True Stories and Historical Events Bridging The Past to Present In 2012, Gabriel and Maggie entered a self-imposed exile, fleeing the United States for France. Their plans to marry in Gabriel’s homeland take an unexpected twist when Gabriel discovers that he was born under the controversial French law Accouchement Sous X (Anonymous Childbirth Under Madame X). In search of his birth origins, Gabriel becomes engulfed in a game of cat-and-mouse with Camille, the woman he had always known unquestionably as his mother. Embarking on an odyssey sparked by a mystery to solve, Gabriel and Maggie retrace the footsteps of the Delacroix and Bertrand families, their lives intertwined by scandal, deceit, and decadence beginning in WWII under Nazi occupation and the Vichy regime. Intersecting with their own lives, Gabriel and Maggie become swept up in the terror attacks in France, the European migration crisis of 2015, and Brexit in their search for truth, justice, and closure. Riveting, thought-provoking, and timely, The Revelations of Madame X is a dramatic three-generational family saga and an extraordinary love story that reminds us of our history, the Holocaust, and the extremes of what we, as human beings, are truly capable of.

The action takes place n the mind of Marilyn on an empty stage with a chair. In this play, Marilyn confronts voices in her head to validate her life as an actress. She finds in the afterlife that she must audition and interview to get into heaven and that her judges are her enemies and aborted children. ... taken from Samuel French website.

John Singer Sargent, an up-and-coming American artist, is eager to collaborate on a portrait that would capapult him and Madame X, the most beautiful woman in Paris, to the pinnacle of society.

The subject of John Singer Sargent's most famous painting was twenty-three-year-old New Orleans Creole Virginie Gautreau, who moved to Paris and quickly became the "it girl" of her day. A relative unknown at the time, Sargent won the commission to paint her; the two must have recognized in each other a like-minded hunger for fame. Unveiled at the 1884 Paris Salon, Gautreau's portrait generated the attention she craved-but it led to infamy rather than stardom. Sargent had painted one strap of Gautreau's dress dangling from her shoulder, suggesting either the prelude to or the aftermath of sex. Her reputation irreparably damaged, Gautreau retired from public life, destroying all the mirrors in her home. Drawing on documents from private collections and other previously unexamined materials, and featuring a cast of characters including Oscar Wilde and Richard Wagner, Strapless is a tale of art and celebrity, obsession and betrayal.

A Wall Street Journal and Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year | Long-listed for the Plutarch Award A bold new biography of the legendary painter John Singer Sargent, stressing the unruly emotions and furtive desires that drove his innovative work and defined the transatlantic, fin de siècle culture he inhabited. A great American artist, John Singer Sargent is also an abiding enigma. While dressing like a businessman and crafting a highly respectable persona, he scandalized viewers on both sides of the Atlantic with the frankness and sensuality of his work. He charmed the nouveaux riches as well as the old money, but he reserved his greatest sympathies for Bedouins, Spanish dancers, and the gondoliers of Venice. At the height of his renown in Britain and America, he quit his lucrative portrait-painting career to concentrate on allegorical murals with religious themes—and on nude drawings of male models that he kept to himself. In The Grand Affair, the historian Paul Fisher offers a vivid life of the buttoned-up artist and his unbuttoned work. Sargent’s nervy, edgy portraits exposed illicit or dark feelings in himself and his sitters—feelings that high society on both sides of the Atlantic found fascinating and off-putting. Fisher traces Singer’s life from his wandering trans-European childhood to the salons of Paris, and the scandals and enthusiasms he caused, and on to London. There he mixed with eccentrics and aristocrats, and the likes of Henry James and Oscar Wilde, while at the same time forming a close relationship with a lightweight boxer who became his model, valet, and traveling partner. In later years, Sargent met up with his friend and patron Isabella Stewart Gardner around the world and devoted himself to a new model, the African American elevator operator and part-time contortionist Thomas McKeller, who would become the subject of some of Sargent’s most daring and powerful work. Illuminating Sargent’s restless itinerary, Fisher explores the enigmas of fin de siècle sexuality and art, fashioning a biography that grants the man and his paintings new and intense life.

"Every now and then an author stands out for his sharp observations, crackling dialogue, and incisive storyline -- qualities found in Literature with a capital L. Gary Alexander approaches that capital letter." - Hollis George, editor and anthologist "Read it straight through. Couldn't put it down." - Hayes Brandwell, The Polemicist Post Like father, like son. Whoever coined that one had never heard of Joe and Stanley Buckley. Joe is a ne'er-do-well fugitive who tends bar in Belize. All he knows of the son he hasn't seen in years is that "he likes computers," the understatement of the year. Susan, Joe's ex and Stanley's mother pleads with him to come up to an Oregon beach to attend his son's upcoming wedding. Joe barely makes it in time for the nuptials and stays on through Father's Day a week later, raising havoc throughout. Father's Day is at once tender, suspenseful and comical, but not a recommended parenting guide.

This book is an invitation to the secret world behind the veil of daily events. In its pages you will meet the legendary Cagliostro and the Comte de Saint-Germain as they travel through the royal courts and Masonic lodges of eighteenth-century Europe, fomenting Revolution and working to overturn the social order of their day. Alchemists, magicians, Illuminati adepts, mystics, and Freemasons joined forces with politicians, journalists, scientists, writers, philosophers and libertines in a movement that forever altered the cultural landscape of Western civilization. Inaugurating two centuries of revolution and upheaval, the French Revolution of 1789 put an end to the concept of the divine right of kings, led to the formal separation of church and state, destroyed the remnants of medieval feudalism, and heralded the values of the Enlightenment as the triumphant banner under which the modern world would be born. Yet it was accompanied by a level of violence whose ferocity spoke more of an exorcism than a political restructuring. What lessons does the Revolution hold for us today? Do the forces of secret societies and silent conspiracies continue to influence the world? Historian Una Birch's classic account was originally published in 1911. Her proximity to and sympathy with the events offer a unique perspective. Secret society expert James Wasserman has made this work accessible to the modern reader with extensive annotations, a history of the Revolution, an introduction that places the Illuminati in context, and biographical sketches of the main participants. Book jacket.