This 1997 book is a mixture of cultural and labour history which traces the role of barmaids and Australian drinking culture.

In 1966 Ronnie Kray shot George Cornell in the Blind Beggar pub. The principal witness, a young barmaid, eventually agreed to give evidence that was crucial in securing a conviction. This is the barmaid's story, of her life growing up in the East End and her ordeal as a witness.

A national bestseller, the story of “a boy’s last days of youth and a history his father can’t leave behind” (The Daily Beast). Tom Harry has a streak of frost in his black pompadour and a venerable bar called The Medicine Lodge, the chief watering hole and last refuge in the town of Gros Ventre, in northern Montana. Tom also has a son named Rusty, an “accident between the sheets” whose mother deserted them both years ago. The pair make an odd kind of family, with the bar their true home, but they manage just fine. Until the summer of 1960, that is, when Rusty turns twelve. Change arrives with gale force, in the person of Proxy, a taxi dancer Tom knew back when, and her beatnik daughter, Francine. Is Francine, as Proxy claims, the unsuspected legacy of her and Tom’s past? Without a doubt she is an unsettling gust of the future, upending every certainty in Rusty’s life and generating a mist of passion and pretense that seems to obscure everyone’s vision but his own. The Bartender’s Tale wonderfully captures how the world becomes bigger and the past becomes more complex in the last moments of childhood.

How did a bar like P. J. Clarke’s saloon become the beloved watering hole for Frank Sinatra, Marilyn Monroe, Jacqueline Kennedy, Rocky Marciano, and Buddy Holly (not to mention the fictional Don Draper)? And what was it about their bacon cheeseburger that caused Nat King Cole to pronounce it “the Cadillac of burgers”? Established in 1884 and bought in l904 by Patrick “Paddy” Joseph Clarke, this Irish saloon in a beautiful Victorian building on the corner of Third Avenue and Fifty-Fifth Street has captivated generations of New Yorkers—from the working class to entertainers, athletes, business executives, and members of high society. Here, finally, is the story of this famed saloon. Learn more about the bar where: Ernest Borgnine and Ethel Merman announced their impending nuptials to an astonished crowd Johnny Mercer penned “One for My Baby (and One More for the Road)” on a napkin while sitting at the bar Frank Sinatra was the “owner” of table twenty Over P. J. Clarke’s Bar is at once a nostalgic look back at one of New York City’s most famous landmark saloons (in an age when they are quickly disappearing) and an eloquent memoir by the former owner’s grandniece, which details in sharp relief the excitement of days gone by—when as a young girl she entered through the “ladies” entrance and watched bartenders handing buckets of beer to thirsty customers on the sidewalk through the “to go” window.

Now a USA Today Bestseller! A sparkingly witty, poignant debut novel that is a Bright Lights, Big City for a post-Reagan, pre-Y2K Philadelphia—for readers of Normal People, Sweetbitter, Modern Lovers, and Less. It’s September 1987. Charlie Green is an eighteen-year-old romantic and aspiring alcoholic, whose great wish is to fall in love with a light-eyed girl on his first day of college and never look back. Charlie believes in the magic of bars and girls. He believes he can use these talismans to finally feel at home, an assurance his dim and privileged childhood did not provide. At the Sansom Street Oyster House, he meets Paula Henderson, a beautiful and deceptively soulful waitress who is the most overqualified bar maid in all the city—and perhaps the most alluring. But there are obstacles in the Philly night between Charlie and his full heart. Drunks, louts, boyfriends—heroes too. And in Paula’s eyes, Charlie becomes one. When she takes him home to New Hope, PA, to meet her very Catholic mother, the young couple must contend with the consequences of their pure love. In this darkly comedic coming-of-age novel, Charlie Green needs to grow up fast. At stake is his soul.

