Here are 100 books that Woodstock Goes to Hollywood fans have personally recommended if you like
Woodstock Goes to Hollywood.
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I have a Walter Mitty view of the world. If I were a movie character, I would be Edward Bloom, in Big Fish. I have been a lawyer in the entertainment industry for almost four decades. As a result of my personality and profession, my books mix fantasy, science fiction, and the mystical into our everyday world, and I do it in a way that makes you wonder if what I’m telling you is true, causes you to hope it is true and compels you to wish you could join in the adventures.
The Celt in me loves Dark Humor. Managed Care is one of the funniest Dark Humor books I have ever read.
The dialogue is amazing, the characters fully developed and the story unique. Incredibly fast read. There is a poignancy to the story, and you cannot help but root for everything to work itself out for the characters.
"Funniest book I've ever read." –Tom McCaffrey, bestselling author of The Wise Ass
Is it too much to ask that a managed care facility refund a year's advance payment when your grandfather dies before he can move in?
Frank Johnson doesn't think so, which is why the thirty-three-year-old now lives in a nursing home, locked in a chess match feud with management that doesn't occupy nearly enough of his time.
When foster kid Elroy is thrust into his life, Frank decides to turn this forced relationship to his advantage - launching a string of absurd decisions, inappropriate behaviors and unexpected…
The Victorian mansion, Evenmere, is the mechanism that runs the universe.
The lamps must be lit, or the stars die. The clocks must be wound, or Time ceases. The Balance between Order and Chaos must be preserved, or Existence crumbles.
Appointed the Steward of Evenmere, Carter Anderson must learn the…
I have a Walter Mitty view of the world. If I were a movie character, I would be Edward Bloom, in Big Fish. I have been a lawyer in the entertainment industry for almost four decades. As a result of my personality and profession, my books mix fantasy, science fiction, and the mystical into our everyday world, and I do it in a way that makes you wonder if what I’m telling you is true, causes you to hope it is true and compels you to wish you could join in the adventures.
The writing is superb, the story clever and interesting and the settings diverse and beautiful. I love the characters and their inter and intra-family dynamics. And then there is a magical cat named Brie.
The writing draws you into each scene and you feel like you are another person in the room as the story unfolds.
Perfect for fans of Carlos Ruiz Zafón's The Shadow of the Wind and Ocean Vuong's On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, E.H Wilde's memoir-styled literary fiction debut, The Memories of Eskar Wilde, is a coming-of-age tale of secrets and discovery, love and loss, and guilt and penance.
I'm no author. I don't know how to structure my "story" in a conventional way, though I am now inclined to tell it. If you possess sufficient patience and a willingness to forgive my amateurish storytelling, I'll explain to you how I came to be in a small Paris apartment on my eighteenth birthday,…
I have a Walter Mitty view of the world. If I were a movie character, I would be Edward Bloom, in Big Fish. I have been a lawyer in the entertainment industry for almost four decades. As a result of my personality and profession, my books mix fantasy, science fiction, and the mystical into our everyday world, and I do it in a way that makes you wonder if what I’m telling you is true, causes you to hope it is true and compels you to wish you could join in the adventures.
A time travel book that is clever and fast paced. Spoiled Hollywood types.
A trip back to Victorian London and a fateful meeting with Jack The Ripper. What’s not to love? As a matter of fact, I loved the female lead, Madison Taylor, so much that I included her (with permission) as a cross-over character in my latest novel, Finding Jimmy Moran.
I could've easily sold my time travel machine for billions and walked away. Instead, I opened The Taylor Travel Group where I take the elite on vacations into history, to a time and place of their choice.
But when a big-time movie studio hired my company, I sold my soul.
What was supposed to be a few days of method-actor immersion in nineteenth-century London went horribly awry. Now America's hottest starlet is dead, and Jack the Ripper is…
Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!
On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…
I have a Walter Mitty view of the world. If I were a movie character, I would be Edward Bloom, in Big Fish. I have been a lawyer in the entertainment industry for almost four decades. As a result of my personality and profession, my books mix fantasy, science fiction, and the mystical into our everyday world, and I do it in a way that makes you wonder if what I’m telling you is true, causes you to hope it is true and compels you to wish you could join in the adventures.
This is the latest in a series that is a clever parody of the James Bond series of books by Ian Fleming.
Haris Orkin is an excellent writer who has built this series around his charming protagonist, James Flynn, who you cannot tell if he is crazy or has the deepest and most brilliant cover story imaginable – a patient in a psychiatric hospital.
While it is told with a tongue firmly planted in cheek, there is plenty of real action and adventure. It is a great escape from the mundane everyday life.
