Secret Lives

With outrageous and uncensored profiles of everyone from William Shakespeare to Thomas Pynchon, Secret Lives of Great Authors tackles all the tough questions your high school teachers were afraid to ask: What's the deal with Lewis Carroll and little girls? Is it true that J. D. Salinger drank his own urine? How many women-and men-did Lord Byron actually sleep with? And why was Ayn Rand such a big fan of Charlie's Angels? Classic literature was never this much fun in school! Authors included: William Shakespeare Lord Byron Honoré de Balzac Edgar Allan Poe Charles Dickens The Brontë Sisters Henry David Thoreau Walt Whitman Leo Tolstoy Emily Dickinson Lewis Carroll Louisa May Alcott Mark Twain Oscar Wilde Arthur Conan Doyle W.B. Yeats H.G. Wells Gertrude Stein Jack London Virginia Woolf James Joyce Franz Kafka T.S. Eliot Agatha Christie J.R.R. Tolkien F. Scott Fitzgerald William Faulkner Ernest Hemingway Ayn Rand Jean-Paul Sartre Richard Wright William Burroughs Carson McCullers J.D. Salinger Jack Kerouac Kurt Vonnegut Toni Morrison Sylvia Plath Thomas Pynchon

With outrageous anecdotes about everyone from Gioachino Rossini (draft-dodging womanizer) to Johann Sebastian Bach (jailbird) to Richard Wagner (alleged cross-dresser), Secret Lives of Great Composers recounts the seamy, steamy, and gritty history behind the great masters of international music. You'll learn that Edward Elgar dabbled with explosives; that John Cage was obsessed with fungus; that Berlioz plotted murder; and that Giacomo Puccini stole his church's organ pipes and sold them as scrap metal so he could buy cigarettes. This is one music history lesson you'll never forget!

With outrageous and uncensored profiles of everyone from D. W. Griffith to Quentin Tarantino, Secret Lives of Great Filmmakers reveals the little-known secrets of all your favorite directors. Why did Charlie Chaplin refuse to bathe for weeks at a time? Was Alfred Hitchcock really missing a belly button? Is Walt Disney's corpse preserved in a state of suspended animation? And why on earth did Francis Ford Coppola direct a 3-D pornographic movie? The legends of the silver screen will never be the same!

With outrageous anecdotes about everyone from Leonardo Da Vinci to Caravaggio to Edward Hopper, Secret Lives of Great Artists recounts the seamy, steamy and gritty history behind the great masters of international art. Here, you'll learn that Michelangelo's body odor was so bad, his assistants couldn't stand working for him; that Vincent van Gogh sometimes ate paint directly from the tube; and Georgia O'Keeffe loved to paint in the nude. This is one art history lesson you'll never forget!

Secret Lives of the Civil War features irreverent and uncensored profiles of men and women from the Union and the Confederacy-complete with hundreds of little-known and downright bizarre facts. You'll discover that: • Mary Todd Lincoln claimed to receive valuable military strategies from ghosts in the spirit world. • Jefferson Davis once imported camels for soldiers stationed in the American southwest. • Ulysses S. Grant spent much of the Vicksburg campaign on a horse named "Kangaroo." • James Longstreet fought the Battle of Antietam wearing carpet slippers. • William T. Sherman was the victim of two shipwrecks on the same day. • Harriet Tubman experienced frequent and bizarre hallucinations. • Stonewall Jackson was a notorious hypochondriac (he always sat up straight, fearing that slouching would compress his vital organs). With chapters on everyone from William Quantrill (a guerilla leader whose skull later ended up in the basement of a fraternity house) to Rose O'Neal Greenhow (perhaps the South's most glamorous spy), Secret Lives of the Civil War features a mix of famous faces and unsung heroes. American history was never this much fun in school!

Badass 75-year-old retired FBI agent Ethel Fiona Crestwater is back-stalking mobsters, dodging bullets, and pulling off Bond-worthy moves as she tracks down missing state secrets in this fun and pacy new installment in the Secret Lives mystery series "Ethel's adventures will appeal to fans of Richard Osman's Thursday Murder Club series and Deanna Raybourn's Killers of a Certain Age"-Library Journal Starred Review "Ethel looks like Marple but acts like Marlowe"-Kirkus Reviews "Plucky Ethel is an elderly Nancy Drew"-Publishers Weekly For seventy-five-year-old former FBI agent Ethel Fiona Crestwater, her age is nothing but an advantage when it comes to ferreting out secrets. Who's going to notice the little old woman in the corner? Besides, Ethel might be officially retired, but she knows everyone in DC law enforcement-and is smarter than all of them combined. When a former colleague asks Ethel for help, she agrees without a second thought. But the favor throws Ethel back eighteen years, to the botched sting operation that resulted in the murder of an innocent young woman by a Russian gangster-and nearly ended Ethel's own life too. Soon, Ethel and her young tech-whizz sidekick Jesse, her double-first-cousin-twice-removed, find themselves in the crosshairs of some very bad-and very desperate-men who'll do anything to get their hands on the state secrets they're seeking. Ethel will have to use all the skills she's learned during her long career if she's to save the day, and keep both herself and her beloved cousin alive.