Biography Girls

In elegant prose, Hilary A. Hallett traces Elinor Glyn’s meteoric rise from a depressed society darling to a world-renowned celebrity author who consorted with world leaders from St. Petersburg to Cairo to New York. After reporting from the trenches during World War I, the author was lured by American movie producers from Paris to Los Angeles for her remarkable third act. Weaving together years of deep archival research, Hallett movingly conveys how Glyn, more than any other individual during the Roaring Twenties, crafted early Hollywood’s glamorous romantic aesthetic.

When Frank Thompson sees a poster requesting recruits for the new Union army, he is ready and willing to enlist. Except Frank isn’t his real name. In fact, Frank isn’t a man—he is really Sarah Emma Edmonds. At only nineteen years old, Sarah had already been dressing as a man for three years and living on the run in order to escape an arranged marriage. She had tasted freedom, and there was no going back.

Blurring the boundaries of righteous and irreverent, Red Lip Theology invites us to discover freedom in a progressive Christian faith that incorporates activism, feminism, and radical authenticity. Essayist and theologian Candice Marie Benbow’s essays explore universal themes like heartache, loss, forgiveness, and sexuality, and she unflinchingly empowers women who struggle with feeling loved and nurtured by church culture.

There's a seismic shift happening worldwide, as individuals from every social class question their relationship with alcohol and drugs. While marijuana gains mainstream acceptance, a profound inquiry persists: Is this okay? Am I drinking too much? Is this normal? These questions resonate deeply, particularly among professional women who are drinking at higher rates than anyone else, and White women are drinking themselves to death.

Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, T. S. Eliot was considered the greatest English-language poet of his generation. But there was another side to Eliot, as acclaimed biographer Lyndall Gordon reveals in her new biography, The Hyacinth Girl. While married twice, Eliot had an almost lifelong love for Emily Hale, an American drama teacher to whom he wrote extensive, illuminating, deeply personal letters.

Part memoir, part comedy routine, part advice manual, Challenge Accepted! is Celeste at her best, revealing her secrets to love, friendship, family, and marriage (oh hai, #hothusband), and how to deal with life’s many challenges - why she checks the bath for sharks, how Nutella quite literally shaped who she is as a woman, and why being famous on Instagram is like being rich in Monopoly. It’s real, like totally, really real.

Born in the picturesque town of Taxco, Mexico, Julissa Arce was left behind for months at a time with her two sisters, a nanny, and her grandma while her parents worked tirelessly in America in hopes of building a home and providing a better life for their children. That is, until her parents brought Julissa to Texas to live with them. From then on, Julissa secretly lived as an undocumented immigrant, went on to become a scholarship winner and an honors college graduate, and climbed the ladder to become a vice president at Goldman Sachs.

When Charlie McDowell began sharing his open letters to his noisy upstairs neighbors - two impossibly ditzy female roommates in their mid-twenties - on Twitter, his feed quickly went viral. His followers multiplied and he got the attention of everyone from celebrities to production studios to major media outlets such as Time and Glamour.

Now Dear Girls breaks out of the 140-character limit as Charlie imagines what would happen if he put the wisdom of the girls to the test.

A meningitis outbreak in their underprivileged neighborhood left Sylvia Acevedo's family forever altered. As she struggled in the aftermath of loss, young Sylvia's life transformed when she joined the Brownies. The Girl Scouts taught her how to take control of her world and nourished her love of numbers and science.

Before Bonnie and Clyde there were Tiger Girl and the Candy Kid. In the wake of world war, a pandemic, and an economic depression, Margaret and Richard Whittemore, two love-struck working-class kids from Baltimore, reached for the dream of a better life. The couple headed up a gang that in less than a year stole over one million dollars’ worth of diamonds and precious gems—over 10 million dollars today.

Bryony Gordon has OCD. It's the snake in her brain that has told her ever since she was a teenager that her world is about to come crashing down: that her family might die if she doesn't repeat a phrase five times, or that she might have murdered someone and forgotten about it. It's caused alopecia, bulimia, and drug dependency. And Bryony is sick of it. Keeping silent about her illness has given it a cachet it simply does not deserve, so here she shares her story with trademark wit and dazzling honesty.

“I am fat,” begins Judith Moore’s unflinching account of her life. As she describes her obsessions with food, struggles with self image and troubled relationships, she refuses to become an object of pity. Moore is the recipient of two NEA grants and a Guggenheim fellowship. Her previous book, also a memoir, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year.

Sarah Morgan Dawson used her diary to record her thoughts and experiences from 1862 to 1865, during the height of the American Civil War. A Confederate Girl’s Diary provides a thorough account of civilian life in Louisiana during and after the war.

“Tell me a little girl story,” was a bedtime request from Patsy Redden’s 6-year-old daughter, Elina. She became fascinated by the “old-time” stories her mom told about being a girl growing up on a farm in north-central Kansas during the 1950s. What did little girls do to have fun before the time of television and other electronic entertainment? What was it like to go to a country school with one teacher for eight grades?

A girl uses her wits to survive a maniacal killer who wipes out her family. A woman is condemned for the "final betrayal of motherhood" for killing her children. A grieving mother becomes convinced that the man convicted of murdering her beautiful teenage daughter is innocent.

Are you looking for the courage to finally start living your truth? Are you ready to find happiness in yourself, stop struggling with self-worth, and finally kick anxiety to the curb? Now’s the time! Too Happy to Be Sad Girl is an inspiring guide that will make you laugh, cry, think, and finally stand up for yourself! This heart-to-heart autobiography reveals how Angel learned to use her anxiety and change her life.

'Addie Slaughter' Lassoes Young Readers With True-Life Wild West Adventure Indian attacks, outlaws, rattlesnakes, smallpox and blizzards are a few of the true-to-life dangers experienced by Addie Slaughter, daughter of the famous John Horton Slaughter, a Texas Ranger, famed Cochise County Sheriff and an early settler of the San Bernardino Valley in the late 1800s. In first-person narrative, author Susan Krueger, Ed.D., expertly speaks for Addie, who tells her adventurous, sometimes heartbreaking, story of traveling across the wild west from Texas to Arizona to Oregon, and then eventually ...

When pirates attacked her town and the captain took a liking to her, she saw a way out. Zheng Yi Sao agreed to marry him only if she got an equal share of his business. When her husband died six years later, she took command of the fleet. Over the next decade, the pirate queen built a fleet of over 1,800 ships and 70,000 men. On land and sea, Zheng Yi Sao's power rivaled the emperor himself. Time and again, her ships triumphed over the emperor's ships.

What They Meant for Evil is the account of that unimaginable journey. With the candor and purity of a child, Rebecca recalls how she endured fleeing from gunfire, suffering through hunger and strength-sapping illnesses, dodging life-threatening predators - lions, snakes, crocodiles, and soldiers alike - that dogged her footsteps, and grappling with a war that stole her childhood. Her story is a lyrical, captivating portrait of a child hurled into wartime, and how through divine intervention, she came to America and found a new life full of joy, hope, and redemption.

For over two decades the identity of Melissa Witt's murderer has been hidden among the dense trees and thorny undergrowth rooted deeply in the uneven ground of a remote mountaintop in the Ozark National Forest. Determined to find answers, LaDonna Humphrey has spent the past seven years hunting for Melissa's killer. Her investigation, both thrilling and unpredictable, has led her on a journey like no other.