Straight Lady

On October 20, 1882, future actress Margaret Dumont was born in Brooklyn, New York. A Broadway regular by the 1920s, Dumont found lasting fame once she started appearing with the Marx Brothers. Tall and regal in bearing, her character provided the perfect foil to the wisecracking Groucho Marx in a series of films including A Night at theOpera and Duck Soup. Her character’s seemingly obliviousness to insult led to the widespread belief, encouraged by Groucho himself, that Dumont was a humorless person who never got the joke. a belief she contradicted in a 1942 interview. “I’m not a stooge,” she said. “I’m a straight lady. There’s an art to playing straight. You must build up your man but never top him and never steal the laughs from him. Straight Lady: The Life and Times of Margaret Dumont, "The Fifth Marx Brother" d focuses on the Dumont and her role in the production of the comedy teams' most successful films. Several books have been written about the Marx Brothers as a comedy family and about their individual lives, but there haven’t been any books written about Margaret Dumont. This book will appeal to motion picture enthusiasts, Marx Brothers’ fans, and film historians.

Read the inspiring story of a mother of four who faced down her hard past, poverty, and self-doubt to create the life she dreamed of, including owning her own multi-million dollar business--in this book that's "filled with grit, humility, common-sense advice and entrepreneurial wisdom" (Lee Woodruff, #1 bestselling author). New Plymouth, Idaho. Population 1536. It doesn't look like much from Rural Route 30, but it was here, in this quiet town, that Jessi Roberts created something unexpected: the kind of life she always wanted and a multi-million dollar, for rural/by rural business empire. The business is Cheekys, which started with 6 purses and a tanning bed. Now in her book, Jessi shows how she grew one small store hurdle-by-hurdle into a national clothing and accessories brand with a 1.5 million strong community. Best of all, she did it by standing tall for her values: always be kind, lift up the next gal, and treat employees and customers like family. A personal story filled with life and business tips, BACKROADS BOSS LADY is about embracing your passion even when others don't see value in it--or you--and about putting food on the table and believing in yourself. Brimming with authenticity, it gives the warts-and-all, love-it-despite-it skinny on rural life, community, and contentment without compromise.

Drawing on personal experience and hundreds of interviews with straight chicks who've slept with lesbians, straight chicks who've slept with straight chicks, lesbians who have slept with straight chicks, and straight chicks who've done both or neither, Sincero covers A to Z of the experience.

Ella Kate Ewing was born in 1872. She started out small, but she just kept on growing. Soon she was too tall for her desk at school, too tall for her bed at home, too tall to fit anywhere. Ella Kate was a real-life giant, but she refused to hide herself away. Instead, she used her unusual height to achieve her equally large dreams. The masterful Klise sisters deliver a touching and inspiring true story about a strong-minded girl who finally embraced her differences. It's the perfect book for every child who has ever felt like an outsider.

One of NPR's Best Books of the Year “Straight’s memoir is a lyric social history of her multiracial clan in Riverside that explores the bonds of love and survival that bind them, with a particular emphasis on the women’s stories . . . The aftereffect of all these disparate stories juxtaposed in a single epic is remarkable. Its resonance lingers for days after reading.” —San Francisco Chronicle In the Country of Women is a valuable social history and a personal narrative that reads like a love song to America and indomitable women. In inland Southern California, near the desert and the Mexican border, Susan Straight, a self–proclaimed book nerd, and Dwayne Sims, an African American basketball player, started dating in high school. After college, they married and drove to Amherst, Massachusetts, where Straight met her teacher and mentor, James Baldwin, who encouraged her to write. Once back in Riverside, at driveway barbecues and fish fries with the large, close–knit Sims family, Straight—and eventually her three daughters—heard for decades the stories of Dwayne’s female ancestors. Some women escaped violence in post–slavery Tennessee, some escaped murder in Jim Crow Mississippi, and some fled abusive men. Straight’s mother–in–law, Alberta Sims, is the descendant at the heart of this memoir. Susan’s family, too, reflects the hardship and resilience of women pushing onward—from Switzerland, Canada, and the Colorado Rockies to California. A Pakistani word, biraderi, is one Straight uses to define a complex system of kinship and clan—those who become your family. An entire community helped raise her daughters. Of her three girls, now grown and working in museums and the entertainment industry, Straight writes, “The daughters of our ancestors carry in their blood at least three continents. We are not about borders. We are about love and survival.” “Certain books give off the sense that you won’t want them to end, so splendid the writing, so lyrical the stories. Such is the case with Southern California novelist Susan Straight’s new memoir, In the Country of Women . . . Her vibrant pages are filled with people of churned–together blood culled from scattered immigrants and native peoples, indomitable women and their babies. Yet they never succumb . . . Straight gives us permission to remember what went before with passion and attachment.” ––Los Angeles Times