Like Chekhov’s short stories, Laura Weddle’s writing proves that all literature is local somewhere, and all great stories are happening right around us. In Better than My Own Life, Weddle’s subjects are nearly always women whose career (teacher or mother), economic station (lower middle class) and region (the rural South) render them invisible in literature as in life. Many of the stories in this collection revolve around people who have lost or might lose the thing they love best. When tragedy arrives unexpectedly, it is both inevitable and impossible to comprehend, as are the ordinary losses and disappointments these quiet stories render. But love and forgiveness arrive just as unexpectedly and are equally impossible to credit. Or so Laura Weddle’s stories teach us, and in this teaching rise above mere writing to live in the reader’s mind and heart. —Leatha Kendrick, author of Second Opinion Laura Weddle’s stories in Better than My Own Life show an acute awareness of the human condition; and, as one of Weddle’s characters in “Epiphanies” says, “The awful, unbearable irony of it all.” Weddle reflects an insight into people from various walks of life and an understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of everyone. Her poignant stories help us to understand her characters so well that the reader perhaps knows them “better than my own life.” Her characters, who remain with us long after we read about them, remind us that loving involves both embracing others and letting them go when we must. —Mary Bozeman Hodges, author of Tough Customers Weddle’s subject is love—remembered, gone awry, cherished, broken—and her vision is witty, complex, and tough. The stories in Better than My Own Life have a heart-felt power. They’ll stay with you long after the last page is turned. —George Ella Lyon, author of Many-Storied House

Shortlisted for Harper's Bazaar Book of the Year 2019 A Guardian, Spectator and Mail on Sunday Book of the Year 2018 'A lyrical portrait of a fast-vanishing way of life . . . Thompson is a terrific writer'New Statesman Laura Thompson’s grandmother Violet was one of the great landladies. Born in a London pub, she became the first woman to be given a publican’s licence in her own name and, just as pubs defined her life, she seemed in many ways to embody their essence. Laura spent part of her childhood in Violet’s Home Counties establishment, mesmerised by her gift for cultivating the mix of cosiness and glamour that defined the pub’s atmosphere, making it a unique reflection of the national character. Her memories of this time are just as intoxicating: beer and ash on the carpets in the morning, the deepening rhythms of mirth at night, the magical brightness of glass behind the bar... Through them Laura traces the story of the English pub, asking why it has occupied such a treasured position in our culture. But even Violet, as she grew older, recognised that places like hers were a dying breed, and Laura also considers the precarious future they face. Part memoir, part social history, part elegy, The Last Landlady pays tribute to an extraordinary woman and the world she epitomised.

When George Washington bade farewell to his officers, he did so in New York's Fraunces Tavern. When Andrew Jackson planned his defense of New Orleans against the British in 1815, he met Jean Lafitte in a grog shop. And when John Wilkes Booth plotted with his accomplices to carry out an assassination, they gathered in Surratt Tavern. In America Walks into a Bar, Christine Sismondo recounts the rich and fascinating history of an institution often reviled, yet always central to American life. She traces the tavern from England to New England, showing how even the Puritans valued "a good Beere." With fast-paced narration and lively characters, she carries the story through the twentieth century and beyond, from repeated struggles over licensing and Sunday liquor sales, from the Whiskey Rebellion to the temperance movement, from attempts to ban "treating" to Prohibition and repeal. As the cockpit of organized crime, politics, and everyday social life, the bar has remained vital--and controversial--down to the present. In 2006, when the Hurricane Katrina Emergency Tax Relief Act was passed, a rider excluded bars from applying for aid or tax breaks on the grounds that they contributed nothing to the community. Sismondo proves otherwise: the bar has contributed everything to the American story. Now in paperback, Sismondo's heady cocktail of agile prose and telling anecdotes offers a resounding toast to taprooms, taverns, saloons, speakeasies, and the local hangout where everybody knows your name.

The sensational novel that shocked Australia... Come in Spinner won the 1948 Daily telegraph novel competition. It was first published in an abridged edition in 1951, as the subject matter - including rape, abortion and prostitution - was considered too controversial for the time. Even so, the book was an immediate sensation, with bookshops in both Sydney and Brisbane sold out within days. Set in a beauty salon at the Hotel South Pacific in wartime Sydney, it revolves around the lives and loves of three women - Deb, Guinea and Claire. their romantic entanglements are further complicated by the tensions of war, with American troops in 'occupation' and at a time when anything could be obtained - for a price. Rewritten by Florence James from the original manuscript, an unabridged edition was first published by Angus & Robertson in the 1980s and the book was made into an ABC miniseries in 1989. 'to lose oneself in Come in Spinner is indeed a stirring and memorable experience' - the Sunday times 'Quite astonishingly readable' - the Observer