Audiobooks

Audible was having a sale recently so I purchased the following - unfortunately I haven't had 2 minutes to even start them yet:

Don't You Forget About Me: A Novel -- At thirty-eight, Lillian Curtis is content with her life. She enjoys her routine as a producer for a talk show in New York City starring showbiz veteran Vi (“short for vibrant”) Barbour, a spirited senior. Lillian’s relationship with her husband is pleasant if no longer exciting. Most nights she is more than happy to come home to her apartment and crawl into her pajamas. Then she’s hit with a piece of shocking news: Her husband wants a divorce.

Blindsided, Lillian takes a leave of absence and moves back to her parents’ home in suburban New Jersey. Nestled in her childhood bedroom, where Duran Duran and Squeeze posters still cover the walls, she finds high school memories a healing salve to her troubles. She hurtles backward into her teen years, driving too fast, digging up mix tapes, and tentatively reconciling with Dawn, a childhood friend she once betrayed. Punctuating her stroll down memory lane is an invitation to the Bethel Memorial High School class of 1988 twenty-year reunion. It just might be Lillian’s chance to reconnect with her long-lost boyfriend, Christian Somers, who is expected to attend. Will it be just like heaven?

Lillian discovers, as we all must, the pitfalls of glorifying the glory days, the mortification of failing as a thirtysomething adult, and the impossibility of fully recapturing the past. Don’t You Forget About Me is for anyone who looks back and wonders: What if?

Nice to Come Home To -- Though she's methodically navigated 36 years by making lists and plans, D.C. resident Prudence Whistler's carefully constructed life is about to get shaken up. She's let go from the nonprofit job that never did much to fulfill her in the first place. Then Rudy—who she's finally decided will suffice as The One—condescendingly dumps her. But before she has too much time to stew, her loved ones rally 'round: catty, coupled college friends; her younger sister, Patsy, the unmarried mother of a two-year-old; and John Owen, the in-divorce-proceedings diner owner Pru first encounters while schlepping Rudy's television out to the curb. This crew's the catalyst for a series of adventures and lifestyle shakeups that has retail-addict Pru wondering whether her love for fashion could deliver more than the latest Marc Jacobs dress. And then there's the ongoing coffee klatch at John's diner that inspires the big question: is Pru in the market for getting-each-other-through-a-bad-time-love with John, or is it time to stick her neck out for real-love love? Readers may find Pru's early bad luck streak contrived, but as her lovable friends and neighbors spring into action, the well-written story rounds out and rolls toward a satisfying finish.

More on Gilding Lily

“It’s not like I was raised to the manner born,” said the socialite and author Tatiana Boncompagni on a recent afternoon as she lunched at Bottega del Vino in midtown.

On Sept. 9, Ms. Boncompagni will publish her first novel, Gilding Lily, about a simple girl from Nashville named Lily who is embraced by New York society when she marries a millionaire, then dumped by her fancy friends. Ms. Boncompagni’s publisher, HarperCollins, has marketed her as a descendant of Italian nobility and 16th-century Pope Gregory XIII, but she insists that her background is closer to that of her character’s, as she grew up in South Dakota and Nashville with a mother who left her noble roots behind when she married Ms. Boncompagni’s father, a Jewish man from the Midwest. (Ms. Boncompagni says her mother decided to give her children her last name because she thought it would be easier for them to then get Italian passports.)

“It’s always allowed me to see things from an outsider’s perspective,” said Ms. Boncompagni of her upbringing. “And the big thing with me has always been to figure out my desire to belong.”

Ms. Boncompagni, 31, has dark brown hair, olive skin and big brown eyes, and wore slimming white jeans, a white tank top and a red cardigan. After Georgetown, she was a reporter for The Wall Street Journal; she has also freelanced for The New York Times’ Styles section. At 25, she married Maximilian Hoover, an heir to the vacuum cleaner fortune whom she met through friends, thereby initiating her into New York society.

Nevertheless, Ms. Boncompagni claims that her protagonist is more of a society girl than she ever was. “I would never attempt to say that I had It Girl status,” she said. “[Lily’s] fall from grace was different because she came from a much higher place than I did.

“My first introduction to it was all good,” she continued. “I had my picture in Women’s Wear Daily, we won a trip to Venice at the annual Venice Ball, and I had this gorgeous fiancé.”

But then the combination of having her son, Enrico; tensions with her mother-in-law, actress Camilla Sparv; and having a few society gals spread unpleasant rumors about her made Ms. Boncompagni feel excluded: “There I was in my husband’s boxers and an old Hanes T-shirt, with my son nursing off of one of my gargantuan breasts.”

A party on Tuesday celebrating her book will be hosted by socialites Tinsley Mortimer, Lydia Fenet and Jennifer Creel; Gilt Groupe vice president Christian Leone; and the actress Emmy Rossum.

