Showing results by narrator "Celeste Lawson" in All Categories

Actress Cornelia Otis Skinner and journalist Emily Kimbrough offer a lighthearted, hilarious memoir of their European tour in the 1920s, when they were fresh out of college from Bryn Mawr.

Gemma Jericho is an overworked New York doctor with a handful of a teenaged daughter and a mother who worries that Gemma has no life. So when her mother receives a mysterious letter telling her about an even more mysterious inheritance in Tuscany, Gemma sees her chance. The three of them throw caution and convention to the wind and leave for Italy.

In 1930, dancer and choreographer Martha Graham proclaimed the arrival of "dance as an art of and from America". Dancers such as Doris Humphrey, Ted Shawn, Katherine Dunham, and Helen Tamiris joined Graham in creating a new form of dance, and, like other modernists, they experimented with and argued over their aesthetic innovations, to which they assigned great meaning.Their innovations, however, went beyond aesthetics.

Mozart's wife aroused strong feelings among her contemporaries. Her in-laws loathed her. Mozart's friends, more than 40 after his death, remained eager to gossip about her "failures" as wife to the world's first superstar. Maturing from child to wife to hard-headed widow, Konstanze paid her husband's debts, provided for their children, and relentlessly marketed and mythologized her brilliant husband.

In the Shadow of Fame, by the daughter of world-renowned psychoanalyst and theorist Erik Erikson, is the intimate story of her struggle to come to terms with her father's fame and to develop a sense of self in a family, and world, in which being famous is the very definition of being a worthwhile human being. And, while her story is unique in its personal details, it is also a description of the struggle faced by all of us in a modern world.

Morgan Tyler is a beautiful, sassy young widow who lost the love of her life before she turned 30 and now puts all her romantic energies into her job as the head writer of the award-winning soap opera, Love of My Life.

These are confessions, and Ilona Paris - and her cougar pals - have plenty to confess. And they’re proud of it. A “cougar” is a woman in her forties (or so), who indulges in the pleasures of younger men in a quest for terrific sex without the hassles of a relationship. These women have been there, done that. In Hot Cougar Sex, their wild, sexy encounters are described with a brazen voice that seduces but never apologizes.

Artistic profile of one of the 20th century's great choreographers.The literature on Balanchine is vast, but it is primarily biographical. Balanchine Variations is the first book to concentrate on the ballets themselves, providing critical analysis and detailed descriptions of what the dancers actually do.

It was 1895 and time for a change, or so Rebecca thought. For 13 years Rebecca Rice had suffocated under the social restraints of widowhood, soaking up the leftovers of other people's lives like a sponge. She can't remember a time in her life when she didn't do exactly what was expected of her, until now. Armed with a knowledge of nursing and faith healing that she learned from a visiting missionary group, she heads for the hill country of southeastern Oklahoma, Indian Territory, to share her new vocation.

As head writer of the soap opera Love of My Life, Morgan specializes in imperiling her characters. As co-executive producer on the show, she must protect the actors playing them. But when leading man Link Ramsey finds himself stalked by a woman who can't separate fact from fiction, Morgan's job is about to get more complicated.

When Julia Scully was seven years old, her father committed suicide, and she and her sister were sent to an orphanage. Julia sought comfort in the rituals of the orphanage - learning to knit, roller-skating after dinner, listening to One Man's Family on the radio - and tried to adapt. But two years later, emotionally damaged by the isolation and brutality of the orphanage, the girls followed their mother to the near-wilderness of the gold-mining territory north of Nome, Alaska.

Catherine, wife of one-handed Edgar, daughter of a Jewish merchant, and mother of two small children, is a Christian convert. Agnes, her estranged sister, has returned to Paris with the news that she is to marry a German lord. She wants no part of her Jewish family, except the sizable dowry her father can provide.

If you're like most women, you have more worries, wishes, and chores than you can keep track of. You may crave a sense of order and control but have no idea how to attain it and thus find yourself coping with a thousand daily details.

Maggie Summer has three loves: her antique print business, Shadows; her career as a community college professor in Somerset County, New Jersey; and the new man in her life, Will Brewer. Her biological clock is pushing her to decide whether she's ready to add a fourth love: an adopted child.

Suddenly Dannie's fairy tale comes to an end. A rich newcomer to Truro builds a hideous "trophy house" down the beach from the Fabers', irritating the town's inhabitants before he's even moved in and setting off shock waves that erupt in a nasty racial incident. With an unfortunate turn of events, Dannie's life begins to unravel. Beth loses her boyfriend and quits her job, her best friend falls in love with the owner of the "trophy house", and Dannie's own marriage falls apart.

Soap writer and producer Morgan Tyler knows she's in trouble when her life threatens to become even more dramatic than her story lines. Morgan has hired a private investigator to help unravel the mystery of her childhood, which is rooted in a terrible secret she's kept for years. But a more immediate crisis arises when Morgan's best friend, Nancy, is arrested for the murder of her boyfriend's evil ex.

Following the success of Linda Palmer's first book in the series, Love Is Murder, listeners are treated to the return of Morgan Tyler, feisty head writer for the TV soap opera Love of My Life. Her imagination is always at work, churning out the scenes that fill many a fan's daytime with drama. But when fiction becomes stranger, and more deadly, than art, Morgan is forced to rely on her ingenuity to save herself from "early cancellation".

We share our lives, for better or worse, with a multitude of animals: white-tailed deer and white-tailed eagles, hens and wrens, frogs and guppies, and, last but hardly least, bugs and bacteria. For the most part, we drift along separately, with neither man nor animal affecting the other's way of life. Sometimes, however, we fall in love - as in the case of the cat in the title - or otherwise encounter our animal neighbors in ways that change both of us.

In this elegant and sensual novel, Frederic Tuten explores the ageless tension between a life of passion and a desire for ease. Set in Paris and New York, The Green Hour tells the story of Dominique, an art historian who cannot choose between two men who embody the critical schism in her life: unquenchable idealism and material happiness.

In December 1941, America is reeling from the brutal attack on Pearl Harbor. Both patriotism and paranoia grip New York as the city frantically mobilizes for war. Nurse Louise Hunter is outraged when the FBI, in a midnight sweep of prominent Japanese residents, storms in to arrest her patient’s wife. The desperately ill Professor Oakley is married to artist Masako Fumi. The nurse vows to help the professor free Masako. But when the murdered body of Masako’s art dealer is discovered in the gallery where he’d been closing down her controversial show, Masako’s troubles multiply.