A Singular Woman

From the author of The Beneficiary: Fortune, Misfortune and the Story of My Father comes a major publishing event: an unprecedented look into the life of the woman who most singularly shaped Barack Obama-his mother. Barack Obama has written extensively about his father, but little is known about Stanley Ann Dunham, the fiercely independent woman who raised him, the person he credits for, as he says, "what is best in me." Here is the missing piece of the story. Award-winning reporter Janny Scott interviewed nearly two hundred of Dunham's friends, colleagues, and relatives (including both her children), and combed through boxes of personal and professional papers, letters to friends, and photo albums, to uncover the full breadth of this woman's inspiring and untraditional life, and to show the remarkable extent to which she shaped the man Obama is today. Dunham's story moves from Kansas and Washington state to Hawaii and Indonesia. It begins in a time when interracial marriage was still a felony in much of the United States, and culminates in the present, with her son as our president- something she never got to see. It is a poignant look at how character is passed from parent to child, and offers insight into how Obama's destiny was created early, by his mother's extraordinary faith in his gifts, and by her unconventional mothering. Finally, it is a heartbreaking story of a woman who died at age fifty-two, before her son would go on to his greatest accomplishments and reflections of what she taught him.

The New York Times bestseller-an unprecedented look into the life and character of the woman who raised a president. Barack Obama has written extensively about his father but credited his mother for "what is best in me." Still, little is known about this fiercely independent, spirited woman who raised the man who became the first biracial president of the United States. This book is that story. In A Singular Woman, award-winning New York Times reporter Janny Scott tells the story of this unique woman, Stanley Ann Dunham, who broke many of the rules of her time, and shows how her fierce example helped influence the future president-and can serve as an inspiration to us all.

Contemporary art historians - all of them women - probe the dilemmas and complexities of writing about the woman artist, past and present. These 13 essays address the work and history of specific artists, beginning with the Renaissance and ending with the present day.

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR "[A] poignant addition to the literature of moneyed glamour and its inevitable tarnish and decay…like something out of Fitzgerald or Waugh."—The New Yorker A parable for the new age of inequality: part family history, part detective story, part history of a vanishing class, and a vividly compelling exploration of the degree to which an inheritance—financial, cultural, genetic—conspired in one person's self-destruction. Land, houses, and money tumbled from one generation to the next on the eight-hundred-acre estate built by Scott's investment banker great-grandfather on Philadelphia's Main Line. There was an obligation to protect it, a license to enjoy it, a duty to pass it on—but it was impossible to know in advance how all that extraordinary good fortune might influence the choices made over a lifetime. In this warmly felt tale of an American family's fortunes, journalist Janny Scott excavates the rarefied world that shaped her charming, unknowable father, Robert Montgomery Scott, and provides an incisive look at the weight of inheritance, the tenacity of addiction, and the power of buried secrets. Some beneficiaries flourished, like Scott's grandmother, Helen Hope Scott, a socialite and celebrated horsewoman said to have inspired Katherine Hepburn's character in the play and Academy Award-winning film The Philadelphia Story. For others, including the author's father, she concludes, the impact was more complex. Bringing her journalistic talents, light touch, and crystalline prose to this powerful story of a child's search to understand a parent's puzzling end, Scott also raises questions about our new Gilded Age. New fortunes are being amassed, new estates are being born. Does anyone wonder how it will all play out, one hundred years hence?

A celebration of Chanel haute couture photographed by one of fashion's most acclaimed hotographers. As the fashion cognoscenti would say, there's magic in true haute couture--the creations that entail thousands of hours of handwork, crafting, embellishing. In an exclusive shoot with the house of Chanel, photographer Cathleen Naundorf gained rare access to their physical archives to photograph couture gowns against theatrical backdrops. The result: a book of ethereal, cinematic photographs that capture the exquisiteness of the ensembles and the magical allure of haute couture. This is what sartorial dreams are made of. For more than two decades, Naundorf has used her expert photographic skills to pay homage to the haute couture aesthetic. Combining her experiences in travel, art, and photojournalism, Naundorf elaborately arranges each detail of her photographs, using storyboards and extensively researching the lighting, setting, backdrops, props, hairpieces, makeup, and design for every image. Each photograph is a singular vision suggesting romance, surrealism, exoticism, and above all else, fantasy.

Brings to life one of the most significant figures in the crusade for women's rights in America This comprehensive biography of Susan B. Anthony traces the life of a feminist icon, bringing new depth to our understanding of her influence on the course of women’s history. Beginning with her humble Quaker childhood in rural Massachusetts, taking readers through her late twenties when she left a secure teaching position to pursue activism, and ultimately tracing her evolution into a champion of women’s rights, this book offers an in-depth look at the ways Anthony’s life experiences shaped who she would become. Drawing on countless letters, diaries, and other documents, Kathleen Barry offers new interpretations of Anthony’s relationship with feminist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and illuminating insights on Anthony’s views of men, marriage, and children. She paints a vivid picture of the political, economic, and cultural milieu of 19th-century America. And, above all, she brings a very real Susan B. Anthony to life. Here we find a powerful portrait of this most singular woman—who she was, what she felt, and how she thought. Complete with a new preface to honor the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage and Anthony’s vital role in the fight for voting rights, this thorough biography gives us essential new insight into the life and legacy of an enduring American heroine.

The groundbreaking multigenerational biography, a richly textured account of President Obama and the forces that shaped him and sustain him, from Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter, political commentator, and acclaimed biographer David Maraniss. In Barack Obama: The Story, David Maraniss has written a deeply reported generational biography teeming with fresh insights and revealing information, a masterly narrative drawn from hundreds of interviews, including with President Obama in the Oval Office, and a trove of letters, journals, diaries, and other documents. The book unfolds in the small towns of Kansas and the remote villages of western Kenya, following the personal struggles of Obama’s white and black ancestors through the swirl of the twentieth century. It is a roots story on a global scale, a saga of constant movement, frustration and accomplishment, strong women and weak men, hopes lost and deferred, people leaving and being left. Disparate family threads converge in the climactic chapters as Obama reaches adulthood and travels from Honolulu to Los Angeles to New York to Chicago, trying to make sense of his past, establish his own identity, and prepare for his political future. Barack Obama: The Story chronicles as never before the forces that shaped the first black president of the United States and explains why he thinks and acts as he does. Much like the author’s classic study of Bill Clinton, First in His Class, this promises to become a seminal book that will redefine a president.

Now a New Directions book, the legendary novel that is “equal to the best of Virginia Woolf and Samuel Beckett” (New York Times Book Review) In Malina, originally published in German in 1971, Ingeborg Bachmann invites the reader into a world stretched to the very limits of language. An unnamed narrator, a writer in Vienna, is torn between two men: viewed, through the tilting prism of obsession, she travels further into her own madness, anxiety, and genius. Malina explores love, "deathstyles," the roots of fascism, and passion.