007
  • ISBN : 9780738555843
  • Pages : 132 pages

Download or read book French San Francisco written by Claudine Chalmers and published by Arcadia Publishing. This book was released on 2007 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nineteenth-century California was not a destination for the faint of heart, and Frenchmen are usually said to prefer their slippers to their traveling boots. Yet many visitors from France--starting in 1786 with legendary explorer Count de LapAA(c)rouse--made their way to the remote and beautiful territory, leaving enduring accounts and images of their experience. As France's troubled revolutionary era began in the 1840s, tens of thousands of Frenchmen journeyed to California's goldfields. Some found wealth, others freedom, and some death. Many remained in San Francisco, helping shape the city and make it French from the inside.

Book The Barbizon School   the Origins of Impressionism

Download or read book The Barbizon School the Origins of Impressionism written by Steven Adams and published by . This book was released on 1994-07-21 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The key painters associated with the Barbizon School - Corot, Millet, Rousseau and Courbet - are among the finest landscape artists of the nineteenth century. From their base at the village of Barbizon in the Forest of Fontainebleau, just outside Paris, they painted nature as they saw it, anticipating many of the techniques and effects of Impressionism. In this survey Steven Adams re-evaluates French landscape painting in the half-century before Impressionism, placing this 'return to nature' against the background of the rapid industrialization and political crises of the period.

Book The Chelsea Girls

    Book Details:
  • Author : Fiona Davis
  • Publisher : Penguin
  • Release : 2020-12-08
  • ISBN : 1524744603
  • Pages : 401 pages

Download or read book The Chelsea Girls written by Fiona Davis and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2020-12-08 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The bright lights of the theater district, the glamour and danger of 1950s New York, and the wild scene at the iconic Chelsea Hotel come together in a dazzling new novel about a twenty-year friendship that will irrevocably change two women's lives—from the New York Times bestselling author of The Lions of Fifth Avenue. From the dramatic redbrick facade to the sweeping staircase dripping with art, the Chelsea Hotel has long been New York City's creative oasis for the many artists, writers, musicians, actors, filmmakers, and poets who have called it home—a scene playwright Hazel Riley and actress Maxine Mead are determined to use to their advantage. Yet they soon discover that the greatest obstacle to putting up a show on Broadway has nothing to do with their art, and everything to do with politics. A Red Scare is sweeping across America, and Senator Joseph McCarthy has started a witch hunt for communists, with those in the entertainment industry in the crosshairs. As the pressure builds to name names, it is more than Hazel and Maxine's Broadway dreams that may suffer as they grapple with the terrible consequences, but also their livelihood, their friendship, and even their freedom. Spanning from the 1940s to the 1960s, The Chelsea Girls deftly pulls back the curtain on the desperate political pressures of McCarthyism, the complicated bonds of female friendship, and the siren call of the uninhibited Chelsea Hotel.