At last employing his prodigious storytelling gifts to tell the saga of his own family's emigration to America from Italy in the years preceding World War II, Talese shares the hope and sacrifice that took them from the familiarity of the old world into the mysteries and challenges of the new.

Joan Rivers was known all over the world--from the Palace Theater to Buckingham Palace, from the bright lights of Las Vegas to the footlights of Broadway, from the days of talkies to hosting talk shows. But there was only one person who knew Joan intimately, one person who the authorities would call when she got a little out of hand. Her daughter and best friend, Melissa. Jo an and Melissa Rivers had one of the most celebrated mother-daughter relationships...

In this long-awaited memoir, the beloved author of the bestselling Tales of the City series chronicles his odyssey from the old South to freewheeling San Francisco, and his evolution from curious youth to ground-breaking writer and gay rights pioneer. Born in the mid-twentieth century and raised in the heart of conservative North Carolina, Armistead Maupin lost his virginity to another man "on the very spot where the first shots of the Civil War were...