Hornitos State Mental Hospital houses the worst of the worst. Those convicted of violent criminal behavior and judged not guilty by reason of insanity. Mass murderers, serial killers, mad bombers, arsonists, terrorists, and now... James Flynn. Still convinced he's an international super spy, Flynn finds himself in the most dangerous predicament of his life.
He faces off with old enemies, new enemies, and psycho killers who just want to watch the world burn. He also meets a fierce and beautiful woman who might be even more dangerous and delusional than he is.
Together they walk a tightrope between objective reality…
I am a creature of habitat. I can’t help but connect with my environment in every possible way. It’s physical, emotional. I spent the first 23 years of my life in Mexico City. Leaving was heart-wrenching, but the promise to fulfill a dream drew me to Los Angeles. During the next four decades I became a student of Los Angeles and the Latino community that populates it. I agree with Randy Newman: I love L.A.
Born in Los Angeles and with profound connection to this city’s psyche, Wendy Ortiz delivers a map of Los Angeles transformed into words, a fragmented memoir of hurt, love, loss, and reinvention. What does a young writer (one of thousands) living in this city and trying to make it worry about? Joblessness. Rent. Bills. Riding the metro. Alcohol. And yes, sex and publishing too, of course. This book proves that it’s not always 72 and sunny in Los Angeles.
Hollywood Notebook is a prose poem-ish memoir of fragments. Ortiz takes us through the streets of Los Angeles and the internal maps she's charting as she moves from her twenties to her thirties in a studio apartment in Hollywood. A cartography of love, loss, and transformation, Hollywood Notebook is a portrait of the author's psyche overlaid on a map of the city she makes her home.
Not only am I fascinated by old Hollywood history, I’m also interested in the creative processes that produce great art. Everyone approaches their craft a little differently, and it’s always illuminating to discover how different people do what they do. In my own work, I like to explore how creative people come to their Eureka! moments, and hope that I’ll be able to learn something from their experiences.
This book opens with an absolutely breathtaking passage, one of my favorite openings in any book ever. One imagines Niven narrating his memoir poolside, gripping a cigarette and a martini in the same fist, his pince-nez mustache dancing up and down while he describes, in sordid detail, old-school Hollywood at its most louche. If you want a book that brings alive the atmosphere of a bygone era, this is it.
David Niven is remembered as one of Britain's best-loved actors. The archetypal English gentleman, he starred in over ninety films. He is equally remembered as the author of this classic autobiography. In his first volume, he remembers his childhood and school days, his time at Sandhurst and his early army service. He recalls America during the prohibition era and days in Hollywood before the Second World War. Of the war itself, he tells of family life back in Britain and his time on the front line in France and Germany. THE MOON'S A BALLOON is a wonderful record of a…
A Duke with rigid opinions, a Lady whose beliefs conflict with his, a long disputed parcel of land, a conniving neighbour, a desperate collaboration, a failure of trust, a love found despite it all.
Alexander Cavendish, Duke of Ravensworth, returned from war to find that his father and brother had…
I have loved classic Hollywood movies since childhood, especially the legendary actresses of the era. My grandmother nurtured this love, taking me to the video stores to rent movies and the library to read biographies and books about actresses and Old Hollywood. Now, I am a professor of film history at Chapman University, where I teach classes on American cinema and women in film. Still, my passion for female-centered classic Hollywood movies remains strong. I have compiled a list showing the multi-faceted ways that women have participated in Hollywood cinema during its first century.
When I read this book, I was relieved—at long last, a book that underscored the behind-the-scenes contributions of working women in the 1930s and 1940s. J.E. Smyth’s fascinating study brings to light new dimensions to screen legends Bette Davis, Katharine Hepburn, and fashion designer Edith Head, but also women less known to the greater public—the intrepid editors like Barbara McLean and Margaret Booth, three-time Screenwriter Guild president Mary J. McCall, and producers like Joan Harrison and Virginia Van Upp.
I like how this book provides a counter-history to the male-dominated narratives of Hollywood. Smyth shows that women found other ways outside of directing to leave their mark on Hollywood in the twentieth century.
Looking back on her career in 1977, Bette Davis remembered with pride, "Women owned Hollywood for twenty years." She had a point. Between 1930 and 1950, over 40% of film industry employees were women, 25% of all screenwriters were female, two women supervised all studio feature output and could order retakes on any director's work, one woman ran MGM behind the scenes, over a dozen women worked as producers, a woman headed the Screen Writers Guild three times, and press claimed Hollywood was a generation or two ahead of the rest of the country in terms of gender equality and…
I worked for 27 years at The Washington Post, where I won a Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. But when I returned home in 2006, I wanted to write about my own country, and what could be more American than the movies? They’re a wonderful looking glass into the past, and my books explore the making of an iconic movie and the historical era in which it was created. My recent ones have recounted the making of The Searchers, starring John Wayne, and High Noon, the Gary Cooper classic and its connection to the Hollywood blacklist, a time of vicious conflict eerily similar to our own troubled era.
