Off Easy Street A Memoir

“Mama admitted she was not the nest-building type." With these words author Jean Knight Green starts readers on an engaging journey through backwoods and dusty hamlets of the early 1900's Pacific Northwest. Told from the viewpoint of her high-spirited childhood self, she recounts her Mama's audacious bargain with Papa, bold Englishman and gold speculator, that began the family's saga. Here pledge: to support the family for three years by teaching in remote outposts (Spokane, where did they lived, did not allow married teachers) so Papa could have time to put the family "on Easy Street" as he always promised. While Papa chased gold, strong-willed Mama fearlessly carved out an unusual, adventurous life for her daughters while opening minds of all ages in a chilly one-room schoolhouse. Off Easy Street: A Memoir recounts an inspiring tale of family and relationships, exploits and adventures. "Papa promised Mama mink and pearls, but all she ever wanted was a new corset." Chasing dreams, managing reality: in today's lives only the details have changed. Concluding with Erma Bombeck-style tales from her later years, the author, a born storyteller, rounds out the engaging account of a life filled with remarkable memories and good humor. Green died in 2001. Her daughter Jennifer Ralston Blair edited and compiled her mother's works to introduce others to her mother's delightful tales.

The candid, revealing, hilarious, and inspiring memoir of the iconic star of the Hellboy movies, Beauty and the Beast, and Sons of Anarchy

A moving and offbeat story of unlikely friendship, the cost of ambition, and what happens when the things you’ve always run away from show up on your doorstep. To most, Maggie Rowe appears to live on Easy Street. Her stylish home is in a fashionable Los Angeles neighborhood. She has a kind husband who makes her laugh. And after years of struggle, she is finally making a name for herself in Hollywood. But the agreeable, confident persona she presents to the world often feels like a deception to Maggie, who’s long grappled with mental illness and feelings of inadequacy. Enter Joanna Hergert, a neurodiverse middle-aged woman who lives with her elderly mother. Maggie’s husband, Jim, introduces her to the pair after meeting them at a local charbroiled chicken franchise. Over the next several years, she forms a friendship with Joanna and her mother—despite Joanna’s robust romantic fixation on Jim. What begins as a mild curiosity soon blooms into a complicated and intimate friendship that will challenge Maggie to confront her mental health issues and the trade-offs she’s made to live life on her own terms. Engrossing, moving, and wickedly funny, Easy Street is a midlife coming-of-age buddy comedy about embracing the strength of the families we fashion, finding peace with the choices we make, and, above all, learning to be compassionate with ourselves.

A Taiwanese American rebel restaurateur chronicles his rise to success from his difficult childhood in the American South to his decision to embrace all he had learned about food in his father's restaurants and his mother's kitchen to create his own culinary identity.

Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Memoir or Autobiography A New York Times Notable Book of 2022 * Vulture’s #1 Memoir of 2022 * A Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, USA TODAY, Time, BuzzFeed, Publishers Weekly, Booklist, and New York Public Library Best Book of the Year From Chloé Cooper Jones—Pulitzer Prize finalist, philosophy professor, Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant recipient—an “exquisite” (Oprah Daily) and groundbreaking memoir about disability, motherhood, and the search for a new way of seeing and being seen. “I am in a bar in Brooklyn, listening to two men, my friends, discuss whether my life is worth living.” So begins Chloé Cooper Jones’s bold, revealing account of moving through the world in a body that looks different than most. Jones learned early on to factor “pain calculations” into every plan, every situation. Born with a rare congenital condition called sacral agenesis which affects both her stature and gait, her pain is physical. But there is also the pain of being judged and pitied for her appearance, of being dismissed as “less than.” The way she has been seen—or not seen—has informed her lens on the world her entire life. She resisted this reality by excelling academically and retreating to “the neutral room in her mind” until it passed. But after unexpectedly becoming a mother (in violation of unspoken social taboos about the disabled body), something in her shifts, and Jones sets off on a journey across the globe, reclaiming the spaces she’d been denied, and denied herself. From the bars and domestic spaces of her life in Brooklyn to sculpture gardens in Rome; from film festivals in Utah to a Beyoncé concert in Milan; from a tennis tournament in California to the Killing Fields of Phnom Penh, Jones weaves memory, observation, experience, and aesthetic philosophy to probe the myths underlying our standards of beauty and desirability and interrogates her own complicity in upholding those myths. “Bold, honest, and superbly well-written” (Andre Aciman, author of Call Me By Your Name) Easy Beauty is the rare memoir that has the power to make you see the world, and your place in it, with new eyes.

The candid, hilarious, and inspiring memoir of the iconic star of Beauty and the Beast,the Hellboy movies,and Sons of Anarchy. A classically trained actor who cut his teeth in the East Village's Off-Broadway scene, Ron Perlman—a Golden Globe winner (Beauty and the Beast) with starring roles in the Hellboymovies, Drive, Pacific Rim, and Sons of Anarchy—has traveled an offbeat path to showbiz success. His story involves rising from New York's tough Washington Heights neighborhood, enduring incredible hardships, and ignoring the naysayers who taunted him for his distinctive looks. It's a tale that demonstrates the power of persistence. With a filmography of nearly 200 credits working alongside countless stars during his forty-year career, Perlman knows the ins-and-outs of filmmaking. In Easy Street (the Hard Way), he shares his inspiring story for the next generation of performers.

A moving and offbeat story of unlikely friendship, the cost of ambition, and what happens when the things you’ve always run away from show up on your doorstep. To most, Maggie Rowe appears to live on Easy Street. Her stylish home is in a fashionable Los Angeles neighborhood. She has a kind husband who makes her laugh. And after years of struggle, she is finally making a name for herself in Hollywood. But the agreeable, confident persona she presents to the world often feels like a deception to Maggie, who’s long grappled with mental illness and feelings of inadequacy. Enter Joanna Hergert, a neurodiverse middle-aged woman who lives with her elderly mother. Maggie’s husband, Jim, introduces her to the pair after meeting them at a local charbroiled chicken franchise. Over the next several years, she forms a friendship with Joanna and her mother—despite Joanna’s robust romantic fixation on Jim. What begins as a mild curiosity soon blooms into a complicated and intimate friendship that will challenge Maggie to confront her mental health issues and the trade-offs she’s made to live life on her own terms. Engrossing, moving, and wickedly funny, Easy Street is a midlife coming-of-age buddy comedy about embracing the strength of the families we fashion, finding peace with the choices we make, and, above all, learning to be compassionate with ourselves.