“New York is a totally different animal than, say, Nashville society—it never becomes as vicious as it does here,” she said, though she hastened to add that she did not include the friends throwing her the party in this characterization. “These girls are very ambitious. They want to be famous and they want all the power that goes along with being famous.” Ms. Boncompagni added that she has been accused of being a social climber; there were also rumors that she was planting items in gossip columns.

Ms. Boncompagni’s novel may seem like another socialite book about the inner workings of privilege and class—think Plum Sykes’ Bergdorf Blondes or Holly Peterson’s The Manny—but she hopes her story will seem more “thoughtful.”

“As a writer I’m motivated by exploring the human condition,” said Ms. Boncompagni, who cites F. Scott Fitzgerald and Edith Wharton as influences. “I wanted to investigate why anyone would want to belong to this group of catty women. I was definitely sucked in by the desire for fame and status, and wanted to explore why a character would.”

Ms. Boncompagni’s husband tends to stay out of the limelight. “He’s such a private person, and it’s just not done to put yourself out there in articles or books like I have,” she said. (She is working on another novel, titled Hedge Fund Wives.)

“But this is how society is changing. You used to just see the picture of the beautiful girl in the beautiful dress,” she said. “But now you see these tremendously intimate profiles and girls courting that. Ivanka Trump on the cover of the New York Post—10 years ago that would be a scandal! But of course now it’s like, ‘She’s a smart girl, she’s very real.’”

{via The New York Observer}

The Dress Doctor

The Dress Doctor: Prescriptions for Style, From A to Z
To be released 10/7/08 (you can pre-order from Amazon by clicking the above title)

I think I have an original edition of this one but I am loving all these re-issues with the updated jackets/covers!

Long before celebrity stylists became as renowned as the Oscar-winning film stars they advise, the legendary costume designer Edith Head was dressing Hollywood's most fashionable women and men on screen and off—and lending her sartorial wisdom to women across the country on radio and television. In 1959, she published a best-selling memoir and style guide, The Dress Doctor, in which she shared tips on style and dozens of entertaining anecdotes on Hollywood's A-list with her fans. Now, The Dress Doctor has returned in this special edition of the original volume, an alphabetical romp through the art of getting dressed and dressing Hollywood, with specially commissioned illustrations and the best advice and stories culled word for word from the original book.

From Audrey Hepburn to Zooture, The Dress Doctor is filled with Head's timeless tips: her expertise on developing a personal style, dressing to flatter one's figure, building a wardrobe, and judging quality. Her prescriptions for dressing properly for various activities from archery to house cleaning to roller skating are a charming mix of perennially chic and, now, with the passing of time, tongue in chic. Fashion illustrator Bil Donovan's stunning re-creations of Head's most famous gowns, along with illustrations of myriad other stylish ensembles, bring the designer's work vividly to life again, along with Hollywood icons Grace Kelly, Katharine Hepburn, Mae West, Cary Grant, and many others.

This irresistible, elegant volume is a unique treasure for those who love film, style, and the glamour of Old Hollywood.

Party Favors

Party Favors --Temple Sachet’s got style, smarts, and the party planning gene in her blood. Having grown up in New Orleans, surrounded by the pageantry of Mardi Gras, Temple learned a thing or two about how to turn a fantastic party into a money maker. It’s a skill that pays off big when her gala for the Missouri Opera turns into a Ray of Hope internship at the White House. Within weeks, Temple’s caught Potomac Fever—a hopeless, incurable addiction to D.C. for which there is only one cure: a nasty-tasting spoonful of disillusionment….

Temple rises quickly through the ranks of the Republican Party’s fundraising elite, navigating a treacherous community of lobbyists making deals for dollars, gossiping staffers, and child-like senators, to be appointed the highly coveted position of Finance Director for the Republican Senate Campaign Committee. Her every waking moment is spent convincing the über-rich and ultra eccentric to hand over the cash money green and, in the process, she learns everyone’s secrets. Temple knows which senators can be manipulated by baked goods, which donors are most likely to pass out drunk at dinners, which chiefs of staff are still “in the closet” and, unbelievably, which senators are actually good people, behaving with integrity even if no one is watching. She is envied, adored, respected, feared, and most of all needed as a fundraiser.

From the outside, Temple’s life looks like one fantastic party, but on the inside she’s tired of dating the wrong men and sleeping on the office floor. Her successes are measured in dollars, all of her status is derived from the politicians she knows personally, and all of her friendships stem from her career. But with her entire identity so wrapped up in D.C., can she walk away from it?

