Bitter Crop

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A01=Paul Alexander
Author_Paul Alexander
Billie Holiday
books on female icons
Category=AVP
Category=DNBF
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_music
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
jazz
jazz biographies
music biographies
music books
music legend
strange fruit
twentieth century icons
twentieth-century music

Product details

  • ISBN 9781837262434
  • Weight: 253g
  • Dimensions: 129 x 198mm
  • Publication Date: 13 Mar 2025
  • Publisher: Canongate Books
  • Publication City/Country: GB
  • Product Form: Paperback
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'Paul Alexander tells her story in a way that could put her soul and our questions to rest' Gloria Steinem
'Bitter Crop shows just what lay behind that tragic, transcendent gift' Sunday Times
'Magnificent' Irish Times

Bitter Crop
is an unconventional portrait of arguably America's most eminent jazz singer. Acclaimed biographer Paul Alexander shrewdly focuses on the last year of her life - with relevant flashbacks to provide context - to evoke and examine the persistent magnificence of Holiday's artistry when it was supposed to have declined, in the wake of her drug abuse, relationships with violent men, and run-ins with the law.

Relying on interviews with people who knew her and new material unearthed in private collections and institutional archives, Bitter Crop limns Holiday as a powerful, ambitious woman who overcame her flaws to triumph as a vital figure of American popular music.

Paul Alexander has published eight books, among them Rough Magic, a biography of Sylvia Plath, and Salinger, a biography of J. D. Salinger that was the basis of the documentary Salinger that appeared on PBS, Netflix and HBO. His nonfiction has appeared in numerous publications, including the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, Newsday, New York, the Guardian, The Nation, the Washington Post, and Rolling Stone. He teaches at Hunter College in New York.

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