Sitting Pretty

A memoir-in-essays from disability advocate and creator of the Instagram account @sitting_pretty Rebekah Taussig, processing a lifetime of memories to paint a beautiful, nuanced portrait of a body that looks and moves differently than most. Growing up as a paralyzed girl during the 90s and early 2000s, Rebekah Taussig only saw disability depicted as something monstrous (The Hunchback of Notre Dame), inspirational (Helen Keller), or angelic (Forrest Gump). None of this felt right; and as she got older, she longed for more stories that allowed disability to be complex and ordinary, uncomfortable and fine, painful and fulfilling. Writing about the rhythms and textures of what it means to live in a body that doesn’t fit, Rebekah reflects on everything from the complications of kindness and charity, living both independently and dependently, experiencing intimacy, and how the pervasiveness of ableism in our everyday media directly translates to everyday life. Disability affects all of us, directly or indirectly, at one point or another. By exploring this truth in poignant and lyrical essays, Taussig illustrates the need for more stories and more voices to understand the diversity of humanity. Sitting Pretty challenges us as a society to be patient and vigilant, practical and imaginative, kind and relentless, as we set to work to write an entirely different story.

More than any other male movie star, the refined Clifton Webb (1889-1966) caused the movie-going public to change its image of a leading man. In a day when leading men were supposed to be strong, virile, and brave, Clifton Webb projected an image of flip, acerbic arrogance. He was able to play everything from a decadent columnist (Laura) to a fertile father (Cheaper by the Dozen and The Remarkable Mr. Pennypacker), delivering lines in an urbanely clipped, acidly dry manner with impeccable timing. Sitting Pretty is his remarkable story. Long before his film career began, Webb was a child actor and later a suavely effete song-and-dance man in numerous Broadway musicals and revues. The turning point in his career came in 1941 when his good friend Noël Coward cast him in Blithe Spirit. Director Otto Preminger saw Webb's performance and cast him in Laura in 1944. Webb began to write his autobiography, but he said that he eventually had gotten "bogged down" in the process. However, he did complete six chapters and left a hefty collection of notes that he intended to use in the proposed book. His writing is as witty and sophisticated as his onscreen persona. Those six chapters, information and voluminous notes, and personal research by the coauthor provide an intimate view of an amazingly talented man's life and times.

How have white Afrikaans-speaking women responded to the liberating possibilities of constitutional democracy? Have they re-imagined themselves in opposition to colonial ideas of race, gender, sexuality and class? Sitting Pretty explores this postapartheid identity through the concepts of ordentlikheid and the volksmoeder.

In 1975, Kathy Patterson joins the sorority Gamma Phi Beta, trying to fit into the social climate of James Monroe University. In the same year, Bill Bennett begins his second year in the fraternity Sigma Chi. At the first big party of the year, Kathy and Bill watch silently as a senior Gamma Phi Beta sister, Linda, is sexually assaulted by one of Bill's fraternity brothers as she lays unconscious on the stairs of the fraternity house. Sorority and fraternity teachings enforce different perceptions on what it means to experience sexual assault, but Bill and Kathy both know that the subject is to be approached casually-more commonly, to not be spoken about at all. Sitting Pretty explores the dynamic between men and women in the seventies, the differences in fraternity and sorority teachings, and finding solace in sisterhood. Rebecca Scherr is a fiction writer and a graduate of George Washington Carver Center for Art and Technology's Literary Arts program. At the age of seventeen, her short story, "Ladylike," was awarded first place in the international Jack London Writing Contest. Her poetry, short stories, and personal essays have also been recognized by the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards, where she has won several gold keys, silver keys, and honorable mentions. In her spare time, Scherr enjoys a cup of coffee, walks with her dog, Mock Trial, and an episode of reality television after a long day. While soft-spoken in everyday life, Scherr has future plans to become a lawyer and looks forward to exploring the bolder parts of herself both in the courtroom and on the page. Sitting Pretty is her first novel, but she is certain there will be plenty more of her fiction on the way.