Party Favors gives a deliciously witty peek into the secretive world of political fundraising in D.C. Written by a former Director of Finance for the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the novel explores the very real truth that favor

Shot in Sicily

Shot in Sicily-- Michael Roberts' rich view of Sicily--its people, traditions, and landscape--permeates his photographic work far beyond his well-known work in the fashion world. Spanning two decades, Shot in Sicily traces Roberts' shifting vision of a sensual and ambiguous country. With an occasional nod to Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden's late nineteenth-century images of the Sicilian town of Taormina, and the films of Visconti and Bolognini, Roberts' sense of Sicily moves beyond conventional and touristic aesthetic categories. His camera captures the beauty of youth, crumbling temples, traditional Easter parades and the theater of daily life, and genuinely recreates the allure of Sicily. This monograph is designed by Roberts and features an epilogue/homage by designer Manolo Blahnik.

And from FWD: Michael Roberts is a man about town, but come Fashion Week, his works will be taking Manhattan. From September 10-October 19, images from Roberts' photography book Shot in Sicily will be displayed at 401 Projects and Visión Cultural on West Street. The exhibit will highlight the Vanity Fair fashion and style director's vision of Sicily from his book that was released in 2007. The showcase will open with a private party on September 6.

Summer Blowout

Summer Blowout ---Bella Shaughnessy is addicted to lipstick with names like My Chihuahua Bites and Kiss My Lips - an occupational hazard, since she works at Salon de Paolo, her family-run beauty salon, along with her four half-brothers and sisters. The owner is her father, Lucky Shaughnessy, a gregarious, three-times divorced charmer with Donald Trump hair who is obsessed with all things Italian. After Bella's own marriage flames out spectacularly when her half-sister runs off with her husband, Bella decides she has seen enough of the damage love can do. She makes a vow: no more men. But then Bella meets a cute entrepreneur, and despite their bickering, they can't seem to stay away from each other. A small, well-tressed dog also finds her way into Bella's life, and her heart, and she decides to chance that, too. When the whole clan heads to Atlanta for a big Southern wedding, sparks fly - in a summer blowout no one will ever forget.

Last summer I read Claire Cook's "Life's a Beach" and it was GREAT!

‘Gossip Girl’ DVD Extra Tries to Steer Buyers to the Books

What may dismay parents about the popularity of the TV drama “Gossip Girl” — besides the teenage sex and drug use, that is — is that it has so many girls glued to their television sets who might improve their SAT scores if they cracked open a book instead.

Now, however, the DVD set “Gossip Girl: The Complete First Season,” which goes on sale this week, includes a free electronic version of the original novel by Cecily von Ziegesar on which the show is based. But — OMG! — it is totally not a book that you read! It is, rather, an audio book narrated by Christina Ricci, with other bonus material like scenes that were not broadcast and “LOL: Gag Reel.” The three-hour abridgement of the novel, which Hachette Audio first released in CD format in 2003, can be transferred to an iPod.

This collaboration, by Hachette Audio and Warner Home Video, which made the DVD, is an unprecedented twist on how publishers hitch their wagons to Hollywood projects. With films, publishers typically reprint a paperback with movie-poster artwork, and audio divisions similarly repackage audio books.

The show’s audience is 74 percent female and its median age is 26, according to Nielsen. Because the young women who are introduced to the characters through the TV series may be oblivious to its origins as a book phenomenon, the publisher has been trying to lasso the show’s audience. The 12 books in the series, published by Poppy, an imprint of Hachette, which is owned by Little, Brown Young Readers, have sold 5.6 million copies.

To coincide with the premiere of the TV series, the publisher printed a version of the first Gossip Girl book with a cover featuring the cast of the show; it sold 20,000 copies in 2007 and has sold 12,000 copies so far this year, apparently without cannibalizing the standard version of the same book, which sold 82,000 copies in 2007 (a 1,000-copy increase over 2006) and has sold 41,000 copies so far this year, according to Nielsen BookScan.

But sales of the audio book versions of the first and second book (also read by Ms. Ricci) in the series have been consistently moribund, even in the wake of the hit TV series: for the five years since being released, they have sold fewer than 1,000 copies yearly, according to BookScan.

“The teen and the late-teen market has been a really tough market for us,” said Anthony Goff, publisher of Hachette Audio and Digital Media.

It is no wonder teenage titles flummox audio book publishers. According to AudioFile, a magazine for audio book enthusiasts, 53 percent of those listening do so while driving their cars, a late-teenage privilege. But among those trying to cultivate the market is the audio-book download seller Audible.com, which recently unveiled AudibleKids, with more than 4,000 children’s and young-adult titles.

Donald Katz, chief executive of Audible, pitches audio books as an educational alternative to music on iPods and iPhones, which are sometimes blamed for making youths more detached and are banned as distractions in some schools. Audio books could “reposition” iPods from parental scourge to “storytellers and learning machines,” Mr. Katz said.

{via The NY Times}

{Photo: Giovanni Rufino/The CW}

Tiffany Style: 170 Years of Design

Tiffany Style: 170 Years of Design -- Since its inception 170 years ago, Tiffany & Co. has become synonymous with elegant, stylish design and alluring luxury, creating the world’s most dazzling jewelry and decorative objects. Today, its signature blue box is recognized the world over and can be had (for a price, of course) at more than 150 locations around the globe.

