Sid ‘One-Punch’ Luft, amateur-boxer, producer and Judy Garland’s third husband was the one man in her life who stuck around, helping her achieve a meteoric comeback in the 1960s. It was Luft who reversed the fortunes of an apparently faded career, seeing her triumph at Carnegie Hall, in ‘A Star Is Born’ and ‘The Judy Garland Show’.

Previously unpublished, Sid Luft’s intimate autobiography tells their story in hard-boiled yet elegant prose. It begins on a fateful night in New York City when the not-quite-divorced Judy and the not-quite-divorced Sid meet at Billy Reed’s Little Club. A straight-talking sharp shooter, Sid fell for Judy hard and fast and the romance persisted through separations, reconciliations, and later divorce. However, her drug dependencies and suicidal tendencies put a tremendous strain on the relationship.

Sid did not complete his memoir; it ended in 1960 after Judy hired David Begelman and Freddie Fields to manage her career. But Randy L. Schmidt, acclaimed editor of Judy Garland on Judy Garland, seamlessly pieced together the final section of the book from extensive interviews with Sid, most previously unpublished.

Despite everything, Sid never stopped loving Judy and never forgave himself for not being able to save her from the demons that ultimately drove her to an early death at age forty-seven in 1969. Sid served as chief conservator of the Garland legacy until his death at the age of eighty-nine in 2005. This is his testament to the love of his life.

‘In prose so brassy that it bruises the sensibilities, Luft… illuminates the dark side of life in the spotlight and dispels any sentimental illusions about the glories of show business in Hollywood’s classic age.’ - The New Yorker

No es fácil ser la mala del cuento.

En un pueblo de pescadores de Munchkinland nace Elphaba, un bebé de piel verde y dientes de tiburón con los que arranca los dedos a la comadrona. Elphaba crecerá para convertirse en la Malvada Bruja del Oeste, una persona ingeniosa, irritable y poco comprendida que pone en tela de juicio todas nuestras nociones preconcebidas sobre la naturaleza del bien y del mal.

ENGLISH DESCRIPTION

The New York Times bestseller and basis for the Tony-winning hit musical, soon to be a major motion picture starring Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande

With millions of copies in print around the world, Gregory Maguire’s Wicked is established not only as a commentary on our time but as a novel to revisit for years to come. Wicked relishes the inspired inventions of L. Frank Baum’s 1900 novel, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, while playing sleight of hand with our collective memories of the 1939 MGM film starring Margaret Hamilton (and Judy Garland). In this fast-paced, fantastically real, and supremely entertaining novel, Maguire has populated the largely unknown world of Oz with the power of his own imagination. 

Years before Dorothy and her dog crash-land, another little girl makes her presence known in Oz. This girl, Elphaba, is born with emerald-green skin—no easy burden in a land as mean and poor as Oz, where superstition and magic are not strong enough to explain or overcome the natural disasters of flood and famine. Still, Elphaba is smart, and by the time she enters Shiz University, she becomes a member of a charmed circle of Oz’s most promising young citizens.

But Elphaba’s Oz is no utopia. The Wizard’s secret police are everywhere. Animals—those creatures with voices, souls, and minds—are threatened with exile. Young Elphaba, green and wild and misunderstood, is determined to protect the Animals—even if it means combating the mysterious Wizard, even if it means risking her single chance at romance. Ever wiser in guilt and sorrow, she can find herself grateful when the world declares her a witch. And she can even make herself glad for that young girl from Kansas. 

Recognized as an iconoclastic tour de force on its initial publication, the novel has inspired the blockbuster musical of the same name—one of the longest-running plays in Broadway history. Popular, indeed. But while the novel’s distant cousins hail from the traditions of magical realism, mythopoeic fantasy, and sprawling nineteenth-century sagas of moral urgency, Maguire’s Wicked is as unique as its green-skinned witch.