Sex and the City Movie: The Book

If the movie wasn't enough here's the Sex and the City movie book!

From the publisher: From the team who brought you Sex and the City: Kiss and Tell comes this must-have companion to the movie millions have been waiting for. This sleek hardcover volume gives reader exclusive entrée into the world of Sex and the City: The Movie.

In addition to a storybook-style telling of the film, the book includes mouth-watering bonus features not available anywhere else: behind-the-scenes stories from Kim Cattrall, Kristin Davis, Cynthia Nixon, star and producer Sarah Jessica Parker, writer and director Michael Patrick King, as well as producers and other key cast and crew members; a guide to the movie's multi-million—dollar fashion closet, including insight from costume designer Patricia Field; and an insider's tour of the movie's many locations, some of which have never before appeared on film.

All of this behind-the-scenes information is accompanied by more than three hundred stunning, luscious, full-color images. This beautiful keepsake is sure to bring some big-screen glitz and glamour to every reader's bookshelf.

Reminder! Chasing Harry Winston out this Tuesday!

Coldplay: Viva La Vida

Coldplay was inspired by a painting by Frida Kahlo, the 20th century Mexican artist. The literal translation of the painting's title is "Long Live Life." The album's artwork features the painting Liberty Leading the People (La Liberté guidant le peuple) by French painter Eugène Delacroix, commemorating the July Revolution of 1830.

Here is the Coldplay commercial for iTunes:

Cover image: Coldplay.com

The Today Show Summer Reads

Hit the stack! Top 10 summer reads

"The Art of Racing in the Rain" by Garth Stein
This is the Starbucks book pick of the summer, so you’ll see it by the counter whenever you stop to get your vente latte. Imagine if your dog wrote a tell-all about you — that gives you an idea of what kind of book this is. It’s a novel about a family told from the pooch’s perspective. The concept may sound cutesy, but it is actually a very gripping and well-written story. And it’s getting some heady praise from big-deal writers like my favorite, Wally Lamb.

"Skeletons at the Feast" by Chris Bohjalian
Bohjalian is another favorite author of mine. This is the perfect novel for a book club because there’s so much to discuss. The story is set in World War II and follows a group of German refugees as they flee their homeland. Normally, I’m not a big fan of historical fiction, but this book sucked me right in. It opens with a young girl who’s trying to get across a frozen river with her family, but enemy soldiers are bombing the ice to keep people from crossing. It’s vivid and heart-wrenching. One interesting sidenote: The author was inspired to write this book when someone gave him an unpublished diary of a Prussian woman who fled west in 1945.

"The Story of A Marriage" by Andrew Sean Greer
I love the first sentence of this novel: “We think we know the ones we love.” With an introduction like that you just know there’s some deep dark secrets in store. And that’s exactly what you get. It’s about a 1950s housewife who opens her door one day to find a stranger standing there. This stranger tells her some shocking things about her husband.

"Chasing Harry Winston" by Lauren Weisberger
Okay, now for the lighter reads. I don’t want to call these next couple of books trashy, but we’ll say they’re on the “fluffy” side. And there’s nothing wrong with that — especially in the summer. This one is by the author of "The Devil Wears Prada." It’s the story of three best friends — two of them make a pact to dramatically change their entire lives within the course of a year.

"Love the One You're With" by Emily Giffin
Another fun book that raises the question: How do you know if you’ve found “The One?” It’s about a woman who is happily married — or so she thinks — until she runs into an ex she never quite go over. He’s a real bad boy so the reader doesn’t want her to be tempted, but we can also understand why she is.

"Black Out" by Lisa Unger
I was a big fan of the author’s debut novel, "Beautiful Lies.” This time, she’s back with a novel about a woman leading a pretty comfy life in a Florida suburb until some dark memories from her past begin to surface. As she sets out to uncover the truth behind these memories, her world turns upside down. The book is full of twists and turns. A great read for anyone craving some suspense.

"Bringing Home the Birkin" by Michael Tonelo
You ladies must know what a Birkin bag is, but I had no idea until I read this book. They’re Hermes bags that are worth tens of thousands of dollars. Socialites and celebrities would pretty much kill for them. This is true story by a guy who went from having not much of a job to being one of the busiest Internet resellers of the coveted Birkin bags in the world. It’s a witty and wild ride.

"Wolf at the Table" by Augusten Burroughs
The author is best-known for his runaway bestseller “Running With Scissors.” This latest memoir is a much more serious look at his relationship with his father. It opens with the memory of his dad chasing him through the woods as a child. Once you start turning the pages, it’s hard to stop.