In Tiffany Style, Tiffany’s design director John Loring gathers for the first time in one volume the most renowned and memorable pieces ever produced by the company. In this “best of Tiffany” collection, readers will find a spectacular array of objects, from Louis Comfort Tiffany’s famous lamps and vases to opulent silver tea sets to Andy Warhol’s whimsical Christmas illustrations to Elsa Peretti’s signature heart pendant. Drawing from a rich selection of design sketches and vintage and contemporary photography, all taken from Tiffany’s unparalleled archives, as well as new photography taken especially for this book by Harry Benson, Tiffany Style reveals the company’s fascinating history and evolution through its most unforgettable creations.

Paper Illusions: The Art of Isabelle de Borchgrave

Paper Illusions: The Art of Isabelle de Borchgrave --- Belgian artist, designer, and interior decorator Isabelle de Borchgrave has created exquisite paper dresses evoking high fashions from the courts of the Medici in the Renaissance to the legendary Fortuny silks of the early 20th century. Their historical authenticity, combined with their startling realism, caused an overnight sensation when they were first shown in France in 1998 as “papiers à la mode.” Since then, the dynamic, light-hearted collection has traveled all over the world to critical and popular acclaim.

Paper Illusions does full justice to De Borchgrave’s magical workshop, where paper is cut, folded, and painted on the way to being transformed into shimmering visions of beautiful clothing and luxurious living. In Rene Stoeltie’s vivid photographs, figures from the history of style seem to breathe in atmospheric rooms, while details of color, pattern, and form jump off the page. It is a publishing event of unprecedented creativity, wit, and elegance.

Isabelle de Borchgrave is an artist, designer, and interior decorator. In March 2007, Target announced the introduction of her line of paper party décor, called Isabelle Party. She lives and works in Brussels.

Barbara and René Stoeltie have been collaborating on interior design books and articles since 1984 with Barbara as writer and René as photographer. They live in Brussels.

Hubert de Givenchy is a French aristocrat and world-famous fashion designer. He lives in France.

Yves Saint Laurent: Style

Yves Saint Laurent: Style ---In collaboration with Fondation Pierre Bergé–Yves Saint Laurent.

Yves Saint Laurent’s signature style intertwines references from the art world with those of popular culture and social revolution. Since its establishment in the 1960s by the designer and Pierre Bergé, the Yves Saint Laurent haute couture house has redefined femininity, creating arguably the most famous (and sexiest) suit for women, “Le Smoking” tuxedo, and innovative collections with names such as Pop Art, Ballet Russes, and Picasso.

This retrospective book is the first to cover the forty years of Yves Saint Laurent and highlights the inventive character of the designer’s work. Over 160 of his finest designs and accessories, all taken from the Fondation Pierre Bergé–Yves Saint Laurent collection, are presented. The book is the companion volume to an exhibition that will travel to The Montreal Museum of Fine Art and the de Young Museum in San Francisco.

Houses in My Heart

Houses in My Heart: Carleton Varney: An International Decorator's Colorful Journey - you can pre-order now but it is not scheduled to be released until Sept. 25th.

Still: Oceanscapes by Debra Bloomfield

Still -- Debra Bloomfield's hypnotic photographs provide a visual map of the powerful interplay between sea and sky. Over the years, on a single lonesome stretch of beach, Bloomfield has captured an undeniably intimate portrait of the ocean at rest. Almost impressionistic in their tone, this collection of 60 photographs chronicling seascapes smudging into a series of hazy horizons creates a striking contrast with what we've come to expect of ocean photography. Still is a captivating and entrancing vision by a unique voice in contemporary photography.

French General: Home Sewn

French General: Home Sewn -- As the founder of the renowned crafts and notions store, French General, Kaari Meng scours the French countryside and Parisian flea markets for vintage treasures. Now, this beloved designer has gathered her favorite patterns into a charming sourcebook sure to be coveted by crafters, Francophiles, and home decorators. She offers 30 simple sewing patterns for French-inspired projects—a scalloped tablecloth, piles of pillows and bedding, a festive party garland, totes—and more. Lay-flat spiral binding and ready-to-use pattern sheets and embroidery transfers, plus step-by-step directions, gorgeous photographs, and helpful illustrations make it easy to bring the palettes and pleasures of traditional French living into any home.

Review: Gilding Lily

I had hoped to post my review that I submitted to the publisher but I lost it!  Don't you just hate when that happens?  I did manage to submit it on the Harper Collins website but it has not yet appeared.  I will keep my eye out for it! The author of Gilding Lily, Tatiana Boncompagni, has been in touch with me so if she gets it through the publisher I will post it here as well.  Trust me, it was a fun book and she has another one in the works!

