2020 Participating Authors
(list in formation)
A

Julie Andrews & Emma Walton Hamilton
Home Work: A Memoir of My Hollywood Years
In this follow-up to her critically acclaimed memoir Home, Andrews shares reflections on her astonishing career. In Home, she recounted her difficult childhood and her emergence as an acclaimed singer and performer on the stage. With Home Work, Andrews picks up the story with her arrival in Hollywood and her rise to fame in her earliest films—Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music. Co-written with her daughter Emma Walton Hamilton and told with Andrews’s trademark charm and candor, Home Work takes us on a rare and intimate journey into an extraordinary life that is funny, heartrending, and inspiring.
B

Mike Birbiglia
The New One: Painfully True Stories from a Reluctant Dad
With laugh-out-loud funny parenting observations, the New York Times bestselling author and award-winning comedian delivers a book that is perfect for anyone who has ever raised a child, been a child, or refuses to stop acting like one.
In 2016 comedian Mike Birbiglia and poet Jennifer Hope Stein took their fourteen-month-old daughter Oona to the Nantucket Film Festival. When the festival director picked them up at the airport she asked Mike if he would perform at the storytelling night. She said, “The theme of the stories is jealousy.”
Jen quipped, “You’re jealous of Oona. You should talk about that.”
And so Mike began sharing some of his darkest and funniest thoughts about the decision to have a child. Jen and Mike revealed to each other their sides of what had gone down during Jen’s pregnancy and that first year with their child. Over the next couple years, these stories evolved into a Broadway show, and the more Mike performed it the more he heard how it resonated — not just with parents but also people who resist all kinds of change.
So he pored over his journals, dug deeper, and created this book: The New One: Painfully True Stories From a Reluctant Dad. Along with hilarious and poignant stories he has never shared before, these pages are sprinkled with poetry Jen wrote as she navigated the same rocky shores of new parenthood.
So here it is. This book is an experiment — sort of like a family.

Douglas Brinkley
American Moonshot: John F. Kennedy and the Great Space Race
Instant New York Times Bestseller
As the fiftieth anniversary of the first lunar landing approaches, the award winning historian and perennial New York Times bestselling author takes a fresh look at the space program, President John F. Kennedy’s inspiring challenge, and America’s race to the moon.
“We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win.”—President John F. Kennedy
On May 25, 1961, JFK made an astonishing announcement: his goal of putting a man on the moon by the end of the decade. In this engrossing, fast-paced epic, Douglas Brinkley returns to the 1960s to recreate one of the most exciting and ambitious achievements in the history of humankind. American Moonshot brings together the extraordinary political, cultural, and scientific factors that fueled the birth and development of NASA and the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo projects, which shot the United States to victory in the space race against the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War.
Drawing on new primary source material and major interviews with many of the surviving figures who were key to America’s success, Brinkley brings this fascinating history to life as never before. American Moonshot is a portrait of the brilliant men and women who made this giant leap possible, the technology that enabled us to propel men beyond earth’s orbit to the moon and return them safely, and the geopolitical tensions that spurred Kennedy to commit himself fully to this audacious dream. Brinkley’s ensemble cast of New Frontier characters include rocketeer Wernher von Braun, astronaut John Glenn and space booster Lyndon Johnson.
A vivid and enthralling chronicle of one of the most thrilling, hopeful, and turbulent eras in the nation’s history, American Moonshot is an homage to scientific ingenuity, human curiosity, and the boundless American spirit.
C

