The True Memoirs of Little K

The True Memoirs of Little K
Author: Adrienne Sharp
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
Total Pages: 387
Release: 2010-10-26
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1429962852

Exiled in Paris, tiny, one-hundred-year-old Mathilde Kschessinska sits down to write her memoirs before all that she believes to be true is forgotten. A lifetime ago, she was the vain, ambitious, impossibly charming prima ballerina assoluta of the tsar's Russian Imperial Ballet in St. Petersburg. Now, as she looks back on her tumultuous life, she can still recall every slight she ever suffered, every conquest she ever made. Kschessinka's riveting storytelling soon thrusts us into a world lost to time: that great intersection of the Russian court and the Russian theater. Before the revolution, Kschessinska dominated that world as the greatest dancer of her age. At seventeen, her crisp, scything technique made her a star. So did her romance with the tsarevich Nicholas Romanov, soon to be Nicholas II. It was customary for grand dukes and sons of tsars to draw their mistresses from the ranks of the ballet, but it was not customary for them to fall in love. The affair could not endure: when Nicholas ascended to the throne as tsar, he was forced to give up his mistress, and Kschessinska turned for consolation to his cousins, two grand dukes with whom she formed an infamous ménage à trois. But when Nicholas's marriage to Alexandra wavered after she produced girl after girl, he came once again to visit his Little K. As the tsar's empire—one that once made up a third of the world—began its fatal crumble, Kschessinka's devotion to the imperial family would be tested in ways she could never have foreseen. In Adrienne Sharp's magnificently imagined novel, the last days of the three-hundred-year-old Romanov empire are relived. Through Kschessinska's memories of her own triumphs and defeats, we witness the stories that changed history: the seething beginnings of revolution, the blindness of the doomed court, the end of a grand, decadent way of life that belonged to the nineteenth century. Based on fact, The True Memoirs of Little K is historical fiction as it's meant to be written: passionately eventful, crammed with authentic detail, and alive with emotions that resonate still.

The Master's Muse

The Master's Muse
Author: Varley O'Connor
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 263
Release: 2013-05-07
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1451657757

A fictional account of the marriage of ballet master George Balanchine and Tanaquil Le Clercq describes how polio ended Tanny's dancing career, the rehabilitation that deepened their relationship, and how Balanchine's return to ballet tested their marriage.

Read On...History

Read On...History
Author: Tina Frolund
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 212
Release: 2013-10-21
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1610694325

Make history come alive! This book helps librarians and teachers as well as readers themselves find books they will enjoy—titles that will animate and explain the past, entertain, and expand their minds. This invaluable resource offers reading lists of contemporary and classic non-fiction history books and historical fiction, covering all time periods throughout the world, and including practically all manner of human endeavors. Every book included is hand-selected as an entertaining and enlightening read! Organized by appeal characteristics, this book will help readers zero in on the history books they will like best—for instance, titles that emphasize character, tell a specific type of historical story, convey a mood, or are presented in a particular setting. Every book listed has been recommended based on the author's research, and has proved to be a satisfying and worthwhile read.

So, You Want to Be a Dancer?

So, You Want to Be a Dancer?
Author: Laurel van der Linde
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 208
Release: 2015-04-07
Genre: Juvenile Nonfiction
ISBN: 1582704503

From ballet and contemporary to hip-hop and even Broadway, this book reveals what it really takes to build a career in dance today.

Firefly Lane

Firefly Lane
Author: Kristin Hannah
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Total Pages: 532
Release: 2008-02-05
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1429927844