Schooled

Schooled--- All she wants to do is teach. For Anna Taggert, an earnest Ivy League graduate, pursuing her passion as a teacher means engaging young hearts and minds. She longs to be in a place where she can be her best self, and give that best to her students.

Turns out it isn't that easy.

Landing a job at an elite private school in Manhattan, Anna finds her dreams of chalk boards and lesson plans replaced with board families, learning specialists, and benefit-planning mothers. Not to mention the grim realities of her small paycheck.

And then comes the realization that the papers she grades are not the work of her students, but of their high-priced, college-educated tutors. After uncovering this underground economy where a teacher can make the same hourly rate as a Manhattan attorney, Anna herself is seduced by lucrative offers--one after another. Teacher by day, tutor by night, she starts to sample the good life her students enjoy: binges at Barneys, dinners at the Waverly Inn, and a new address on Madison Avenue.

Until, that is, the truth sets in.

Gilding Lily

Gilding Lily --Lily is on top of the world. Just a few short years ago she was a pretty, but relatively unknown, girl from Nashville. Now she is married to "the" Robert Bartholomew, is a Vogue "Girl of the Moment," a reigning member of New York's social scene...and she's slowly falling apart....along with is her marriage. With a post–pregnancy body (not a size two anymore!) and a mother in law from hell, Lily must navigate through waters that are infested with sharks––human sharks! And once she begins to write about her experiences, Lily starts to see who her friends and enemies are.

I was chosen to receive an advance copy of this book and review it for the publishers website. I will also post my review here as well sometime next week. Just finished it yesterday!

About the Author:
Tatiana Boncompagni, is a Manhattan–based freelancer for the New York Times Sunday Styles section, the Wall Street Journal Weekend section and the Financial Times Style & Shopping pages. Her writing has also appeared in Vogue and In Style. A top ten graduate from Georgetown University's prestigious School of Foreign Service, she worked for the Wall Street Journal in Europe, and, later, as a reporter for the Legal Times in Washington, DC. Married to Maximilian Hoover (of the vacuum cleaner Hoovers), she currently lives in New York City with her husband and two children. Yes, she knows Tinsley Moritmer and Fabiola Beracasa, she truly is descended from an Italian Princess, and you can learn more about her at www.boncompagni.net.

And the Plot Thinned ...

By CATHY HORYN (NY Times)

TRUMAN CAPOTE said of “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” his classic novella of a New York glamour girl, that he was trying to prune his writing style, achieve a more subdued prose. Of course, Holly Golightly became the lodestar to designers as well as to millions of young women who have been enthralled by her single-minded spirit and by the image evoked by Audrey Hepburn in the opening shot of the film, as the cab races up Fifth Avenue and deposits her in front of Tiffany’s.

Holly is now 50 — as hard as that is to believe. This realization lends a certain poignancy to the many new books in the past year, most of them in the chick-lit category, that have attempted to graft her legend. There are: Lauren Weisberger’s “Chasing Harry Winston,” Kristen Kemp’s “Breakfast at Bloomingdale’s,” Michael Tonello’s “Bringing Home the Birkin” and James Patterson’s “Sunday at Tiffany’s.”

You don’t have to read these books to imagine the outcome: girl meets guy; girl gets guy but first she has to discuss him endlessly with her gal friends and perhaps Mother, who is typically a dragon or an ex-supermodel or both. Subdued they are not. (Mr. Tonello’s inspired book, a memoir of his experiences thwarting Hermès’s wait-list strategy for its coveted Birkin bags, is more on the order of guy gets handbag ... and scores!)

Romantic summer novels are silly, to be sure. What is fascinating about the current batch, which includes “The Beach House,” by Jane Green, is how faithfully they are informed by the values and brands of the fashion world and its parallel universes of entertainment, media and publishing. Ms. Green has made Nantucket real estate a theme of her book. And while she may not know the island well enough to know which direction a character is facing — she has a Spenderella named Jordana gazing at the ocean when it is actually a harbor — she has recognized a clear shift in the East Coast status game.

As her editor, Clare Ferraro, the president of Viking, said, “It’s almost as if real estate has become an accessory,” adding, “It says something about who you are.”

Maybe. But a pair of lizard Jimmy Choos does seem to pale in novelty and conversation value next to a $12-million Nantucket house.

On some level, though, it is terrible to imagine what these books say about ourselves, as escapist as they are meant to be. Ms. Ferraro thinks that such books provide a kind of balm for hard times, in the same way that glamorous movies did during the Depression. Readers, she said, “will be living gratuitously through these books.”

To a large extent, they already are. Jonathan Burnham, the publisher of Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins, notes that the audience for novels with a heavy quotient of clothes and Page Six dander isn’t made up of East Coast sophisticates. Rather, he said, “The audience is Middle American women looking to buy a taste of the glittering East Coast experience, with all the silliness.”

