Thrust into the media spotlight with her son Sean Wilsey's searing portrayal of her in his New York Times bestseller Oh the Glory of It All, the former queen of San Francisco society shares her own candid take on the fascinating events of her life. Once dubbed San Francisco's "Golden Girl," Montandon socialized with the cream of San Francisco society, including Danielle Steel, Alex Haley, and the Gettys. Immortalized as a character in Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City, she lived a seemingly perfect life in a penthouse above the San Francisco Bay, complete with her marriage to multimillionaire Al Wilsey and the birth of her son, Sean. From her lavish parties to her legendary Roundtable lunches, Montandon was always the talk of the town. Then, less than a decade later, Wilsey announced he was divorcing her, and Sean abandoned her as well—both for the affections of her once-close friend, Dede Traina. Left penniless and virtually suicidal, Montandon once again had to reinvent herself, this time as a humanitarian for peace. From Berlin to Beslan, she made it her life's mission to give a voice to the world's children and spread a message of hope in times of crisis. Oh the Hell of It All is a rich feast of a story: that of a poor girl turned rich turned poor again, in and out of love and betrayed by those closest to her, who has achieved peace in her life through devotion to something outside herself.

“[An] irreverent and remarkably candid memoir about growing up in wealthy eighties San Francisco . . . rollicking, ruthless . . . ultimately generous-hearted.” —Vogue “A vivid mix of brio, self-awareness and sophistication . . . writing well is indeed the best revenge.” —The New York Times Book Review “A monumental piece of work.” —Kirkus Reviews “In the beginning we were happy. And we were always excessive. So in the beginning we were happy to excess.” With these opening lines Sean Wilsey takes us on an exhilarating tour of life in the strangest, wealthiest, and most grandiose of families. Sean's blond-bombshell mother (one of the thinly veiled characters in Armistead Maupin's bestselling Tales of the City) is a 1980s society-page staple, regularly entertaining Black Panthers and movie stars in her marble and glass penthouse, "eight hundred feet in the air above San Francisco; an apartment at the top of a building at the top of a hill: full of light, full of voices, full of windows full of water and bridges and hills." His enigmatic father uses a jet helicopter to drop Sean off at the video arcade and lectures his son on proper hygiene in public restrooms, "You should wash your hands first, before you use the urinal. Not after. Your penis isn't dirty. But your hands are." When Sean, "the kind of child who sings songs to sick flowers," turns nine years old, his father divorces his mother and marries her best friend. Sean's life blows apart. His mother first invites him to commit suicide with her, then has a "vision" of salvation that requires packing her Louis Vuitton luggage and traveling the globe, a retinue of multiracial children in tow. Her goal: peace on earth (and a Nobel Prize). Sean meets Indira Gandhi, Helmut Kohl, Menachem Begin, and the pope, hoping each one might come back to San Francisco and persuade his father to rejoin the family. Instead, Sean is pushed out of San Francisco and sent spiraling through five high schools, till he finally lands at an unorthodox reform school cum "therapeutic community," in Italy. With its multiplicity of settings and kaleidoscopic mix of preoccupations-sex, Russia, jet helicopters, seismic upheaval, boarding schools, Middle Earth, skinheads, home improvement, suicide, skateboarding, Sovietology, public transportation, massage, Christian fundamentalism, dogs, Texas, global thermonuclear war, truth, evil, masturbation, hope, Bethlehem, CT, eventual salvation (abridged list)—Oh the Glory of It All is memoir as bildungsroman as explosion.

There's a time for yes—and there's a time for no. Oh Hell No! is a collection of art and essays that serve a much-needed reminder to say no to anything that might waste our precious energy. Reclaim your time with the help of these sassy illustrated sayings and astute insights. • A timely celebration of the joy of saying no • Features passionate prose from feminist scholar Sara Ahmed • Includes actionable advice from author and journalist Dani Katz From polite refusal to emphatic rejection, we need that two letter word now more than ever. Oh Hell No! is a reminder and a celebration of the universal human right to say "I would prefer not to." • The ultimate naysayer's manifesto • The perfect self-purchase for feminists, introverts, activists, realists, or burned-out overachievers who are trying to say "no" more often • You'll love this book if you love books like The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life by Mark Manson; Boundaries Updated and Expanded Edition: When to Say Yes, How to Say No To Take Control of Your Life by Henry Cloud and John Townsend; and F*ck Feelings: One Shrink's Practical Advice for Managing All Life's Impossible Problems by Michael Bennett MD and Sarah Bennett.

In the middle of the journey of our life Dante finds himself lost in a dark wood but then he founds a whole lot of literary movements and arguably modernity itself with his Divine Comedy that, nonetheless, inexplicably, didn't make God laugh. This serious absence caused God's non-divine counterparts, humans, to wonder: "Why are we in hell?" "Why is it so funny?" "And why can't I laugh?"

