The Star Shiner poses the question: Can a young man from a small rural Kentucky town--fleeing a domineering mother and an abusive, alcoholic father--find recognition and happiness in New York city, working with the high-powered fashion and cosmetic industries, and with some of the world's most famous people--without losing his values and his soul? After a notable career in fashion illustration and modeling in Paris, Richardson becomes a makeup artist, working with Vogue and Harper's Bazaar, and photographers Richard Avedon, Irving Penn and Frecesco Scavullo. The book is more than a celebrity memoir in that it is particularly a narrative of the '70s into the '90s, a time in New York's history of financial difficulties and corruption. This was the golden era of fashion and cosmetics when Vogue editor-in-chief Diana Vreeland, Charles Revson and Estee Lauder, the king and queen of cosmetics and Avedon, Penn and Scavullo ruled the industries. The reader is taken into wild nights at Studio 54 and into New York's downtown after-hours dungeons, seething with sex, drugs and danger, where individuals are treated as sexual stepping stones. Then the party ended with the scourge of AIDS that took Richardson's partner and turned Richardson's life around with a spiritual awakening.

The Star Shiner poses the question: Can a young man from a small rural Kentucky town--fleeing a domineering mother and an abusive, alcoholic father--find recognition and happiness in New York city, working with the high-powered fashion and cosmetic industries, and with some of the world's most famous people--without losing his values and his soul? After a notable career in fashion illustration and modeling in Paris, Richardson becomes a makeup artist, working with Vogue and Harper's Bazaar, and photographers Richard Avedon, Irving Penn and Frecesco Scavullo. The book is more than a celebrity memoir in that it is particularly a narrative of the '70s into the '90s, a time in New York's history of financial difficulties and corruption. This was the golden era of fashion and cosmetics when Vogue editor-in-chief Diana Vreeland, Charles Revson and Estee Lauder, the king and queen of cosmetics and Avedon, Penn and Scavullo ruled the industries. The reader is taken into wild nights at Studio 54 and into New York's downtown after-hours dungeons, seething with sex, drugs and danger, where individuals are treated as sexual stepping stones. Then the party ended with the scourge of AIDS that took Richardson's partner and turned Richardson's life around with a spiritual awakening.

NAMED A BEST BOOK OF 2020 BY NPR “Amy Jo Burns writes a version of Appalachia that is one step removed from magic – all strychnine and moonshine and powerful wonder.”—NPR “[A] wrenching testament, told in language as incandescent as smoldering coal. . . This is not a despairing book, but a hopeful one, of Appalachian women taking back their life stories.” —New York Times Book Review On a lush mountaintop trapped in time, two women vow to protect each other at all costs-and one young girl must defy her father to survive. An hour from the closest West Virginia mining town, fifteen-year-old Wren Bird lives in a cloistered mountain cabin with her parents. They have no car, no mailbox, and no visitors-except for her mother's lifelong best friend. Every Sunday, Wren's father delivers winding sermons in an abandoned gas station, where he takes up serpents and praises the Lord for his blighted white eye, proof of his divinity and key to the hold he has over the community, over Wren and her mother. But over the course of one summer, a miracle performed by Wren's father quickly turns to tragedy. As the order of her world begins to shatter, Wren must uncover the truth of her father's mysterious legend and her mother's harrowing history and complex bond with her best friend. And with that newfound knowledge, Wren can imagine a different future for herself than she has been told to expect. Rich with epic love and epic loss, and diving deep into a world that is often forgotten but still part of America, Shiner reveals the hidden story behind two generations' worth of Appalachian heartbreak and resolve. Amy Jo Burns brings us a smoldering, taut debut novel about modern female myth-making in a land of men-and one young girl who must ultimately open her eyes.

Alien is the star controller for the entire galaxy, but one night something disastrous happens, and he faces the biggest problem of his life.