He also pointed out that the most successful of these books distill the best bits of the fashion world — the clothes, the famous brand names, the over-the-top characters — instead of dwelling in a fashion house or idling too long backstage. Could the travails of designers be a bore? It seems so.

Ms. Weisberger’s 2003 novel “The Devil Wears Prada” was, after all, about a powerful, latte-demanding fashion editor. And since most people knew that her roman à clef was based on her former boss, Anna Wintour, the editor of Vogue, that added to the intrigue. Despite the exposure the fashion world got from shows like “Sex and the City,” the inner sanctums of the business were still largely unknown to people. “The Devil Wears Prada” was followed a year later by Plum Sykes’s “Bergdorf Blondes,” which Mr. Burnham edited, releasing, it seemed, cataracts of labels and apple-martini-swilling socialites in hot pursuit of equally delish sex.

There is no question that certain brands, like certain summer resorts, have a talismanic effect. And if you can weave a romantic comedy around the Chanels and Sub-Zeroes, as Ms. Green has done — with the sentimental addition of a chic old coot named Nan presiding over a rundown beach house — you might have a best seller.

But this summer’s brand-flogging novels also reveal a kind of empty clink at the bottom of fashion’s well. Is that all there is? Has the fashion plot thinned to such a degree that it’s just about presenting life as a blue velvet ring box or a giant Birkin bag?

When I got done turning down the corners of the pages of Mr. Patterson’s novel that mentioned a brand name or a stylish place (he, too, transports his characters to Nantucket), my copy looked severely riddled. His heroine, a successful if mildly self-loathing playwright named Jane Margaux (as in the wine, Margaux Hemingway?), fairly chokes on the array of contemporary anxieties, observing of her boyfriend, “While Hugh flirted with an obnoxiously pretty and pathologically thin fashion model who had seen HIS play four times, I pretended to study the dessert menu, which, sadly, I knew by heart.” This is, clearly, late-stage withdrawal from fashion.

If Capote mentioned a famous label at all (Mainbocher turns up on a page), it was to merely establish that his glamour girl had good taste.

But fashion wasn’t important to Holly. Despite the Paris wardrobe in the movie version, she made it clear she thought the whole thing was something of a wonderful joke, a bore. Take it or leave it. That was her appeal. As she said, explaining why she didn’t stick around Hollywood and become an actress, “My complexes aren’t inferior enough.”

But the references in most of the new books don’t so much inform us about the pop-fashion world as much as remind us how hideola, to use Holly’s term, it is. “Using all those brand names is sort of bizarre,” said Ms. Sykes. “At the time that ‘Bergdorf Blondes’ and ‘The Devil Wears Prada’ came out, it seemed so modern. Now it seems old-fashioned.”

Ms. Sykes, who writes for Vogue, brought a thorough knowledge of fashion, as well as a Mitfordish humor, to “Bergdorf Blondes.” To her, the most successful of these types of books, like the most successful socialites, are those that “acknowledge that they are in on the joke” that fashion’s over-the-top spectacle presents.

Married and now 38, Ms. Sykes is dubious about trying to come out with another trendy novel. “You can’t write a fashionable comedy about married girls who have two children and are approaching 40,” she said. “For one thing, they can’t wear the clothes.” This does not mean she thinks the form has been tapped out. On the contrary. She fully expects a young person to come along and imagine fashion and New York from his or her generation’s perspective. Maybe with pruning shears.

Ms. Weisberger’s latest novel has been on the New York Times best-seller list for 13 weeks. It seems obvious that with “Chasing Harry Winston” she has put more effort into the development of her characters — three successful gal pals approaching 30, without a dream guy on the hook — than she did in her previous book.

Still, it doesn’t hurt to have a glitzy, double-entendre title (is Harry a man or a rock, or, gosh, does it matter?) and a dust jacket design that recalls “The Devil Wears Prada,” both deliberate decisions, according to Marysue Rucci, her editor at Simon & Schuster. That’s just good marketing, and any fashion dunce understands that.

Chronicle Books Friends and Family Offer

Chronicle Books is having a "friends and family" sale - All titles 30% off plus free shipping. July 22 - August 3. Use promo code FRIENDS at checkout.

Literary Tattoos

I will probably never get a tattoo - I hate needles and I don't think I could ever decide on something that I liked enough to have myself branded with it...forever and ever. I was on a literary website and they posted this site Contrariwise: Literary Tattoos: Tattoos from books, poetry, music, and other sources. Facinating. Take a peek.

Emma's Table

Emma's Table -- From the moment Emma Sutton walks into the esteemed FitzCoopers auction house, the one-time media darling knows exactly what she wants: an exquisite antique dining table. What she doesn't realize is what she's getting: the chance to set things right.

