This is an album of snapshots taken roughly the mid-1950s and mid- 1960s, depicting a group of cross-dressers united around a place called Casa Susanna. The inhabitants, guests and visitors used it as a weekend headquarters for a regular girls life'. Through these wonderfully intimate shots, Susanna and her friends styled era- specific fashion shows and parties. However, it is in the more private life at Casa Susanna, where the girls clean, cook and play Scrabble, that the insight to a very private club becomes brilliant in its very ordinariness.'

THE STORY: Nestled in the Catskills—1962's land of dirty dancing and Borscht Belt comedy—an inconspicuous bungalow colony catered to a very special clientele: heterosexual men who delighted in dressing and acting as women. These white-collar professionals would discreetly escape their families to spend their weekends safely inhabiting their chosen female alter-egos. But given the opportunity to share their secret lives with the world, the members of this sorority had to decide whether the freedom gained by openness was worth the risk of personal ruin. Based on real events and infused with Fierstein's trademark wit, this moving, insightful, and delightfully entertaining work offers a glimpse into the lives of a group of "self-made women" as they search for acceptance and happiness in their very own Garden of Eden.

The Medina -- the Old City -- of Fez is the best-preserved, medieval walled city in the world. Inside this vibrant Moroccan community, internet cafes and mobile phones coexist with a maze of donkey-trod alleyways, thousand-year-old sewer systems, and Arab-style houses, gorgeous with intricate, if often shabby, mosaic work. While vacationing in Morocco, Suzanna Clarke and her husband, Sandy, are inspired to buy a dilapidated, centuries-old riad in Fez with the aim of restoring it to its original splendor, using only traditional craftsmen and handmade materials. So begins a remarkable adventure that is bewildering, at times hilarious, and ultimately immensely rewarding. A House in Fez chronicles their meticulous restoration, but it is also a journey into Moroccan customs and lore and a window into the lives of its people as friendships blossom. When the riad is finally returned to its former glory, Suzanna finds she has not just restored an old house, but also her soul.

America's leading interior designers show readers how to live in the most stylish way with their adorable dogs, offering an array of inspirational tips for keeping both your home and dogs attractive and chic The most elegant, stylish, and well-appointed house is nothing but a shell without its inhabitants, including the canine kind. Just ask the 22 A-List interior designers who grace the pages of At Home with Dogs and Their Designers who love nothing more than letting their best pals sleep in bed with them, cuddle on the couch, and essentially rule the roost. No room is off limits, no piece of furniture banned, clothing is optional, but their accessories are just as chic as their surroundings. Accidents may happen on vintage rugs, antiques are sometimes mistaken for chew toys, and more than one pair of ruined designer shoes have befallen them, but none would consider living without their loyal and loving best friends among the things they love. With individual chapters exploring each of the dogs' amazing lives as they romp through the stunning interiors and gardens they call home with their humans, this book as much an inspirational design book, even if you don’t live with pets, as it is a resource, packed with clever tips from the interior designers themselves on ways to live with dogs. Teddy, Alex Papachristidis’ Yorkie, uses a miniature vintage chair to hop from the floor to the bed instead of doggie steps while Brooke Gianetti created a custom doggie gate made from antique wooden doors to keep Bebe, Sera, Frasier, and Sophie from getting into trouble while she is away from home. With 6 pups on the loose, Carolyne Roehm always orders extra yardage of fabric to make protective covers and quilts. Mary McDonald happily climbs on the oversized dog bed her 5 Pugs—Jack, Lulu, Boris, Eva, and Violet—share for daily “pug hugs” while Charlotte Moss’ Cavalier King Charles Spaniels, Daisy and Buddy, lounge in a cabana out in the Hamptons on summer weekends. All of the featured pooches are interviewed, giving us insight into the luxury of their daily lives from their favorite places to sleep to their guilty pleasures. Complete with a resource guide for your decorative needs as well as pet needs (including adoption and rescue organizations), At Home with Dogs and Their Designers opens the door—from coast to coast, townhouse to beach house—allowing us to peek in and embrace this love letter from these designers to their pets, who are most assuredly family members. FEATURED HUMANS/INTERIOR DESIGNERS: Martyn Lawrence Bullard,Nathan Turner and Eric Hughes, Jeffrey Alan Marks, Mary McDonald, Betsy Burnham, Kelly Wearstler, Schuyler SampertonBrooke Giannetti, Hutton Wilkinson, Windsor Smith, Mark D. Sikes, Jonathan Adler, Steven Gambrel, Katie Ridder, Alex Papachristidis, Robert Couturier, Charlotte Moss, Bunny Williams Carolyne Roehm, Brian J. McCarthy, Michelle Nussbaumer