Robert A. Caro
Working
From the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Power Broker and The Years of Lyndon Johnson: an unprecedented gathering of vivid, candid, deeply revealing recollections about his experiences researching and writing his acclaimed books
For the first time in book form, Robert Caro gives us a glimpse into his own life and work in these evocatively written, personal pieces. He describes what it was like to interview the mighty Robert Moses; what it felt like to begin discovering the extent of the political power Moses wielded; the combination of discouragement and exhilaration he felt confronting the vast holdings of the Lyndon B. Johnson Library in Austin, Texas; his encounters with witnesses, including longtime residents wrenchingly displaced by the construction of Moses’ Cross-Bronx Expressway and Lady Bird Johnson acknowledging the beauty and influence of one of LBJ’s mistresses. He gratefully remembers how, after years of working in solitude, he found a writers’ community at the New York Public Library, and details the ways he goes about planning and composing his books.
Caro recalls the moments at which he came to understand that he wanted to write not just about the men who wielded power but about the people and the politics that were shaped by that power. And he talks about the importance to him of the writing itself, of how he tries to infuse it with a sense of place and mood to bring characters and situations to life on the page. Taken together, these reminiscences–some previously published, some written expressly for this book–bring into focus the passion, the wry self-deprecation, and the integrity with which this brilliant historian has always approached his work.

Harlan Coben
The Boy from the Woods
The #1 New York Times bestselling author of numerous suspense novels, including Run Away, Don’t Let Go, Home, and Fool Me Once, as well as the multi-award-winning Myron Bolitar series, Harlan Coben’s books are published in forty-three languages around the globe and have been number one bestsellers in more than a dozen countries. In the shocking thriller The Boy from the Woods, a man with a mysterious past must find a missing teenage girl. “Intense from the first page, with dramatic plot twists . . . Fans of complex heroes caught up in world-changing events will relish this latest from a master storyteller.”―Library Journal, Starred Review.
G

Neal Gabler
Catching the Wind: Edward Kennedy and the Liberal Hour, 1932-1975
In this first volume of Gabler’s two-volume sweeping biography of Edward Kennedy, he tells a story that is Shakespearean in its dimensions: the story of a star-crossed figure who rises above his seeming limitations and the tragedy that envelopes him to change the face of America. A noted journalist, historian and film critic, Gabler is the author of five books, including: An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Winchell, which was named Time magazine’s nonfiction book of the year and was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and Walt Disney, which won him his second Los Angeles Times Book Prize and was named biography of the year by USA Today.
M

Steve Madden
The Cobbler: How I Disrupted an Industry, Fell From Grace, and Came Back Stronger Than Ever
Everyone knows Steve Madden’s name and his shoes, but few are familiar with his story. Over the past thirty years, Steve Madden has taken his eponymous shoe company from the fledgling start-up he founded with a mere $1,100 to a global, multi-billion-dollar brand. But Madden’s mistakes—from his battle with addiction to the financial shortcuts that landed him in prison—are as important to his story as his iconic shoes. In this raw, intimate, and ultimately inspiring book, Madden holds nothing back as he shares what it took to get here and the lessons he’s learned along the way. From his unconventional hiring strategies to his slavish devotion to product, Madden offers a business perspective that is as unique as his styles.
P

Allison Pataki
The Queen's Fortune: A Novel of Desiree, Napoleon, and the Dynasty That Outlasted the Empire
The Queen’s Fortune: A Novel of Desiree, Napoleon, and the Dynasty That Outlasted the Empire
A sweeping novel about the extraordinary woman who captured Napoleon’s heart, created a dynasty, and changed the course of history—from the New York Times bestselling author of The Traitor’s Wife, The Accidental Empress, and Sisi. Brilliantly imagined, The Queen’s Fortune sweeps readers into the unbelievable life of a woman almost lost to history. “This impeccably researched, expertly rendered historical from Pataki gloriously re-creates the personal dramas surrounding Napoleon Bonaparte…” —Publishers Weekly. A former news writer and producer, Pataki spent several years in journalism before switching to fiction writing. Her novels have been translated into more than a dozen languages.

George Pataki
Beyond the Great Divide: How A Nation Became A Neighborhood
From the three-term Governor of New York comes an unprecedented, insider view into 9/11 and the inner workings of the political climate that emerged after the attacks, which continues to shape our future—politically and culturally— and how we as a country can bridge the “Great Divide.” It’s a divide not just between left and right or Republicans and Democrats, but between the American people and their government. Drawing on his memories, notes, crises, and critical events, Pataki gives an unprecedented, heart-pounding inside view into what happened before, during, and after 9/11—reflecting on where our country is today and how we can rebuild a common future and perhaps return to a time when a nation became a neighborhood.