“I used to be a lesbian.” In Gay Girl, Good God, author Jackie Hill Perry shares her own story, offering practical tools that helped her in the process of finding wholeness. Jackie grew up fatherless and experienced gender confusion. She embraced masculinity and homosexuality with every fiber of her being. She knew that Christians had a lot to say about all of the above. But was she supposed to change herself? How was she supposed to stop loving women, when homosexuality felt more natural to her than heterosexuality ever could? At age nineteen, Jackie came face-to-face with what it meant to be made new. And not in a church, or through contact with Christians. God broke in and turned her heart toward Him right in her own bedroom in light of His gospel. Read in order to understand. Read in order to hope. Or read in order, like Jackie, to be made new.

On October 20, 1882, future actress Margaret Dumont was born in Atlanta, Georgia. A Broadway regular by the 1920s, Dumont found lasting fame once she started appearing with the Marx Brothers. Tall and regal in bearing, her character provided the perfect foil to the wisecracking Groucho Marx in a series of films including A Night at the Opera and Duck Soup. Her character's seemingly obliviousness to insult led to the widespread belief, encouraged by Groucho himself, that Dumont was a humorless person who never got the joke. A belief she contradicted in a 1942 interview. "I'm not a stooge," she said. "I'm a straight lady. There's an art to playing straight. You must build up your man but never top him and never steal the laughs from him. Straight Lady: The Life and Times of Margaret Dumont and the Making of A Day at the Races would focus on the woman MGM called "The Fifth Marx Brother" and her role in the production of one of the comedy teams most successful films. Several books have been written about the Marx Brothers as a comedy family and about their individual lives, but there haven't been any books written about Margaret Dumont. This book would appeal to motion picture enthusiasts, Marx Brothers' fans, and film historians.

Women who stormed the gates of Hollywood's "boy's club" over the past three decades tell their stories in this inside look at the new feminine face of the movie industry.

GOLD MEDALIST OF FOREWORD REVIEWS' 2015 INDIEFAB AWARDS IN WOMEN'S STUDIES What's wrong with black women? Not a damned thing! The Sisters Are Alright exposes anti–black-woman propaganda and shows how real black women are pushing back against distorted cartoon versions of themselves. When African women arrived on American shores, the three-headed hydra—servile Mammy, angry Sapphire, and lascivious Jezebel—followed close behind. In the '60s, the Matriarch, the willfully unmarried baby machine leeching off the state, joined them. These stereotypes persist to this day through newspaper headlines, Sunday sermons, social media memes, cable punditry, government policies, and hit song lyrics. Emancipation may have happened more than 150 years ago, but America still won't let a sister be free from this coven of caricatures. Tamara Winfrey Harris delves into marriage, motherhood, health, sexuality, beauty, and more, taking sharp aim at pervasive stereotypes about black women. She counters warped prejudices with the straight-up truth about being a black woman in America. “We have facets like diamonds,” she writes. “The trouble is the people who refuse to see us sparkling.”

First time in paperback: “One of the most ambitious literary projects of this or any age.”—Adam Kirsch, New Republic Here in Robert Alter's bold new translation are some of the most magnificent works in world literature. The astounding poetry in the Book of Job is restored to its powerful ancient meanings and rhythms. The creation account in its Voice from the Whirlwind is beautiful and incendiary. By contrast, a serene fatalism suffuses Ecclesiastes with a quiet beauty, and the pithy maxims of Proverbs impart a worldly wisdom that is satirically shrewd. Each of these books addresses the universal wisdom that the righteous thrive and the wicked suffer in a rational moral order; together they are essential to the ancient canon that is the Hebrew Bible.