Hollywood, Sight Unseeing begins with the following paragraph... I was in the batter's box. I was eight years old. The pitcher, ten, wound up, threw. Where was the baseball? I saw it leave his hand, then disappear until it was perhaps twenty feet from where it was headed... directly at my head. Being blessed with fast reflexes, I flattened out, dropped like a stone. I hit the ground with that ball missing my noggin by the wispiest whisker. At the time, it seemed nothing at all to me. I had escaped serious injury - just part of the game, I thought. But that "inconsequential" incident, with unrelenting insistence, uncompromising ferocity, would dictate the direction of the rest of my life Missing that baseball was diagnosed as macular degeneration, a retinal fault very rare in children. No known treatment, vision would continue to decline. By age 17, my vision was 20/200... legal blindness status. I saw at 20 feet what normally sighted people saw easily at 200 feet. Beginning with my first love, the entertainment industry, for 25 years, I earned my living, despite its near total visual nature, in the theater, radio, motion picture and television industries. For ten years of that time, I worked as a Dialogue Coach at Paramount, Twentieth Century Fox and Columbia Studios, working with top Directors, Producers and such stars as Elizabeth Taylor, Vivien Leigh, Katherine Hepburn, Cary Grant, Burt Lancaster, Charlton Heston, Loretta Young, Jane Wyman, Janet Leigh, Charles Laughton, Claude Rains, Shirley MacLaine, Jayne Mansfield, and 16 pictures with Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. When decreasing vision made Dialogue Coaching impractical, I switched to writing for motion pictures and television. Later, I transitioned to the construction industry as a General Building contractor. Now, with my vison of 20/600, I have returned to writing. After all, I'm only 83. Rudy Makoul

A Kansas seamstress reinvents herself in Los Angeles, but the past comes back to haunt her, in this “superb, surprising” historical novel (The Seattle Times). At age seventeen, Nell Plat is an unhappily married woman, quick with her needle and wit, but ill-suited to wifely duties like cooking, mothering, and tending to her boorish husband. Unable to shake her dreams of glamour and excitement, she abandons her family and quiet life in Kansas for the hustle, bustle, and glittering lights of Los Angeles. Among the wannabes and celebrities of the silver screen, Nell reinvents herself as Madame Annelle, seamstress to the stars. But just as she begins stitching her way to success, her past shows up on her doorstep, threatening to unravel her carefully crafted ruse. “Meticulously researched” (The A.V. Club) and “vibrant with historical accuracy” (SFGate)—based on the true story of the author’s grandmother—The Seamstress of Hollywood Boulevard is a fascinating look at old Hollywood glamour, gender roles, and the ever-evolving American dream.

"Desi, Sharon, and Bettina are struggling to make names for themselves amid the glitz, glamour, and deception of the entertainment industry. They are swept away by its intrigue and intensity but cannot ignore the desperate calls from the ghosts of their pasts."--Jacket.

Classical Hollywood Cinema, Sexuality, and the Politics of the Face examines the representation of iconic female faces in the golden age of Hollywood – Greta Garbo, Gloria Swanson, Elizabeth Taylor – and the gay male fetishization of those faces. Classical Hollywood cinema is given to an aesthetic and ideological struggle between rival scopic economies: an erotics of “to-be-looked-at-ness” is countered by a hermeneutics of “to-be-seen-through-ness.” The latter emerges triumphant, but the legendary female faces of Hollywood resist, in their different ways, a coercive and normalizing knowledge, which is the source of the gay male investment in them. A disciplinary society privileges a hermeneutics of gaze; the iconomic female faces of classical Hollywood cinema demand an erotics. Classical Holly Cinema, Sexuality, and the Politics of the Face explores the tension between the two through detailed readings of Ninotchka, Sunset Boulevard, and Suddenly, Last Summer in the context of early and mid-century cinema and culture. It includes, for instance, an analysis of D. W. Griffith and blackface, the Stonewall riots and the coming-into-voice of the modern gay subject, several major films by Hitchcock, Citizen Kane, and the emergence of rival standards of beauty, both female and male, in figures such as Katharine Hepburn, Ingrid Bergman, Humphrey Bogart, Rock Hudson, and James Dean. This is an important study for students of queer theory, film theory and history, and gender and sexuality studies.

