Five women's stories: 

Timeless: Love, Morgenthau, and Me, by Lucinda Franks.

In this beautifully rendered literary memoir, Lucinda Franks, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, tells the intimate story of her marriage to Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau, one of the great men of our time.

After Lucinda interviewed Bob for The New York Times in 1973, the two took a while to understand that they had fallen in love.

Franks was a self-styled radical who marched with protesters and chained herself to fences. Morgenthau was a famous lawyer, a symbol of the establishment, who could have helped put her in jail. She was twenty-six. He was fifty-three.

Now, thirty-six years into a marriage that was never supposed to happen, they are living proof that opposites can forge an unbreakable bond.

Franks offers a confidential tour of their unconventional years together, years that are both hilarious and interlaced with suspense. At the same time, she takes us behind the scenes to reveal the untold stories behind some of Morgenthau's most famous cases, many of which she helped him branstorm for. 

The Fame Lunches: On Wounded Icons, Money, Sex, the Brontes, and the Importance of Handbags, by Daphne Merkin.

Merkin's elegant, widely admired profiles go beneath the glossy facades of neon-lit personalities to consider their vulnerabilities and demons, as well as their enduring hold on us.

Here one will enconter a gallery of complex, unforgettable women--Marilyn Monroe, Courtney Love, Liv Ullman, and Cate Blanchett, among others--as well as such intriguing male figures as Michael Jackson, Mike Tyson, Truman Capote, and Richard Burton.

Lillian Hellman: An Imperious Life, by Dorothy Gallagher.

By the age of twenty-nine, Lillian Hellman had written The Children's Hour, the first of four hit Broadway plays, and soon she was considered a member of America's first rank of dramatists, a position she maintained for more than twenty-five years. Apart from her literary accomplishments, Hellman lived a rich life filled with notable friendships, controversial political activity, travel, and love affairs. But by the time she died, the truth about her life and works had been called into question. Scandals attached to her name, having to do with sex, with money, and with her own veracity. 

Dorothy Gallagher confronts the conundrum that was Lillian Hellman--a woman with a capacity to inspire outrage as often as admiration. Exploring Hellman's leftist politics, her Jewish and Southern background, and her famous testimony before the House Committee on Un-American Activites, Gallagher also undertakes a new reading of Hellman's carefully crafted memoirs and plays.

Ann Dvorak: Hollywood's Forgotten Rebel, by Christina Rice.

Possessing a unique beauty and refined acting skills, Ann Dvorak found success in Hollywood during a time when many actors were still struggling to adapt to the era of talkies. Seemingly destined for A-list fame, critics touted her a "Hollywood's New Cinderella" after film mogul Howard Hughes cast her as Cesca in the gangster film Scarface.

Dvorak's journey to superstardom was derailed when she walked out on her contractual obligations to Warner Bros. for an extended honeymoon. Later, she initiated a legal dispute over her contract, an action that was unprecedented at a time when studios exercised complete control over actors' careers. 

As the first full-length biography of an often overlooked actress, Ann Dvorak: Hollywood's Forgotten Rebel explores the life and career of one of the first individuals who dared to challenge the studio system that ruled Tinseltown. 

I Said Yes to Everything: A Memoir, by Lee Grant.

Born Lyova Haskell Rosenthal in New York City, actress Lee Grant spent her youth accumulating more experiences than most people have in a lifetime: from student at the famed Neighborhood Playhouse to member of the legendary Actors Studio; from celebrated Broadway start to Vogue "It Girl." At age twenty-four, she was nominated for an Academy Award for Detective Story, and a year later found herself married and a mother for the first time, her career on the rise.

And then she lost it all.

Her name landed on the Hollywood blacklist, her offers for film and television roles ground to a halt, and her marriage fell apart.

Finding reserves of strength she didn't know she had, Grant took action against anti-Communist witch hunts in the arts. She threw herself into her work, accepting every theater or teaching job that came her way.

After twelve years of fighting the blacklist, she was exonerated. Grant rebuilt her life on her own terms: first stop, a starring role on Peyton Place, and then leads in Valley of the Dolls, In the Heat of the Night, and Shampoo, for which she won her first Oscar.