"Summer of Naked Swim Parties" by Jessica Anya Blau
This wins the prize for the best title of the list. It’s by a first-time author. You know, with the show Swingtown coming out this summer there’s been lots of talk about the ’70s and people having parents who did some wild things back in the day. Again, the title says it all!

"Loving Frank" by Nancy Horan
If you missed this one in hardcover, grab it in paperback. It’s a novel based on the true story of the love affair between Frank Lloyd Wright and a woman named Mamah Cheney; both of them left their family to be together, creating a Chicago scandal that eventually ended in violence.

via MSNBC

Fashion History: Dressed to Kill

Dressed to Kill: What to Wear When Fashion Makes History- From Jackie O.'s pink suit to Mao's signature blue jacket with tidy collar, fashion has been a catalyst, a lightning rod, even a dominant player at many of the central events in history. While critics and moralists through the ages have raged against fashion's essential frivolity, many cultural and political leaders have intuitively understood its centrality to human concerns. Dressed to Kill puts style in its rightful place at the center of the historical stage {description from Amazon.com}

Bringing Home the Birkin: NY Times Book Review

The end of the world just inched a little nearer: an eBay seller has written a memoir. About handbags.

Not just any handbag. For those not familiar with the Birkin bag — made by Hermès, the French luxury leather goods company, for the singer Jane Birkin in the early ’80s, after its chief executive saw the chanteuse struggling with her vagabond-verging-on-cat-lady straw purse on a plane — it doesn’t matter, because you can’t get one anyway. Any other Jane who walks in off the street and asks for a Birkin is politely told there is a two-to-three-year waiting list. Oh, and the entry-level leather model costs about $7,500, with a crocodile-and-diamond version topping out at $150,000.

These days, Americans versed in pop culture — “Sex and the City,” Oprah being turned away at the Paris Hermès store — know about Birkins. And for a woman of a certain class anywhere in the world, carrying one is the quickest way to telegraph to other women, “I win.” And so some of them will do or pay just about anything to get one.

At the start of “Bringing Home the Birkin,” the author, Michael Tonello, is a party boy in Provincetown, Mass., who doesn’t know a Birkin from Burkina Faso. Weary of traveling the world as a hair and makeup artist for commercials, he decides to move to Barcelona after working on an I.B.M. shoot in the city. A job magically materializes, then vanishes, and Tonello is stuck in Spain with a five-year lease, no work visa and expensive custom closets he had built to fit his designer clothes. He was up a particular creek “without a paleta,” he writes. But his father reminds him of his American entrepreneurial pluck, recalling how, as a teenager, Michael made money for his French class trip by selling sandwiches at their country club out of a golf cart. Lightning soon strikes, as I suppose it sometimes does, in the form of cashmere: rearranging his sweaters for the “800th time,” he realizes it’s not actually that cold in Spain. He lists a Ralph Lauren scarf on eBay, bought at an outlet for $99, which sells for $430. Paleta found.

Suddenly, everything in his apartment has eBay appeal. Even his “friends,” his first-edition Lillian Hellman and Truman Capote books, are put on the virtual block. Tonello breezes through a paragraph of advice for potential sellers, then barrels toward his fateful sale, a silk Hermès scarf that draws aggressive bidding, as well as e-mail messages from desperate collectors imploring him to help them complete their scarf “wish lists.” “I intimated that this was ‘only the tip of the iceberg,’” he writes in his exhaustingly chatty, girlfriend-à-girlfriend tone. (Tonello has never met a cliché he didn’t love, and is addicted to alliteration. Sample: “I didn’t mind the calculus of currency conversion or the etymology of exotic entrees.”) Click here to read the entire review.

American Eve Companion Video

American Eve: Evelyn Nesbit, Stanford White, the Birth of the "It Girl" and the Crime of the Century

American Eve: The scandalous story of America’s first supermodel, sex goddess, and modern celebrity, Evelyn Nesbit, the temptress at the center of Stanford White’s famous murder, whose iconic life story reflected all the paradoxes of America’s Gilded Age. Known to millions before her sixteenth birthday in 1900, Evelyn Nesbit was the most photographed woman of her era, an iconic figure who set the standard for female beauty. Women wanted to be her. Men just wanted her. When her life of fantasy became all too real, and her jealous millionaire husband, Harry K. Thaw, killed her lover—celebrity architect Stanford White, builder of the Washington Square Arch and much of New York City—she found herself at the center of the “Crime of the Century” and the popular courtroom drama that followed—a scandal that signaled the beginning of a national obsession with youth, beauty, celebrity, and sex. The story of Evelyn Nesbit is one of glamour, money, romance, sex, madness, and murder, and Paula Uruburu weaves all of these elements into an elegant narrativethat reads like the best fiction — only it’s all true. American Eve goes far beyond just literary biography; it paints a picture of America as it crossed from the Victorian era into the modern, foreshadowing so much of our contemporary culture today. {description from Amazon.com}

Update: Dr. Paula Uruburu (the author of American Eve) stopped by and commented - she has a website dedicated to American Eve with lots of great info which can be found here.

