Tapped at the young age of 16 to star as Meadow Soprano, by the time “The Sopranos” ended in 2007, Jamie Lynn Sigler suffered from an eating disorder, kept private her diagnosis of MS, and entered a disastrous early marriage. Over the next years, Jamie would remarry, become a mother, launch a hugely popular podcast, and, most recently, nearly lose her beloved son to a mysterious illness. Amidst the stardust showered and all the slings and arrows that life has thrown, Jamie emerges with grace and a generosity of spirit that she is ready to share. In this moving and fiercely honest memoir, she reflects on her life and her years on “The Sopranos.” But this is no tale of woe. Jamie guides us through her darkest moments and comes out the other side emboldened and not embittered.

In the summer of 1857, an unusual-looking stranger arrived at Charles Dickens' home. Dickens had met Hans Christian Andersen at a dinner party a decade before and, in a moment of desperation, had invited him to visit. The eccentric Danish author of classic fairy tales outstayed his welcome and alienated the Dickens household, which included nine children. Even the oblivious, obsessively self-conscious Andersen sensed the increasing tension between Dickens and his unhappy wife, Catherine, but was slow to understand --- or to believe --- that Dickens had fallen in love with a young actress appearing in his new play. For Andersen, those five weeks were a series of social mistakes and embarrassments but ultimately a lesson in how life's most humbling experiences can be transformed into art.

Jayne Anne Phillips grew up in the small town of Buckhannon, West Virginia. The distinctly American landscape of Appalachia has been the great setting for her fiction, even as she and her boundless imagination have traveled to other times and places. In these pieces, Phillips brings us into her childhood and family, most movingly her mother. She recreates the place she calls home, its foundational truths and the densely woven ties between the women of the town. She traces her journeys across the country and her discovery of writing and reading as tools for both survival and revelation, offering insights into the fellow writers and touchstones that moved and influenced her. From the local beauty salon to the legendary Hatfield–McCoy feud, Phillips ponders her relationship with inspiration, spirituality, culture, and the troubled annals of the last American centuries.

For the last decade, being the owner and operator of Lena Dunham’s body has felt “like towing a wrecked car across town at midnight.” It’s not easy dragging a wrecked car anywhere, much less to the set of the hit show that you --- as a 25-year-old --- are writing, directing, producing and starring in. But Dunham does it --- even if it means interminable hospital stays, vomiting in the bathroom when she’s meant to be meeting Oprah, or terrifying those closest to her --- because she can no longer tell the difference between fighting to do what she loves and being a servant to her own ambition. All the while, she is holding out for a love that can withstand her personal and public challenges and, more than anything, yearning to feel like herself again --- if only she could remember who that self was.

Terrence Tully is at work when he receives news that his mother has died. A third-year medical resident in a gritty community hospital in downtown Los Angeles, he sees death daily, but the news that his mother has passed away jolts him like no other. Turn the page, and he’s heading north on I-15 through a lifeless desert to the small Nevada town where his mother had retired. Overwhelmed with grief and the burden of having to sort out the remnants of his mother’s life, he stops at a café and has a chance encounter with a pretty young local girl in a turquoise minidress. What seems to him a chance meeting like so many we all experience daily will come to upend his life and morph into a fatal obsession.

A Stoic philosopher and divorcée, Adora Hazzard lives a contented life on New York City’s Upper West Side. Having discovered that the secret to happiness is to desire only what you have, she’s applied this insight to blissful effect: relishing her teenage daughter, the freedom of being solo, and her job as a moral tutor for the twin boys of an old-money family. She’s even assembled a “coven” --- like-minded women who live on the same floor in the legendary Ansonia --- and is making active efforts to grow its membership. Adora’s carefully curated life is humming along brilliantly until a chance meeting with a handsome stranger. Soon, her ordered world is upended by black-market art deals, secret rendezvous and international intrigue…and her past lands like a bomb in her present.

After Annabelle Gurwitch received an out-of-the-blue diagnosis of Stage 4 lung cancer, an existential dread set in. Precision medicine offered a temporary reprieve --- but instead of turning into a cancer warrior, Annabelle declared herself a cancer slacker. Her motto: no runs, no ribbons, no religion. Told with her signature wit, warmth and gimlet eye, Gurwitch draws inspiration from Greek mythology and TV comedies, Kermit the Frog and Samuel Beckett. She accidentally acquires an angel, embraces being in it “just for the sex,” and finds herself on a European van tour selling merch for a heavy metal band.

Written over the past two decades, Louise Erdrich’s magnificent story collection features a range of characters --- a tribal newsletter editor whose son tells her a story that nothing in her experience can encompass; immigrant farmers whose tenuous hold on the earth, and sanity, is challenged; and ordinary people, bird lovers, artists, grade-school teachers and romantics. A girl decides to spend her life with a stone. A man is confronted with a folk-singing thief. A woman enters a corporately owned afterlife to seek revenge on her father. Accompanied by specially commissioned artwork by Aza Erdrich Abe --- an intimate and revelatory creative collaboration between mother and daughter --- these stories offer an opportunity to celebrate the wisdom and brilliant, wide-ranging imagination of one of America’s most important writers.

KIDS, WAIT TILL YOU HEAR THIS! is the autobiography of EGOT icon Liza Minnelli. This fascinating, untold story reveals the intimate truth of the only child born to Hollywood legends Vincente Minnelli and Judy Garland. For the first time, here is Liza up close. Liza decided at the age of 16 that “sympathy is my mother’s business. I give people joy.” That veil of joy, however, masks a lifelong struggle with Substance Use Disorder, boundless love to give and an equal need to receive it, broken marriages, multiple miscarriages and hospitalizations. Despite every challenge, Liza’s is a life wrapped in laughter and her tremendous capacity to give and receive love. Today at nearly 80, she opens her heart, mind and memories, sharing secrets we never knew.

Christina Applegate came of age on sets and stages. What started as a financial necessity soon became an emotional escape from a tumultuous home life. She rocketed to stardom on the sitcom “Married...with Children” and went on to captivate audiences in classics like Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead, Anchorman and Dead to Me. Then it all stopped. A multiple sclerosis diagnosis in 2021 confined her to a king-sized bed and the company of memories she’d rather forget: memories of the self-doubt and body dysmorphia that stalked her meteoric rise, of her mother’s fight against addiction and abuse after her father left, and of the tax life had taken on her body and mind that was suddenly coming due. Now, at her most intimate and vulnerable, she unveils a story not even those closest to her fully know.