Natalie Portman

Academy Award-winning actress, director, producer, and activist Natalie Portman retells three classic fables and imbues them with wit and wisdom in this New York Times bestselling book. From realizing that there is no “right” way to live to respecting our planet and learning what really makes someone a winner, the messages at the heart of Natalie Portman’s Fables are modern takes on timeless life lessons. Told with a playful, kid-friendly voice and perfectly paired with Janna Mattia’s charming artwork, Portman’s insightful retellings of The Tortoise and the Hare, The Three Little Pigs, and Country Mouse and City Mouse are ideal for reading aloud and are sure to become beloved additions to family libraries. An instant New York Times bestseller!

Natalie Portman is only 20 years old, but already she has co-starred in nine films with everyone from Woody Allen to Al Pacino and is considered the best young actress in Hollywood. In the first biography of this dynamic star, Dickerson examines the charm and wit of her professional persona, while revealing the emotional life of the real Portman. From her relationship with her parents, her long friendship with Britney Spears, her life at Harvard, and her involvement in Star Wars, this book delves into a story never before told. Illustrated with 8 colour and 15 b/w photos.

*Featured in The Times' 'Best Books of the Year So Far' 2019*'Somehow this chronicle of a long, dark night of the soul also involves funny stories involving Trump, Putin, and a truly baffling array of degenerates.' Stephen Colbert***What do you do when you realise you have everything you think you've ever wanted but still feel completely empty?What do you do when it all starts to fall apart? The second volume of Moby's extraordinary life story is a journey into the dark heart of fame and the demons that lurk just beneath the bling and bluster of the celebrity lifestyle. In summer 1999, Moby released the album that defined the millennium, PLAY. Like generation-defining albums before it, PLAY was ubiquitous, and catapulted Moby to superstardom. Suddenly he was hanging out with David Bowie and Lou Reed, Christina Ricci and Madonna, taking ecstasy for breakfast (most days), drinking litres of vodka (every day), and sleeping with super models (infrequently). It was a diet that couldn't last. And then it fell apart. The second volume of Moby's memoir is a classic about the banality of fame. It is shocking, riotously entertaining, extreme, and unforgiving. It is unedifying, but you can never tear your eyes away from the page.

ABOUT THE BOOK Born in Jerusalem, Israel on June 9, 1981, Natalie Hershlag grew up to be Oscar-winning actress Natalie Portman. An only child, she moved to the United States with her parents, Avner Hershlag and Shelley Stevens in 1984. Her father, an Israeli fertility doctor, and mother, an artist from Ohio, gave their only child a strong upbringing in Long Island, New York where they stressed education and travel. Natalie’s first language is Hebrew, but she has spoken English since she was a toddler. Natalie visited Israel twice a year as a child, and thanks to her father she still has dual citizenship. She attended Conservative Jewish day school through the seventh grade “to preserve my Hebrew and my sense of Israel more than anything religious,” Natalie told the Jewish News of Greater Phoenix. As a child growing up on Long Island, she found her classmates treating her differently after she began getting work as an actress. It started as early as her first film role in Leon: The Professional in 1994. “In seventh grade, I cried every day when I came back from shooting The Professional,” she told the Jewish News agency in 2002. Years later, she would find the same isolation due to her fame while attending college. Because of her parents, Natalie chose to attend the Ivy-League Harvard University when most of her counterparts were finding themselves in the tabloids by getting in trouble. Natalie drew upon her Israeli background when she penned an op-ed piece in her college newspaper objecting to a law student’s essay condemning Israel. She objected to his assertion that the Middle Eastern country is a “racist colonial occupation ... (in which) white Israeli soldiers destroy refugee camps of the brown people they have dispossessed.” EXCERPT FROM THE BOOK Family is important to Natalie. When she won her Golden Globe for Black Swan, she made a point to thank her grandmother Bernice, who lives in Cincinnati. In fact, it is this branch of Natalie’s family that could be responsible for Natalie’s foray into acting. Bernice’s husband Art, who changed his last name from Edelstein to Stevens, started the family showbiz tradition by starring in his own ads for his windows company, according to an article in The American Israelite. Natalie’s parents, Avner and Shelley, who met at a Jewish Center at Ohio State University, strived to maintain a strong extended family for their only child even after their move to New York. Bernice told the Cincinnati Enquirer in a quote that was included in the American Israelite that she visited her daughter’s family in New York several times a year and, “even though Natalie and I have never lived in the same city — we bonded when she was a baby.” The family had settled in the New York area after moving from Israel and Natalie experienced a serene upbringing. As a youth she attended exclusive and competitive theater camps like Stagedoor Manor and Usden Camp in the Catskills. She was discovered by a Revlon agent when she was 10 at a Long Island pizza parlor and acting in movies like Heat and Mars Attacks! early in her career. Natalie starred as Anne Frank on Broadway in 1998, a role she found extremely personal. “I grew up with the Holocaust, because my grandparents lost their entire families,” Natalie told the Jewish News. She even found a similar story to Anne’s in her own family. “My grandfather's 14-year-old brother was also hidden, but one day he couldn't take it anymore and he ran outside and was shot.” She found the role so emotional that she often found herself crying offstage. She told the Jewish News that “It's a stunning realization when you come to see how much historical memory affects you,” she says... ...buy the book to read more!

"Natalie Portman's Stark Reality" is a biography of the actress that covers her life from childhood through her 20s.

When his father dies, it falls to Larry—the secular son in a family of Orthodox Brooklyn Jews—to recite the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, every day for eleven months. But to the horror and dismay of his sister, Larry refuses, imperiling the fate of his father’s soul. To appease her, he hires a stranger through a website called kaddish.com to say the prayer instead—a decision that will have profound, and very personal, repercussions. Irreverent, hilarious, and wholly irresistible, Nathan Englander’s tale of a son who makes a diabolical compromise brilliantly captures the tensions between tradition and modernity.

SOON TO BE A SERIES FROM APPLE TV! A New York Times Bestseller The revered New York Times bestselling author returns with a novel set in 1960s Baltimore that combines modern psychological insights with elements of classic noir, about a middle-aged housewife turned aspiring reporter who pursues the murder of a forgotten young woman. In 1966, Baltimore is a city of secrets that everyone seems to know—everyone, that is, except Madeline “Maddie” Schwartz. Last year, she was a happy, even pampered housewife. This year, she’s bolted from her marriage of almost twenty years, determined to make good on her youthful ambitions to live a passionate, meaningful life. Maddie wants to matter, to leave her mark on a swiftly changing world. Drawing on her own secrets, she helps Baltimore police find a murdered girl—assistance that leads to a job at the city’s afternoon newspaper, the Star. Working at the newspaper offers Maddie the opportunity to make her name, and she has found just the story to do it: Cleo Sherwood, a missing woman whose body was discovered in the fountain of a city park lake. If Cleo were white, every reporter in Baltimore would be clamoring to tell her story. Instead, her mysterious death receives only cursory mention in the daily newspapers, and no one cares when Maddie starts poking around in a young Black woman's life—except for Cleo's ghost, who is determined to keep her secrets and her dignity. Cleo scolds the ambitious Maddie: You're interested in my death, not my life. They're not the same thing. Maddie’s investigation brings her into contact with people that used to be on the periphery of her life—a jewelry store clerk, a waitress, a rising star on the Baltimore Orioles, a patrol cop, a hardened female reporter, a lonely man in a movie theater. But for all her ambition and drive, Maddie often fails to see the people right in front of her. Her inability to look beyond her own needs will lead to tragedy and turmoil for all sorts of people—including Ferdie, the man who shares her bed, a police officer who is risking far more than Maddie can understand.