The House on Fortune Street

The House on Fortune Street: A Novel

From Publishers Weekly:
The absorbing latest from Livesey opens multiple perspectives on the life of Dara MacLeod, a young London therapist, partly by paying subtle homage to literary figures and works. The first of four sections follows Keats scholar Sean Wyman: his girlfriend, Abigail, is Dara's best friend, and the couple lives upstairs from Dara in the titular London house. While Dara tries to coax her boyfriend Edward to move out of the house he shares with his ex-girlfriend and daughter, Sean receives a mysterious letter implying that Abigail is having an affair, and both relationships start to fall apart. The second section, set during Dara's childhood, is narrated by Dara's father, who has a strange fascination with Charles Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll) and shares Dodgson's creepy interest in young girls. Dara's meeting with Edward dominates part three, which mirrors the plot of Jane Eyre, and the final part, reminiscent of Great Expectations, is told mainly from Abigail's college-era point of view. The pieces cross-reference and fit together seamlessly, with Dara's fate being revealed by the end of part one and explained in the denouement. Livesey's use of the classics enriches the narrative, giving Dara a larger-than-life resonance.

When You Are Engulfed in Flames

David Sedaris' latest When You Are Engulfed in Flames will be released on June 3rd and I can't wait. Below is from a recent interview in W Magazine:

After five autobiographical essay collections that have sold more than four million copies in 25 languages, a lot of people must think they know David Sedaris pretty well. Certainly his fans are fully versed in the eccentricities of the writer’s sizable Greek-American family and his down-and-out young adulthood. After stints in multiple colleges, he scraped by picking apples, painting houses and playing an elf at Macy’s Santaland, all the while consuming drugs, alcohol and cigarettes in bulk. Happily, things turned around in the early Nineties, when he met his perfect boyfriend, Hugh Hamrick, and, shortly thereafter, was asked to read his essay about the aforementioned elf gig on NPR, which led to overnight fame and a book deal. Sedaris and Hamrick, a decorative painter, soon traded their rat-friendly tenement in New York’s SoHo for a lovely Paris flat. Today the couple divide their time between a Left Bank apartment, a house in a rustic part of Normandy and a town house in London’s Kensington.

To read the entire article click W Magazine.

Stuff White People Like: The Book

If you love the website, you'll love the book: Stuff White People Like: A Guide to the Unique Taste of Millions-Available July 1st.

The Fashion Questionaire

Designers who answered the Fashion Questionnaire: Thom Browne, Ennio Capasa, Pierre Cardin, Jean-Charles de Castelbajac, Roberto Cavalli, Alber Elbaz, Diane von Furstenberg, John Galliano, Carolina Herrera, Tommy Hilfiger, Donna Karan, Michael Kors, Karl Lagerfeld, Catherine Malandrino, Nicole Miller, Oscar de la Renta, Ralph Rucci, Sonia Rykiel, Olivier Theyskens, Isabel Toledo, and Valentino. I couldn't find this on Amazon but I believe it's available through Assouline.com.

Play Ball!

I heard the authors of It Takes More Than Balls: The Savvy Girls' Guide to Understanding and Enjoying Baseball on my way home from work the day before yesterday via Cosmo Radio (Cocktails with Patrick) and thought I would reccomend it to anyone that needs a little help. Personally, I don't need much help since I was actually stood up for a date (Yankees game) because I knew a little too much about baseball, but I think it's a great idea! I also loved their idea for a baseball lover's dating website, I've been looking for a Philadelphia Phillies fan forever!

The Girls were featured on the front page of MLB.com yesterday - click here to read the article. Click here for their Official MLB blog and lastly check out the Savvy Girls website.

Rumors

Rumors: A Luxe Novel - I am really psyched for the sequel to The Luxe...here's the description: After bidding good-bye to New York's brightest star, Elizabeth Holland, rumors continue to fly about her untimely demise.

All eyes are on those closest to the dearly departed: her mischievous sister, Diana, now the family's only hope for redemption; New York's most notorious cad, Henry Schoon-maker, the flame Elizabeth never extinguished; the seductive Penelope Hayes, poised to claim all that her best friend left behind—including Henry; even Elizabeth's scheming former maid, Lina Broud, who discovers that while money matters and breeding counts, gossip is the new currency.

As old friends become rivals, Manhattan's most dazzling socialites find their futures threatened by whispers from the past. In this delicious sequel to The Luxe, nothing is more dangerous than a scandal . . . or more precious than a secret.