Fresh from a year-long stretch in prison and the public bloodletting that accompanied her fall, Emma needs a clean slate. She finds her life just as she left it, filled with glittering business successes and bruising personal defeats—rolling television cameras and chauffeured limousines, followed by awkward Sunday dinners at home. She knows, deep down, that she needs a change, though she can't imagine where it might come from or where it will lead.

Enter Benjamin Blackman, a terminally charming social worker who moonlights for Emma on the weekends, and Gracie Santiago, an overweight little girl from Queens, one of Benjamin's most heartbreaking wards. Together with an eclectic supporting cast—including Emma's prodigal ex-husband, a bossy yoga teacher, and a tiny Japanese diplomat—the unlikely trio is whisked into a fleet-footed story of unforeseen circumstance and delicious opportunity, as their solitary searching for better paths leads them all, however improbably, straight to Park Avenue and the dynamic woman at the novel's center.

Sophisticated yet accessible, lighthearted but also telling, Emma's Table is a thoroughly winning and surprisingly affecting tale of second chances.

The author is also the columnist for my new favorite section of the NY Times Style Section - Social Q's.

Down the Garden Path

Down the Garden Path has stood the test of time as one of the world's best-loved and most-quoted gardening books. Ostensibly an account of the creation of a garden in Huntingdonshire in the 1930s, it is really about the underlying emotions and obsessions for which gardening is just a cover story. The secret of this book's success - and its timelessness - is that it does not seek to impress the reader with a wealth of expert knowledge or advice." As unforgettable as the plants in the garden is the cast of visitors and neighbors who invariably turn up at inopportune moments. For every angelic Miss Hazlitt there is an insufferable Miss Wilkins waiting in the wings. For every thought-provoking Professor, there is an intrusive Miss M, whose chief offense may be that she is a "damnably efficient" gardener. From a disaster building a rock garden, to further adventures with greenhouses, woodland gardens, not to mention cats and treacle, Nichols has left us a true gardening classic.

The Anglo Files

The Anglo Files: A Field Guide to the British -- Sarah Lyall, a reporter for the New York Times, moved to London in the mid-1990s and soon became known for her amusing and incisive dispatches on her adopted country. As she came to terms with its eccentric inhabitants (the English husband who never turned on the lights, the legislators who behaved like drunken frat boys, the hedgehog lovers, the people who extracted their own teeth), she found that she had a ringside seat at a singular transitional era in British life. The roller-coaster decade of Tony Blair's New Labor government was an increasingly materialistic time when old-world symbols of aristocratic privilege and stiff-upper-lip sensibility collided with modern consumerism, overwrought emotion, and a new (but still unsuccessful) effort to make the trains run on time. Appearing a half-century after Nancy Mitford's classic Noblesse Oblige, Lyall's book is a brilliantly witty account of twenty-first-century Britain that will be recognized as a contemporary classic.

American Wife

Looks like another crappy book by author Curtis Sittenfeld (Prep, The Man of My Dreams). You can read the review (sort of) of her latest due out in September from Radar Magazine. Apparently it's a thinly veiled shot at historical/biographical fiction.

Did anyone else enjoy Prep or The Man of My Dreams? I think a lot of people got all excited because of the title of her first book and that grosgrain belt for the jacket image (I was sucked in by it) but I really thought it was horrible. The second book wasn't much better so I am definitely NOT reading this one.

The Flirt

The Flirt -- Tantalizing words written on an ivory card. It is the first clue that will lead an intrigued and intriguing London lady on an odyssey of sensual experience designed to awaken her romantic nature. Out-of-work actor Hughie Venables-Smythe has found a profitable new outlet for his talents. He is hired, often by distraught husbands, to flirt with wives who are feeling neglected in their relationships. His current seductive campaign is focused on Olivia, the spouse of a narcissistic billionaire, and the lady is responding quite nicely to the cream-colored missives he secretly leaves for her. So nicely, in fact, that Hughie decides to employ a similar technique—and shockingly similar messages—in his pursuit of his own heart’s desire: the aloof and charming lingerie designer, Leticia. But the canny, professional flirt’s brazen anonymous intrusions into the lives of two women are about to set in motion a series of remarkable events that no one could have anticipated—setting the stage for shocking revelations about love, friendship, and domestic bliss.

The Daily Candy Lexicon

The DailyCandy Lexicon: Words That Don't Exist But Should -- Maybe you’re tired of talking the way you’ve talked for years (please stop calling things “dope”), or maybe you’re embarrassed that you didn’t know what your cubicle-mate meant by “desk burn” (it’s an injury sustained during in-office sex). Either way, you need a dose of The DailyCandy Lexicon:

· Tart fuel: n. Girlie drinks. e.g., cosmos, kirs, or anything that tastes like Kool-Aid.

· Teenile: adj. Used to describe someone who is way too old for what she is wearing. (“That 45-year-old woman is wearing low-cut jeans. Is she crazy or just teenile?”)