The dutiful daughter of one studio mogul and devoted wife of another, Irene Selznick was Hollywood royalty throughout the 1920s to 40s, the Golden Age of American cinema. Her father, the tyrannical Louis B. Mayer, steered MGM, Hollywood’s most successful studio, discovered Greta Garbo and victimized Judy Garland. Her husband, David O. Selznick made the first A Star Is Born andGone with the Wind before self-destructing from drugs and megalomania. Irene escaped the shadow of overpowering men to become the respected Broadway producer of A Streetcar Named Desire, a woman to be reckoned with and—in this powerful memoir—a first-class storyteller.
Irene Mayer came to Hollywood when she was ten. Her childhood was populated with legendary names as her father, Louis B., practically created the movie industry. But life at the Mayers' was not lived in the typical Hollywood style. They believed in family, in strict hours, tiny allowances, no boys, no going away to college, and no socializing with actors. She didn't marry an actor. She married David O. Selznick, a wildly energized, and ambitious man who would go on to make some of the greatest movies Hollywood would ever see. Irene eventually left him, and Hollywood, for New York…
My interest in Golden Age Hollywood dates to my childhood of watching classic movies on television. It definitely inspired my career as an actress, which began when I was only ten and later expanded into tv and film. After the publication of twelve historical novels, I decided to write biographical fiction about actresses—famous and obscure—of the 1930s and 1940s. I regularly seek out Hollywood fiction for entertainment, and for research I rely on nonfiction (biographies, histories, sociological studies). I also collect ephemera, so at my author events I can share physical artifacts as well as Hollywood legend and lore!
So many Hollywood novels focus primarily on the marquee names—the movie stars. This one explores the tortured romantic relationship between gossip columnist Sheilah Graham and author F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose stint as a scriptwriter was financially sustaining and artistically demoralizing, deepening his descent into alcoholism and despair over his failing marriage to Zelda. Sheilah could have been his creation, with her Gatsby-esque concealment of her background and reinvention of herself. Though this is a work of fiction, it results from meticulous research into the lives and careers of its fascinating and legendary main characters. As a writer myself, who has produced newspaper columns as well as more than a dozen novels, I fully appreciate the literary aspects of this story.
“A stunning, utterly captivating read. Another Side of Paradise delivers an unforgettable portrait of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Sheilah Graham, a remarkable couple steeped in all the glamour, romance, and intrigue of old Hollywood. Their wild ride of a love affair is one for the ages!” — Kathleen Grissom, New York Times bestselling author of The Kitchen House and Glory Over Everything
A novel based on the true story of F. Scott Fitzgerald and his longtime mistress, Sheilah Graham—an unforgettable tale of love, celebrity, and Gatsby-esque self-creation in 1930s Hollywood.
In 1937 Hollywood, gossip columnist Sheilah Graham’s star is on…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
It’s safe to say that I love LA. While my home town is often dismissed as being little more than a string of shopping malls strung together by freeways, to me, it’s a place like nowhere else in the world. In a city fueled by cinema, LA’s outsider magic is hard to capture, but I find it fascinating when novelists make the attempt. With my first novel, The Body Double, I take a surreal deep dive into the mystery and magic of this strange city—inspired, in no small part, by my five favorite books about Los Angeles. I hope you enjoy them as much as I have!
I’m a little biased with this one, because Eve was my neighbor growing up and something of a literary fairy godmother, but there are few writers who capture the spirit of Los Angeles with more fascination and ease. Her work is messy—delightfully so, like eavesdropping on that friend who always has the craziest stories to tell about her exploits, and her prose captures her inimitable personality. She notices things about Los Angeles that will make you fall in love with the city all over again, or book your first visit if you’re from out of town. Perfect for readers who want to feel a sense of intimacy with their books, or people like me who love listening in on gossip, the messier the better. Eve always delivers!
A legendary love letter to Los Angeles by the city's most charming daughter, complete with portraits of rock stars at Chateau Marmont, surfers in Santa Monica, prostitutes on sunset, and Eve's own beloved cat, Rosie.
Journalist, party girl, bookworm, artist, muse: by the time she’d hit thirty, Eve Babitz had played all of these roles. Immortalized as the nude beauty facing down Duchamp and as one of Ed Ruscha’s Five 1965 Girlfriends, Babitz’s first book showed her to be a razor-sharp writer with tales of her own. Eve’s Hollywood is an album of vivid snapshots of Southern California’s haute bohemians,…
