What's a dedicated bachelor doing at a week-long society wedding celebration? Doug Llewellyn is being bored out of his skull…until a beautiful, unknown woman calls him "darling," then plants a big wet kiss on him. Suddenly boredom is no longer Doug's problem. Rosie Kilgannon, she of the big wet kiss, is also a guest at the wedding, and although she's used Doug as a way to escape an amorous admirer, that kiss was really something else! Why not enjoy each other for the week, no strings attached? Which might have worked, if not for the weeping bride, the suspiciously shifty groom, the neurotic wedding planner…and the fact that True Love often sneaks up on the unwary and belts them right in the chops!

Dear Diary, I’m surviving middle school and living in Singapore! Mom is still cooking up a storm, making delicious local food; Alex is still annoying, as usual; Dad is still busy making sure that we are all happy. I’ve decided to join the water polo class as my extra-curricular activity. That’s going to be real fun. Now all I have to do is grab my googles and swim gear and go. The next few months will be BLISSFUL, right? Tired of all the trouble Sharon has caused since Rosie arrived in Singapore, Rosie is determined to stay as far as possible away from her rival. So she signs up for water polo (yes, seriously, water polo). But Ben accidentally signs Rosie up for student council, and she finds herself running for president—against Sharon! Can middle school get any worse?

"Spike Gillespie is beautiful, charming, and funny. She told me to write that. It's also true, especially the funny part. Some of us are just a lot more alive than others, and Spike is one of those people who lives at 90 m.p.h. while experiencing everything that happens to her with an intensity that is either painful or hilarious, but usually both. If you can imagine Anne Lamott as a working-class kid from Jersey with a penchant for losers, you have an idea of Spike. She's a woman grown now and signs of wisdom are setting in, not that many years but a lot of mileage on the woman. As a writer, what she brings to the mountains of baggage in her life is not only humor but incurable honesty. I think of her as a voice of the younger generation, even though she's approaching forty, because she has no protective layer on her nerve endings, no cynicism, no been there/done that, no ability to dismiss anything as too freaking strange to bother with. She experiences it all wide open and then reports back. —Molly Ivins, nationally syndicated political columnist and author of Molly Ivins Can't Say That, Can She? "Spike Gillespie's voice is highly idiosyncratic, extremely charming, and deeply personal. . . . She is such a winning heroine that you root for her, for her son. You want to smooth the way for them a bit through the hardships they endure with such great good humor." —Sarah Bird, author of The Yokota Officers Club, Virgin of the Rodeo, and The Mommy Club Spike Gillespie tells it like it is. Whether she's writing about men, mothering or money, she cuts to the chase, unabashedly recounting the exhilaration and uncertainty she is forever encountering along the odd path that is her life. Gillespie approaches her subjects with a keen eye for curious details and a readiness to ask hard questions and give honest, even brutal, answers. Her willingness to "put it all down—the painful, the funny, the mundane, the embarrassing" has won legions of readers for her print and online columns. Surrender (But Don't Give Yourself Away) collects forty-six essays, which initially appeared in such publications as the Washington Post, Austin Chronicle, Dallas Morning News, Bust, Gargoyle, and thecommonspace.org. As Gillespie describes them, "There are odes to my good days and bad, to trips I've taken—both real and metaphorical, to holiness found in unexpected places, to men I have not slept with, to learning to live sober. Too, there are miscellaneous ruminations on my alter-ego, my inner-teen, the floor mat in my car, a dead squirrel in the road." Binding these pieces is the thread of hope: there are moments the thread slips out of view only to resurface in some unexpected location. Sometimes it takes awhile, but Gillespie always relocates hope, discovering even in her darkest times that life is full of an embarrassment of riches.

When people hear the name "Clooney," they automatically think of George Clooney, one of Hollywood's biggest stars. But it was his aunt Rosemary who first catapulted the name into bright lights with a string of hit songs in the 1950s and a starring role alongside Bing Crosby in the immortal "White Christmas." Drawing on interviews with family members, managers, promoters, and the jazz musicians who worked with her, as well as contemporary newspaper articles and reviews, Late Life Jazz tells the unsung story of one of America's finest singers, Rosemary Clooney. Ken Crossland and Malcolm Macfarlane trace Rosemary's life from her hardscrabble beginnings in Maysville Kentucky, through her first performances singing with the Barney Rapp Band in Cincinnati, through her rise to pop stardom in the early 1950s when she topped the Hit Parade with songs such as "Come On-a My House," "Tenderly," and "Half As Much." By the time the 1960s arrived, however, personal turmoil, fueled by depression and an addiction to prescription medication, almost destroyed Clooney's career-and her life. She underwent years of therapy and recuperation before she was able to perform again in the early 1970s. Few expected her to be anything more than a baroness of nostalgia, but Rosemary had other ideas. Rejuvenated by a series of concerts alongside her friend and mentor, Bing Crosby, she found a new medium in the midst of America's finest jazz musicians, building a second career and with it a reputation as one of the finest interpreters of the Great American Songbook. Vividly written and painstakingly researched, Late Life Jazz explores the rise, fall, and final triumph of Clooney the First, Aunt Rosemary, jazz singer par excellence.

As the notorious Reva Shayne on the daytime television drama Guiding Light, Kim Zimmer portrayed a vixen, a manic-depressive, an Amish woman, a time traveler, a Civil War belle, a talk show host, a cancer survivor, a loving mother, and a devoted wife. In her more than two decades on the show, she earned eleven Daytime Emmy nominations and four wins, not to mention a legion of loving fans. Now, in this heartfelt memoir, Zimmer delves into her experiences as a daytime diva. Packed with on- and off-set photographs and behind-the-scenes information, blatantly honest and wildly indiscreet, I’m Just Sayin’ tells all in an insightful journey through the parallel lives of Reva Shayne and Kim Zimmer—and the true stories behind the longest-running drama in television and radio history.

The "New York Post" theater columnist draws on more than 150 insider interviews to celebrate the productions, artists, and movements that shaped Broadway in the years spanning "Sunset Boulevard" through "The Lion King."

"I need you," the tall, good-looking missionary had said...but he'd been speaking to Josey's entire church at the time. Had she taken it too literally? Because she was no longer in Gull Lake, Minnesota. She was a missionary. In Russia. For a year. True, Josey had wanted to skip town when her sister married her ex, and her secret crush/best friend got engaged. But Russia? Yet after a few weeks the idea grew on her. She could speak enough words to buy fruit at the Moscow market, and the missionary role was feeling...right (although her bagel-thieving roommate tested her daily). Even the frosty Russian weather was no big deal for this Minnesota girl — it was getting her love life to thaw that was the real challenge!