Book 4 – Movie Lovers Grace Brewster makes the biggest mistake of her life with sexy, bad boy movie producer, Gunther Quill. Humiliated by Quill and Jake Matthews, her sister’s Broadway co-star, Grace vows to even the score with both men. Will her plan work or blow up in her face, losing her the man she loves? Book 5 – Love’s Last Chance Seeking true love, respected choreographer, Dorrie, reconnects with each of three men. Will she find what she’s looking for or end up back with the one man who broke her heart? Book 6 – Lovers & Liars Gunther Quill, arrogant, brilliant producer, hates liars worse than anything. Erica Wheeler needs a job or face eviction. Will a little white lie used to get a plum job working for Gunther destroy her chance for happiness?

The next morning, Alex finds the body of a young Ch9inese boy floating near the edge of the waterfront. Who killed him and for what? Why would someone warn her ahead of time that she would find trouble near the water? What does it mean for an independen female private investigator when she is unexpectedly involved in an illegal immigrant's murder?

"Those who love One of Us Is Lying, will devour this page-turner." (Buzzfeed) Delve into a murderous, twisty whodunit doused in juicy Hollywood lore. No one at Hollywood High knows who’s behind We'll Never Tell—a viral YouTube channel where the anonymous creators trespass behind the scenes of LA's most intriguing locales. The team includes CASEY, quiet researcher and trivia champ; JACOB, voice narrator and video editor, who is secretly dating EDDIE, aspiring filmmaker; and ZOE, coder and breaking-and-entering extraordinaire. Now senior year is winding down and with their lives heading in different directions, the YouTubers vow to go out with a bang. Their last episode will be filmed at the infamous Valentini “murder house,” which has been left abandoned, bloodstained, and untouched since a shocking murder/suicide in 1972. When the teens break in, they capture epic footage. But someone trips an alarm, and it’s a mad dash to get out before the police arrive—at which point they realize only three of them escaped instead of four. Jacob is still inside, slain and bleeding out. Is his attack connected to the historic murder, or is one of their crew responsible? A week of suspicions and cover-ups unfolds as Casey and her remaining friends try to stay alive long enough to solve murder mysteries past and present. If they do, their friendship may not survive. If they don't, the house will claim more victims.

“Subverts the simplistic sunshine/reggae/spliff-smoking image of Jamaica at almost every turn . . . with a rich interplay of geographies and themes.” —Los Angeles Times From Trench Town to Half Way Tree to Norbrook to Portmore and beyond, the stories of Kingston Noir shine light into the darkest corners of this fabled city. Joining award-winning Jamaican authors such as Marlon James, Leone Ross, and Thomas Glave are two “special guest” writers with no Jamaican lineage: Nigerian-born Chris Abani and British writer Ian Thomson. The menacing tone that runs through some of these stories is counterbalanced by the clever humor in others, such as Kei Miller’s “White Gyal with a Camera,” who softens even the hardest of August Town’s gangsters; and Mr. Brown, the private investigator in Kwame Dawes’s story, who explains why his girth works to his advantage: “In Jamaica a woman like a big man. She can see he is prosperous, and that he can be in charge.” Together—with more contributions from Patricia Powell, Colin Channer, Marcia Douglas, and Christopher John Farley—the outstanding tales in Kingston Noir comprise the best volume of short fiction ever to arise from the literary wellspring that is Jamaica. “Thoroughly well-written stories . . . fans of noir will enjoy this batch of sordid tales set in the sweltering heat of the tropics.” —Publishers Weekly “An eclectic and gritty mélange of tales that sears the imagination . . . Kingston Noir proves its worth as a quintessential piece of West Indian literature—rich, artistic, timeless, and above all, draped in unmistakable realism.” —The Gleaner (Jamaica)