What does it take to love your life more fully, to feel more focused and productive, and to have deeper, more satisfying relationships with everyone in your life? All it takes is being more mindful and more attuned to your life and what is happening in the moment, whether youre sipping your morning latte, helping your kid with homework, or stuck in traffic on the way to work. Thats what Marriage and Family Therapist and mindfulness practitioner Laurie Goldey discovered more than a decade ago, when, skeptically, she began taking baby steps toward living a more mindful life. What she found was, making tiny changes are all it takes to incorporate noticing into your daily routine, whatever you happen to be doing. Focusing on the task at hand (whether mundane or exceptional) can help you find joy in the most routine or habitual tasks and can bring out your best self, impacting your family, your job, and all of your relationships (especially the one with yourself). If you follow the week-by-week suggestions in this book, you will feel less overwhelmed, less anxious, less likely to spend early-morning hours in bed wide awake, ticking off your to-do list. And thats just the start of the new life ahead of you. Before you know it, youll be sitting pretty.

Professional pet-sitter Beth believes her Greek boyfriend, Alex is the one. So when he’s offered a job in Dubai, he and Beth marry so they can move there together. But on the day they’re due to fly to their new life, Alex says their marriage was a mistake and ends it. By phone. Beth is suddenly husbandless and homeless. Distraught, and with her life in turmoil, when her old boss asks a favour she agrees on autopilot, and goes to feed Talisker the cat, whose handsome but dour owner Henry travels one week in three. Finding herself in luxury surroundings, with nowhere to go and determined not to hear her mother’s “I told you so”, she sleeps on Henry’s sofa. Next day, Beth has her job back and a plan. For the time being, she’ll quietly stay in her clients’ homes until she can convince Alex that this is all a big mistake. She’s pretty sure squatting’s against the law, but if she’s careful, no one need find out ... until the mysterious Henry comes home unexpectedly.

“Neel emerges as a resolute survivor who lived by her convictions, both aesthetically and politically.” —Publisher’s Weekly Phoebe Hoban’s definitive biography of the renowned American painter Alice Neel tells the unforgettable story of an artist whose life spanned the twentieth century, from women’s suffrage through the Depression, McCarthyism, the civil rights movement, the sexual revolution, and second-wave feminism. Throughout her life and work, Neel constantly challenged convention, ultimately gaining an enduring place in the canon. Alice Neel’s stated goal was to “capture the zeitgeist.” Born into a proper Victorian family at the turn of the twentieth century, Neel reached voting age during suffrage. A quintessential bohemian, she was one of the first artists participating in the Easel Project of the Works Progress Administration, documenting the challenges of life during the Depression. An avowed humanist, Neel chose to paint the world around her, sticking to figurative work even during the peak of abstract expressionism. Neel never ceased pushing the envelope, creating a unique chronicle of her time. Neel was fiercely democratic in selecting her subjects, who represent an extraordinarily diverse population—from such legendary figures as Joe Gould to her Spanish Harlem neighbors in the 1940s, the art critic Meyer Schapiro, Nobel Laureate Linus Pauling, Andy Warhol, and major figures of the labor, civil rights, and feminist movements—producing an indelible portrait of twentieth-century America. By dictating her own terms, Neel was able to transcend such personal tragedy as the death of her infant daughter, Santillana, a nervous breakdown and suicide attempts, and the separation from her second child, Isabetta. After spending much of her career in relative obscurity, Neel finally received a major museum retrospective in 1974, at the Whitney Museum of American Art, in New York. In this first paperback edition of the authoritative biography of Neel, which serves also as a cultural history of twentieth-century New York, Hoban documents the tumultuous life of the artist in vivid detail, creating a portrait as incisive as Neel’s relentlessly honest paintings. With a new introduction by Hoban that explores Neel’s enduring relevance, this biography is essential to understanding and appreciating the life and work of one of America’s foremost artists.