From the New York Times bestselling author Kristin Hannah comes a powerful novel of love, loss, and the magic of friendship. . . . now a #1 Netflix series! In the turbulent summer of 1974, Kate Mularkey has accepted her place at the bottom of the eighth-grade social food chain. Then, to her amazement, the "coolest girl in the world" moves in across the street and wants to be her friend. Tully Hart seems to have it all---beauty, brains, ambition. On the surface they are as opposite as two people can be: Kate, doomed to be forever uncool, with a loving family who mortifies her at every turn. Tully, steeped in glamour and mystery, but with a secret that is destroying her. They make a pact to be best friends forever; by summer's end they've become TullyandKate. Inseparable. So begins Kristin Hannah's magnificent new novel. Spanning more than three decades and playing out across the ever-changing face of the Pacific Northwest, Firefly Lane is the poignant, powerful story of two women and the friendship that becomes the bulkhead of their lives. From the beginning, Tully is desperate to prove her worth to the world. Abandoned by her mother at an early age, she longs to be loved unconditionally. In the glittering, big-hair era of the eighties, she looks to men to fill the void in her soul. But in the buttoned-down nineties, it is television news that captivates her. She will follow her own blind ambition to New York and around the globe, finding fame and success . . . and loneliness. Kate knows early on that her life will be nothing special. Throughout college, she pretends to be driven by a need for success, but all she really wants is to fall in love and have children and live an ordinary life. In her own quiet way, Kate is as driven as Tully. What she doesn't know is how being a wife and mother will change her . . . how she'll lose sight of who she once was, and what she once wanted. And how much she'll envy her famous best friend. . . . For thirty years, Tully and Kate buoy each other through life, weathering the storms of friendship---jealousy, anger, hurt, resentment. They think they've survived it all until a single act of betrayal tears them apart . . . and puts their courage and friendship to the ultimate test. Firefly Lane is for anyone who ever drank Boone's Farm apple wine while listening to Abba or Fleetwood Mac. More than a coming-of-age novel, it's the story of a generation of women who were both blessed and cursed by choices. It's about promises and secrets and betrayals. And ultimately, about the one person who really, truly knows you---and knows what has the power to hurt you . . . and heal you. Firefly Lane is a story you'll never forget . . . one you'll want to pass on to your best friend.

White Swan, Black Swan

White Swan, Black Swan
Author: Adrienne Sharp
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Total Pages: 239
Release: 2008-12-18
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0307493105

The world's most famous choreographer becomes infatuated with a coltish young dancer who proves both siren and muse. A rising star plunges into an affair with a principal but finds that ecstasy on the stage can't be surpassed in the bed. A dying legend reflects on the evanescent beauty of a life of gesture, lost to everything but memory. Each bittersweet story plants the reader amid a cast of dancers and choreographers who struggle—valiantly, playfully, fiercely—to find in the rigorous discipline and animating beauty of ballet a counterbalance to the chaos of unscripted life. Many of the tales dare to imagine the inner lives of the century's titans—Balanchine, Fonteyn and Nureyev—which rival in emotional complexity and pathos the classic dramas they enacted onstage: La Bayadere, Don Quixote, Swan Lake. White Swan, Black Swan translates the pure and essential gestures of ballet into starkly elegant prose while showing the sweat and sex beneath the serene surface. Adrienne Sharp's debut is a bravura performance.

Dancing in Petersburg

Dancing in Petersburg
Author: Matilʹda Feliksovna Kshesinskai︠a︡
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2005
Genre: Ballerinas
ISBN: 9781852731052

There have been wonderful books about dancing, and superbly evocative ones about old Russia: but here the two themes are fascinatingly wedded. For these are the memoirs of the prima ballerina assoluta of the imperial Russian ballet, Mathilde Kschessinska (the Princess Romanovsky-Krassinsky), with whom, at her first appearance, the Tsarevitch Nicholas fell in love. As a dancer she had few rivals: apart from her marvellous technique she had a star personality, and was adored by the public. At the height of her fame she appeared in London with Diaghilev's company and danced with Nijinsky: she preferred, however, to dance in Russia, and for twenty years she was the adored darling of the great world of Petersburg. After the Revolution, when she was living as an emigre in the South of France, Diaghilev begged her to dance for him in his new Paris season, but to no avail. Kschessinska's memoirs fall roughly into three parts: the glittering fairy-story of her life as prima ballerina in Russia; her flight during the Revolution; and the era in which she established herself as a teacher of the highest rank. It is an extraordinary self-revelation of a great dancer and an utterly human person.

Too Good to Be True

Too Good to Be True
Author: Benjamin Anastas
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Total Pages: 195
Release: 2012
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0547913990

Acclaimed writer Benjamin Anastas s searing, utterly moving memoir of fathers and sons, crushing debt and infidelity, and the first, cautious steps taken towards piecing a life back together."