· Kama-suture: n. Aid for injuries sustained during aerobic bedroom exercises (particularly by non-aerobic types).

· Crapas: n. One of the many bad versions of the “small plates” craze.

· Apathy hour: n. What happy hour usually feels like.

Tan Lines

Tan Lines -- A Jacqueline Susann–style thriller by way of Candace Bushnell, Salem's scorching debut follows three young women on a wild Hamptons summer of reinventing themselves. Unhappy with fireman hubby Justin (whom she married in the aftermath of 9/11), fashionista feminist and political media pundit Liza Pike, 29, is harvesting her eggs for future momhood and considering divorce. Former actress Kellyanne Downey is the depressed mistress of wealthy, possessive businessman Walter Isherwood, while indie rock chick Billie Shelton finds herself on a downhill slide: I can't. I'm all fucked out. Reschedule. A prologue foretells that a grisly murder, a premature birth, and a public meltdown, will be the eventual fate for the three at the posh Hampton summer rental they're sharing, and Salem doesn't disappoint. Her poolside read throbs with intensity, spiked with erotic detail (eight thousand nerve endings in the clitoris, and this son of a bitch couldn't find any of them) and disturbing aftershocks.

One Fifth Avenue

I just paid a ridiculous amount of money in order to be one of the first people to read Candace Bushnell's new book One Fifth Avenue which won't be released until September 22nd. I will probably re-sell it when I am finished with it which will be probably a day or two after I receive it - if anyone is interested let me know!

Fashion Victims

Fashion Victims: The Catty Catalogue of Stylish Casualties, From A to Z --- Not available until late August!

The Heartbreak Diet

The Heartbreak Diet: A Story of Family, Fidelity, and Starting Over-- Thorina Rose's funny, beautifully illustrated memoir charts the unexpected dissolution of her marriage and the struggles and adventures of starting over. After marrying young, living in New York, and settling in San Francisco, Rose and her husband start a family. When he begins an affair with his "running partner," Rose must find a way to rebuild her life with her two young sons, navigating her own inner doubts, the chorus of advice from well-meaning friends, and coping mechanisms close at hand: retail therapy and pet adoption (not so useful); leaning on friends and travels with gay men (very useful). With humor and insight, The Heartbreak Diet is a moving and entertaining meditation on fidelity, family, and finding one's way.

Trophies

Anyone remember Heather Thomas from her pre-author days???? Yep, she was on The Fall Guy with Lee Majors and looks fabulous! Now she's written a novel entitled Trophies: Marion Zane is the top Trophy—she has it all: a faithful husband, loyal fellow-Trophy girlfriends, queen-bee status over the Hollywood "name-above-the-title" charities, and—best of all—no prenup!

She knows inside information is king, smiles hide jealousy, jackals lure husbands away (or, worse, steal personal assistants), housekeepers have the power to destroy, and that everyone has devastating secrets—including her! It's why she refuses to gossip yet remembers everything.

So why is she so nervous?

Maybe it's because, after years of unchallenged social position, Marion forgets that in L.A., even enemies embrace—especially ones disguised as girlfriends. When she impulsively champions building a much-needed trauma center hospital downtown, Marion breaks the unwritten code by stepping on another Trophy's charity turf. It's a fatal mistake.

Her furious and jealously bitter "girlfriend" joins forces with a powerful mystery partner to destroy Marion. Drugged and framed as unfaithful and insane, she loses her dream life in one lurid, unforgivable humiliation.

Abandoned by her husband, her deepest secrets exposed, Marion is left shattered and literally penniless in paradise. Determined to build the hospital and regain her love, lifestyle, and dermatologist, Marion goes to hilarious lengths to hide her newfound poverty from even her closest friends, living out of her luxury car and using Magic Marker for eyeliner as she raises hospital funding at five-star restaurants.

Fortunately, Marion's loyal, lusty Trophy girlfriends discover her condition through her overwhelmed maid and come to her rescue, employing ferocious manipulation skills, ridiculous logic, and much-needed dermabrasion. Redirecting the same competitive hyperdrive that won the rocks on their fingers, the girls make Marion their new project even as they deal with their own crises.

Still, all the Trophy support in the world might not be able to stop Marion from betraying one of them; then her mystery enemy is revealed and she's given the choice of re-enthronement or vilification. After all, she's a survivor and didn't become Marion Zane by fair play alone.

Self Portrait in a Velvet Dress

Self Portrait in a Velvet Dress: The Fashion of Frida Kahlo -- Frida Kahlo remains one of the most popular artists of our time and yet no volume has ever focused on one of the most memorable aspects of her persona and creative oeuvre: her wardrobe. Now, for the first time, 95 original and beautifully staged photographs of Kahlo's newly restored clothing are paired with historic photos of the artist wearing them and her paintings in which the garments appear.