In 1939 Scott is living in Hollywood, a virulent alcoholic and deeply in debt. Despite his relationship with gossip columnist Sheila Graham, he remains fiercely loyal to Zelda, his soul mate and muse. In an attempt to fuse together their fractured marriage, Scott arranges a trip to Cuba, where, after a disastrous first night in Havana, the couple runs off to a beach resort outside the city. But even in paradise, Scott and Zelda cannot escape the dangerous...

Toperoff reimagines the highs and lows of a fast-living, hard-drinking literary couple, and their individual passions, projects, and literary creations. Hammett and Hellman's relationship evolves during major artistic and political epochs--Hollywood's heyday, the New York literary scene, the Spanish Civil War, McCarthyism, and both world wars--and each movement is captured with subjectivity and credible insight. Populated with writers, drinkers, filmmakers,...

"In April 1988, Valerie Solanas--the writer, radical feminist, author of the SCUM Manifesto and would-be assassin of Andy Warhol--was discovered dead at fifty-two in her hotel room, in a grimy corner of San Francisco, alone, penniless, and surrounded by the typed pages of her last writings. In Valerie, a nameless narrator revisits the room where Solanas died, the courtroom where she was tried and convicted of attempting to murder Andy Warhol, the...

"Jerzy Kosinski was a great enigma of post-World War II literature. When he exploded onto the American literary scene in 1965 with his best-selling novel The Painted Bird, he was revered as a Holocaust survivor and refugee from the world hidden behind the Soviet Iron Curtain. He won major literary awards, befriended actor Peter Sellers (who appeared in the screen adaptation of his novel Being There), and was a guest on talk shows and at the Oscars....

A sequel to "The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril" finds Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, and their literary associates confronting a powerful adversary who threatens to tip the balance of power during World War II.