Showing results for "Happy Birthday" in Literature & Fiction

Valerie Wyatt is the queen of gracious living and the arbiter of taste with a successful TV show. Since her long-ago divorce, she’s worked hard to reach the pinnacle of her profession and to create a camera-ready life in her Fifth Avenue penthouse. So why is she so depressed? All the hours with her personal trainer, the careful work of New York’s best hairdressers, cosmetic surgeons, and her own God-given bone structure and great looks can’t fudge the truth or her lies about it: Valerie is turning sixty.

Valerie Wyatt is the high priestess of elegance: She has built an empire on how to entertain, how to decorate, how to live beautifully, and is at the top of her game with licensing arrangements for fine fabrics, furniture, wallpaper; six books; and a highly rated TV show. Valerie's daughter, April, is a classically trained chef and the workaholic proprietor of a comfortable, popular downtown New York restaurant. They couldn't be happier in their chosen fields—or more different in their attitudes.

From the author of the award-winning Kindle single, Cornbread, comes a story about Cumberland Bixby, a minor league baseball player turned B-list actor who wakes up on his 34th birthday to find he's been dead for nearly nine hours. Seeking answers, Cumberland crisscrosses Manhattan on foot, his last glimpses of the city disappearing behind him. Happy Birthday, Cumberland Bixby is a story about life and death in the era of self-promotion, and what it means to be truly seen.

Thirteen-year-old Emily has saved up every single birthday wish from six to 12 years old, banking on a promise from the birthday fairy that one day she could use up all those wishes in one fell swoop. What Emily wishes for, however, is not a pony or new clothes or the chance to be a princess. She has a much bigger plan in mind.

In which our intrepid correspondent speaks of the President speaking about the unspeakable.