Ready for my close upDavid M. Lubin (Grand Central). In the late forties, Hollywood was going through a period of transition: the blacklist was destroying careers, the studio system was collapsing, and television was emptying movie theaters. The 1950 film noir Sunset Boulevard reflected this destabilization. The film centers on two Hollywood castoffs: an aging former star and an indecisive screenwriter who becomes her life partner. This meticulous account of the making of the film, originally conceived as a comedy starring Mae West, traces how it became “a Hollywood story” satirizing “an entire industry on the brink of collapse or reinvention, depending on who you ask.”
Eternal ForestElena Sheppard (St. Martin's). On Christmas Eve 1960, a woman named Rosita fled Castro's revolution in Cuba by boarding a flight with her two daughters to what she assumed would be temporary exile in Miami. She lived another sixty years, but never returned to the island. In this masterfully crafted memoir, Sheppard, Rosita's US-born granddaughter, moves between centuries, weaving Cuban history with family lore. She tries to articulate her inherited feelings of unease, openly struggling with the difficulties of telling the story of a loss that was never entirely hers. “I tried, but I couldn’t feel what it was like to leave,” she writes.
