Conversations With Marilyn

Relates the author's interviews with the legendary screen actress, offering an intimate portrait of the private Marilyn

"I'm so many people. They shock me sometimes. I wish I was just me!" --Marilyn Monroe Nearly sixty years after her death, Marilyn Monroe remains an icon whom everyone loves but no one really knows. The conversations gathered here--spanning her emergence on the Hollywood scene to just days before her death at age 36--show Monroe at her sharpest and most insightful on the thorny topics of ambition, fame, femininity, desire, and more. Together with an introduction by Sady Doyle, these pieces reveal yet another Marilyn: not the tragic heroine she's become in the popular imagination, but a righteously and justifiably angry figure breaking free of the limitations the world forced on her.

Given as a Christmas present to Marilyn Monroe, Maf the dog provides keen insight into the world of the Hollywood starlet during the last two years of her life.

An intimate memoir recalling a young photographer's relationship with Marilyn Monroe just months before her death, with extraordinary photographs, some of which have never been published. "With the precision of a surgeon, Schiller slices through the façade of Marilyn Monroe in his unflinching memoir. Revealing and readable, it’s a book I couldn’t put down." —Tina Brown When he pulled his station wagon into the 20th Century-Fox studios parking lot in Los Angeles in 1960, twenty-three-year-old Lawrence Schiller kept telling himself that this was just another assignment, just another pretty girl. But the assignment and the girl were anything but ordinary. Schiller was a photographer for Look magazine and his subject was Marilyn Monroe, America's sweetheart and sex symbol. In this intimate memoir, Schiller recalls the friendship that developed between him and Monroe while he photographed her in Hollywood in 1960 and 1962 on the sets of Let's Make Love and the unfinished feature Something's Got to Give, the last film she worked on. Schiller recalls Marilyn as tough and determined, enormously insecure as an actress but totally self-assured as a photographer’s model. Monroe knew how to use her looks and sexuality to generate publicity, and in 1962 she allowed Schiller to publish the first nude photographs of her in over ten years, which she then used as a weapon against a studio that wanted to have her fired—and ultimately succeeded. The Marilyn Schiller knew and writes about was adept at hiding deep psychological scars, but she was also warm and open, candid and disarming, a movie star who wished to be taken more seriously than she was. Accompanying the text are eighteen of the author’s own photographs, some never previously published. Many writers have tried to capture her essence on the page, but as someone who was in the room, a young man Marilyn could connect with and trust, Schiller gives us a unique look at the real woman offscreen. "In this short, splendid memoir, Lawrence Schiller offers us another cut on the scintillating diamond that is Marilyn Monroe. In clear honest straightforward prose, Schiller allows us to dwell in the heart of another time. He captures Marilyn, both in photographs and words, and in so doing he gives us intimate access into one of the great stories of the 20th century: the complicated cocktail of joy and sadness that goes along with both beauty and fame." —Colum McCann

From the Orange Prize winning author of HomeAcclaimed on publication as a contemporary classic, Housekeeping is the story of Ruth and Lucille, orphansgrowing up in the small desolate town of Fingerbone in the vast northwest of America.Abandoned by a succession of relatives, the sisters find themselves in the care of Sylvie, the remote and enigmatic sister of their dead mother. Steeped in imagery of the bleak wintry landscape around them, the sisters' struggle towards adulthood is powerfully portrayed in a novel about loss, loneliness and transience.'I love and have lived with this book . . . it holds a unique and quiet place among the masterpieces of 20th century American fiction.' Paul Bailey'I found myself reading slowly, than more slowly--this is not a novel to be hurried through, for every sentence is a delight.' Doris Lessing

To tie-in with a major film, starring Michelle Williams, Eddie Redmayne, Judi Dench, Emma Watson, Kenneth Branagh and Dominic Cooper. This edition combines Colin Clark’s acclaimed The Prince, the Showgirl and Me and My Week with Marilyn.

Relying on over 150 interviews as well as Marilyn's letters and diaries, this work by best-selling biographer Spoto casts new light on every aspect of the actress's tempestuous life.