The thin man: "The start of it all! Nick and Nora Charles invite you to bring your own alibi to Dashiell Hammett's jaunty whodunit about a missing inventor that made William Powell and Myrna Loy the champagne elite of sleuthing"--Container. After the thin man: "New Year's Eve and a new mystery surrounding the philandering husband of Nora's cousin. Round up the usual suspects, including James Stewart in an early screen role."--Container. Another...

From the beginning, Myrna Loy's screen image conjured mystery, a sense of something withheld. This first ever biography of the wry and sophisticated actress, best known for her role as Nora Charles in The Thin Man, offers an unprecedented picture of her life and a career that spanned six decades. Opening with Loy's rough-and-tumble upbringing in Montana, the book takes us to Los Angeles from the 1920s, through the thirties, when Loy became a top box...

William Shakespeare, the most celebrated poet in the English language, left behind nearly a million words of text, but his biography has long been a thicket of supposition arranged around scant facts. With his trademark wit, Bill Bryson sorts through this colorful muddle to reveal the man himself. Bryson documents the efforts of earlier scholars, and, emulating the style of his travelogues, records episodes in his own research. He celebrates Shakespeare...

"Hannah has abandoned everything-her trajectory as a law student, her childhood home and caring for her ill mother-for the chance to work with the Innocence Project, a prestigious coalition of investigators who fight to free wrongly convicted prisoners. Hannah's ambitions are set on the program's highest-stakes case in years: a convicted rapist and murderer on death row. She'll do anything-whatever it takes-to work on this case. Because Hannah has...

"Translated, edited, and with an Introduction by Stanley Corngold Featuring essays by Philip Roth, W. H Auden, and Walter Benjamin "When Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from unsettling dreams, he found himself changed in his bed into a monstrous vermin." With this startling, bizarre, yet surprisingly funny first sentence, Franz Kafka begins his masterpiece, The Metamorphosis. It is the story of a young man who, transformed overnight into a giant...

In Louisiana, Deputy Sheriff Annie Broussard catches Detective Renard beating a man the whole town believes is guilty of murder even though a court acquitted him. Annie arrests Renard, only to become ostracized by the town and suspended from the police department. But Renard too is suspended and in a twist of fate the pair must join forces to investigate the murder anew. By the author of Guilty as Sin.

From the film critics of The New York Times come these uncut, original reviews of the most popular and influential movies ever made -- from the Talkies to blockbusters like Chicago and The Wizard of Oz from timeless classics like Casablanca and Notorious, to beloved foreign films by Truffaut and Kurosawa, Fellini and Almodovar. The reviews reflect Hollywood history at its best. In addition, this volume includes: Full cast and production credits for...

In World War II, the outcome of the battle of Guadalcanal will strongly influence the Japanese's advance into the Pacific. Based on James Jones' novel, this is the story of Charlie Company's landing and battle experience there in 1942. The story concentrates on how the battle affects, and is effected by, Commanding officer Lt. Col. Gordon Tall, Captain James Staros, Sgt. Edward Welsh, and two privates, Witt and Bell. Charlie Company is attacking a...

A married couple who have managed to remain blissfully happy into their autumn years are surrounded over the course of the four seasons of one average year by friends, colleagues, and family who all seem to suffer some degree of unhappiness.