Darryl Pinckney
Busted in New York and Other Essays
In these twenty-five essays, the celebrated literary critic and novelist Darryl Pinckney gives us a view of our recent racial history that blends the social and the personal and wonders how we arrived at our current moment. This impulse to see historically is at the core of Busted in New York and Other Essays, which traces the lineage of black intellectual history from Booker T. Washington through the Harlem Renaissance, to the Black Panther Party and the turbulent sixties, to today’s Afro-pessimists, and celebrated and neglected thinkers in between. Pinckney is a long time contributor to The New York Review of Books, the author of two novels, High Cotton and Black Deutschland and two works of nonfiction, Out There: Mavericks of Black Literature and Blackballed: The Black Vote and US Democracy.
R

Philip Rucker
A Very Stable Genius: Donald J. Trump's Testing of America
In this bestselling book, Washington Post White House bureau chief Philip Rucker and Post national investigative reporter Carol Leonnig provide the definitive insider narrative of Donald Trump’s presidency with shocking new reporting and insight into its implications. Both Pulitzer Prize winners with deep and unmatched sources throughout Washington, D.C., the authors tell of rages and frenzies but also moments of courage and perseverance. This peerless and gripping narrative reveals President Trump at his most unvarnished; telling the story of how an unparalleled president has scrambled to survive and tested the strength of America’s democracy and its common heart as a nation.
S

J. Courtney Sullivan
Friends and Strangers: A Novel
J. Courtney Sullivan is the New York Times bestselling author of the novels Commencement, Maine, The Engagements, and Saints For All Occasions. Friends and Strangers is an insightful, hilarious, and compulsively readable novel about a complicated friendship between two women who are at two very different stages in life. This well-drawn domestic drama explores with verve and an almost scientific rigor how friendships form, especially across generational and socio-economic lines. A masterful exploration of motherhood, power dynamics, and privilege in its many forms, Friends and Strangers reveals how a single year can shape the course of a life.
W

Eric K. Washington
Boss of the Grips: The Life of James H. Williams and the Red Caps of Grand Central Terminal
Washington uncovers the nearly forgotten life of James H. Williams (1878–1948), the chief porter of Grand Central Terminal’s Red Caps—a multitude of Harlem-based black men whom he organized into the essential labor force of America’s most august railroad station. Washington chronicles Williams’s life, showing how the enterprising son of freed slaves successfully navigated the segregated world of the northern metropolis, and in so doing ultimately achieved financial and social influence. Washington is an independent historian who has held fellowships at Columbia University and the CUNY Leon Levy Center for Biography. Interviewer A’Lelia Bundles is the author of On Her Own Ground: The Life and Times of Madam C.J. Walker, about her entrepreneurial great-great-grandmother and the inspiration for Self Made, the 2020 Netflix series starring Octavia Spencer. She is at work on her fifth book, The Joy Goddess of Harlem: A’Lelia Walker and the Harlem Renaissance.

Dr. Ruth K. Westheimer
Sex For Dummies
Everything you need to know about sex in the 21st century
S-e-x isn’t a bad three-letter word—but many of us are afraid to talk about it. In this new edition of the fun and comprehensive guide to sex, you’ll find out how to approach intimacy in a new way to get the most pleasure from a physical relationship. Written by the world’s favorite expert on the topic, Dr. Ruth helps you explore the ins and outs of dating and commitment, talk about sex with partners, and consider any health and social issues you may encounter along the way.
As well as giving you all you need to know about how to make your sex life happy, safe, and rewarding, this edition of Sex for Dummies has been updated to include discussions of recent changes and issues surrounding sexual topics — such as transgender rights and the #metoo movement — to provide a modern, 360-degree view of how our diverse sexualities impact and enrich the world around us.
Whether experienced or not, get the low down on how sex works
Find out how to spice up yoursex life
Take precautions to stay healthy
Discover 10 common sexual myths — and why they’re wrong
Thanks to the timeless wisdom and unabashed honesty that only Dr. Ruth can offer, sex doesn’t have to be taboo — and this book makes it easier than ever to let your hair down in the bedroom while still keeping your head on straight!