Bobby Gould in Hell by David Mamet Short Play, Comedy Characters: 3 male, 1 female Interior Set This is Bobby Gould's day of reckoning. The conniving movie mogul from Speed the Plow awakes in a strange room. A loquacious interrogator in fishing waders enters. Gould argues his case. A woman he has wronged appears and gets so carried away that she says some sassy things to the Interrogator. In the end, Bobby is damned for being "cruel without bei

***2021 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER*** ***THE NATIONAL BESTSELLER*** Winner of the 2021 Sir Walter Raleigh Award for Fiction, Joyce Carol Oates Literary Prize Finalist, 2022 Chautauqua Prize Finalist, Willie Morris Award for Southern Writing Shortlist, 2021 Aspen Words Literary Prize Shortlist, 2022 Maya Angelou Book Award Shortlist, 2022 Carnegie Medal Longlist A Read With Jenna Today Show Book Club Pick! An Ebony Magazine Publishing Book Club Pick! One of Washington Post's 50 Notable Works of Fiction | One of Philadelphia Inquirer's Best Books of 2021 | One of Shelf Awareness's Top Ten Fiction Titles of the Year | One of TIME Magazine’s 100 Must-Read Books | One of NPR.org's "Books We Love" | EW’s "Guide to the Biggest and Buzziest Books of 2021" | One of the New York Public Library's Best Books for Adults | San Diego Union Tribune—My Favorite Things from 2021 | Writer's Bone's Best Books of 2021 | Atlanta Journal Constitution—Top 10 Southern Books of the Year | One of the Guardian's (UK) Best Ten 21st Century Comic Novels | One of Entertainment Weekly's 15 Books You Need to Read This June | On Entertainment Weekly's "Must List" | One of the New York Post's Best Summer Reading books | One of GMA's 27 Books for June | One of USA Today's 5 Books Not to Miss | One of Fortune's 21 Most Anticipated Books Coming Out in the Second Half of 2021 | One of The Root's PageTurners: It’s Getting Hot in Here | One of Real Simple's Best New Books to Read in 2021 An astounding work of fiction from New York Times bestselling author Jason Mott, always deeply honest, at times electrically funny, that goes to the heart of racism, police violence, and the hidden costs exacted upon Black Americans and America as a whole In Jason Mott’s Hell of a Book, a Black author sets out on a cross-country publicity tour to promote his bestselling novel. That storyline drives Hell of a Book and is the scaffolding of something much larger and more urgent: Mott’s novel also tells the story of Soot, a young Black boy living in a rural town in the recent past, and The Kid, a possibly imaginary child who appears to the author on his tour. As these characters’ stories build and converge, they astonish. For while this heartbreaking and magical book entertains and is at once about family, love of parents and children, art and money, it’s also about the nation’s reckoning with a tragic police shooting playing over and over again on the news. And with what it can mean to be Black in America. Who has been killed? Who is The Kid? Will the author finish his book tour, and what kind of world will he leave behind? Unforgettably told, with characters who burn into your mind and an electrifying plot ideal for book club discussion, Hell of a Book is the novel Mott has been writing in his head for the last ten years. And in its final twists, it truly becomes its title.

A book of five short stories 1. "Oh threats of hell and hopes of paradise" 2. "One thing at least is certain, this life flies" 3. "One thing is certain and the rest is lies" 4. "The flower that once has blown forever dies" 5. "I sent my soul into the invisible some letter of the afterlife spell" My stories (five) are told in the first person and inspired by the "Rubaiyat" of Omar Khayyam, the twelfth century philosopher and Edgar Allen Poe. They tell of rape, murder, a philandering preacher, an engineer driven to the gates of insanity by his perfectionist ideals and a despondent professor attempting to leave his legacy by trying to prove Carl Jung's theory of the collective unconscious. I have been writing on these stories for a few years as the spirit would move me to write. When someone asks me what they are about, or to summarize them, my brain sort of goes into neutral and I really don't know where to start. I generally try to change the subject since I can't summarize in 4000 characters or less what I had for breakfast this morning. If the inquisitive person is persistent I simply offer to let them read the book and then they change the subject. Actually, after meditating upon the "Rubaiyat" of Omar Khayyam and wallowing his quatrains around in my mind for a while, I generally end up writing a little. I think I'm much like Omar; still trying to deduce what this thing we call "life" is all about! My stories touch on things from the simple life of an Appalachian Mountains sharecropper, a dubious country preacher, rape, murder, an arduous and unnecessary flight from justice, snakebites and miraculous healings, the lynching of an innocent black man, and subsistence farm life to, the complicated motives of brainy engineers and chemists attempting to leave their legacy to science by proving knowledge can be transmitted genetically; thereby, proving Carl Jung's theory of the collective unconscious to be valid. Keywords: Fiction, Short Stories, Rubaiyat, Omar Khayyam, Carl Jung, Life, Murder, Rape, Preacher, Engineer