Bestselling author David Shields analyzed over a decade's worth of front-page war photographs fromTheNew York Timesand came to a shocking conclusion: the photo-editing process ofthe "paper of record,"by way of pretty, heroic, and lavishly aesthetic image selection, pullsthe woolover the eyes of its readers; Shields forces us to face not only the the media's complicity in dubious and catastrophic military campaigns but our own as well.This powerful media mouthpiece, the mightyTimes, far from being a check on governmental power, is in reality a massive amplifier for its dark forces by virtue of the way it aestheticizeswarfare. Anyone baffled by the willful American involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan can't help but see in this book how eagerly and invariably theTimesled the way in making the case for these wars through the manipulation of its visuals. Shields forces the reader to weigh the consequences of our own passivity in the face of these images' opiatic numbing. The photographs gathered inWar Is Beautiful, often beautiful and always artful, are filters of reality rather than the documentary journalism they purport to be.

The Catskills (“Cat Creek” in Dutch), America’s original frontier, northwest of New York City, with its seven hundred thousand acres of forest land preserve and its five counties—Delaware, Greene, Sullivan, Ulster, Schoharie; America’s first great vacationland; the subject of the nineteenth-century Hudson River School paintings that captured the almost godlike majesty of the mountains and landscapes, the skies, waterfalls, pastures, cliffs . . . refuge and home to poets and gangsters, tycoons and politicians, preachers and outlaws, musicians and spiritualists, outcasts and rebels . . . Stephen Silverman and Raphael Silver tell of the turning points that made the Catskills so vital to the development of America: Henry Hudson’s first spotting the distant blue mountains in 1609; the New York State constitutional convention, resulting in New York’s own Declaration of Independence from Great Britain and its own constitution, causing the ire of the invading British army . . . the Catskills as a popular attraction in the 1800s, with the construction of the Catskill Mountain House and its rugged imitators that offered WASP guests “one-hundred percent restricted” accommodations (“Hebrews will knock vainly for admission”), a policy that remained until the Catskills became the curative for tubercular patients, sending real-estate prices plummeting and the WASP enclave on to richer pastures . . . Here are the gangsters (Jack “Legs” Diamond and Dutch Schultz, among them) who sought refuge in the Catskill Mountains, and the resorts that after World War II catered to upwardly mobile Jewish families, giving rise to hundreds of hotels inspired by Grossinger’s, the original “Disneyland with knishes”—the Concord, Brown’s Hotel, Kutsher’s Hotel, and others—in what became known as the Borscht Belt and Sour Cream Alps, with their headliners from movies and radio (Phil Silvers, Eddie Cantor, Milton Berle, et al.), and others who learned their trade there, among them Moss Hart (who got his start organizing summer theatricals), Sid Caesar, Lenny Bruce, Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, and Joan Rivers. Here is a nineteenth-century America turning away from England for its literary and artistic inspiration, finding it instead in Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle” and his childhood recollections (set in the Catskills) . . . in James Fenimore Cooper’s adventure-romances, which provided a pastoral history, describing the shift from a colonial to a nationalist mentality . . . and in the canvases of Thomas Cole, Asher B. Durand, Frederick Church, and others that caught the grandeur of the wilderness and that gave texture, color, and form to Irving’s and Cooper’s imaginings. Here are the entrepreneurs and financiers who saw the Catskills as a way to strike it rich, plundering the resources that had been likened to “creation,” the Catskills’ tanneries that supplied the boots and saddles for Union troops in the Civil War . . . and the bluestone quarries whose excavated rock became the curbs and streets of the fast-growing Eastern Seaboard. Here are the Catskills brought fully to life in all of their intensity, beauty, vastness, and lunacy.