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Actress Ione Skye was a teenager when her appearances in River's Edge and Say Anything... made her a star. In her best-selling new memoir, Say Everything, she details her rocky romantic history and long estrangement from her father, the folk-rock legend Donovan.
'West of Eden' by Jean Stein (2016)
After writing Edie—a portrait of Andy Warhol superstar Edie Sedgwick that was also one of the greatest oral-history books of all time—Stein explored the history of Los Angeles through intriguing and dark stories, both well-known and obscure, that took place in and around the movie industry. Buy it here.
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'The Magic World' by E. Nesbit (1912)
Nesbit was a fantastic and witty writer. This is one of those brilliant children's books that grown-ups will love as well. Its stories mostly follow English kids, raised with too many rules, as they get into trouble and fabulous, magical, fairy-tale-like things happen to them. Buy it here.
'Music for Chameleons' by Truman Capote (1980)
I can reread these short stories and non-fiction pieces forever. The story "Hand-Carved Coffins" is an account of a crime, much like In Cold Blood—though some say Capote made this one up. I love his Southern, almost surreal sensibility in his early short stories, as well as the portraits, such as "A Beautiful Child," about a day spent with his friend Marilyn Monroe. Buy it here.
'Giovanni's Room' by James Baldwin (1956)
This is a marvelous novel, set in Paris, about a tempestuous gay love affair between the American narrator and an Italian bartender who is about to be executed for murder. Baldwin's emotional intelligence and insight into human behavior are absolutely stunning. Buy it here.
'Heartburn' by Nora Ephron (1983)
Ephron's novel is a brilliant and funny comfort read about the end of a marriage, inspired by the author's own split with Washington Post journalist Carl Bernstein. Ephron's stand-in is a food writer, and because I love food, I enjoy when food plays a role in books. Buy it here.
'The Complete Short Stories of W. Somerset Maugham' (1951)
Maugham was famous for his novels and plays, but I love his short stories best. He often uses a narrator drinking a nightcap at a men's club, recounting a recent scandalous tale of adultery or murder set in the morally questionable British Far Eastern colonies. Many of his stories and books became films, including The Letter, starring Bette Davis. Buy it here.
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Train Dreams pulses with ‘awards season gravitas’The Week Recommends Felicity Jones and Joel Edgerton star in this meditative period piece about a working man in a vanished America
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Middleland: Rory Stewart’s essay collection is a ‘triumph’The Week Recommends The Rest is Politics co-host compiles his fortnightly columns written during his time as an MP
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‘Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America’ and ‘Unabridged: The Thrill of (and Threat to) the Modern Dictionary’feature The culture divide in small-town Ohio and how the internet usurped dictionaries
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6 homes with fall foliagefeature An autumnal orange Craftsman, a renovated Greek Revival church and an estate with an orchard
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Bugonia: ‘deranged, extreme and explosively enjoyable’Talking Point Yorgos Lanthimos’ film stars Emma Stone as a CEO who is kidnapped and accused of being an alien
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The Revolutionists: a ‘superb and monumental’ bookThe Week Recommends Jason Burke ‘epic’ account of the plane hijackings and kidnappings carried out by extremists in the 1970s
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Film reviews: ‘Bugonia,’ ‘The Mastermind’ and ‘Nouvelle Vague’feature A kidnapped CEO might only appear to be human, an amateurish art heist goes sideways, and Jean-Luc Godard’s ‘Breathless’ gets a lively homage
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Book reviews: ‘Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity’ and ‘Nobody’s Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice’feature An examination of humanity in the face of “the Machine” and a posthumous memoir from one of Jeffrey Epstein’s victims, who recently died by suicide
