Showing results by publisher "Penguin Audio" in Entertainment & Performing Arts

A Vulture Best Comedy Book of 2025 A wildly entertaining book by one of the world’s most obsessed and informed fans of TV icon Johnny Carson, setting the record straight on Carson's legacy and shining light on the personality behind the legendary comedian and talk show host Over the course of...

Every time you deliver a speech, give a presentation, or simply tell a good story, you are taking centre stage. Here, one of the world’s leading voice coaches introduces the simple exercises that great actors use to hold people’s attention – and reveals how anyone speaking in public can use them. Drawing on 25 years working at London’s National Theatre, Jeannette Nelson explains how to warm up your voice and body before a big speech, how focusing on your breathing can improve your clarity and pace, and much more.

From humble beginnings in County Donegal in Ireland to worldwide recording success, Daniel O'Donnell recounts the incredible story of his life, charting the ups and downs with remarkable honesty. Through wonderful anecdotes, Daniel recalls his early years and the moment he set his heart on becoming a singer, and gives a personal acount of his spreading popularity and subsequent perfomances all over the world.

Written together with friend and journalist Boyd Hilton, the audiobook follows a year in the lives of Matt Lucas and David Walliams in every unfiltered detail: the good, the bad, the mundane and the meaningful. It is a year that includes writing, rehearsing, filming, Live8, going to America, and undertaking a mammoth 100-date, seven-month tour where Little Britain goes in search of Great Britain.

Comedy, Tragedy, Therapy. Simon Amstell did his first stand-up gig at the age of 13. His parents had just divorced, and puberty was confusing. Trying to be funny solved everything. Read by Simon Amstell, and interspersed with footage from his stand-up tours, HELP is the hilarious and heartbreaking account of Simon's ongoing compulsion to reveal his entire self onstage. To tell the truth so it can't hurt him anymore. Loneliness, anxiety, depression - this book has it all. And more.

Back in print after two decades, the story of Hollywood’s most exclusive hotel and its star-studded guest list Raymond Sarlot bought the Chateau Marmont in 1975, but what was originally a business purchase became a love affair as he delved into the hotel’s incredible history. From its perch...

'Penguin's fine pandemic audio festival delivers hours of laughs from comedy's most creative talents.' - The Observer 'An absolutely cracking lineup' - The Guardian 'A marvellous wheeze, almost like attending a private stand-up gig' - The I Brought to you by Penguin. The show has been called off...

One of The Smithsonian's Ten Best History Books of the Year A brilliant and daring account of a culture war over the place of theater in American democracy in the 1930s, one that anticipates our current divide, by the acclaimed Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro From 1935 to 1939, the Federal...

A riveting and revealing look at the shows that helped cable television drama emerge as the signature art form of the twenty-first century. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the landscape of television began an unprecedented transformation. While the networks continued to chase the lowest...

Legendary filmmaker and celebrated author Werner Herzog tells in his inimitable voice the story of his epic artistic career in a long-awaited memoir that is as inventive and daring as anything he has done before Werner Herzog was born in September 1942 in Munich, Germany, at a turning point in...

An Esquire Best Book of 2022! Written with inside access, comprehensive research, and a down-to-earth perspective, Phasers on Stun! chronicles the entire history of Star Trek, revealing that its enduring place in pop culture is all thanks to innovative pivots and radical change. For over five...

Director, writer, and actor Jay Chandrasekhar tells the hilarious stories behind his films Super Troopers and Super Troopers 2 (out on 4/20/2018!), the history of his comedy group, Broken Lizard, and everything in between. Jay Chandrasekhar has spent the past two decades writing, directing, and...

Big personalities, high drama—the extraordinary behind-the-scenes story of the Food Network, now about to celebrate its twentieth anniversary: the business, media, and cultural juggernaut that changed the way America thinks about food. In October 1993, a tiny start-up called the Food Network...

A deeply personal and electrifying memoir by Ellen Burstyn, renowned actress and six-time Academy Award nominee. By the time Ellen Burstyn arrived in New York to study acting, she'd already worked as a Texas fashion model, a Montreal chorus girl, suffered numerous toxic relationships, and just...

#1 New York Times bestseller! For seven decades Katharine Hepburn played a leading role in the popular culture of the twentieth century—reigning as an admired actress, a beloved movie star, and a treasured icon of the modern American woman. She also remained one of the most private of all the...

The highly anticipated first book by a widely respected entertainer whose career highlights include The Right Stuff, Ugly Betty, Desperate Housewives, and former Miss America When Vanessa Williams was growing up, she had a plan: She’d go to college and major in musical theater; afterward...

Learn how to thrive in intense, competitive environments with these secrets from one of America's premiere ballerinas--and get a sneak peek at what her life is really like. Ballet may look glamorous and effortless to audience members, but it requires grueling discipline. It's a competitive and...

Throughout history, there has been a consistent crossover between show business and espionage, often producing some of the most extraordinary undercover agents, and occasionally leading to disastrous and dangerous failures. The fact that one relies on publicity and the other on secrecy might seem to rule out a successful symbiosis, but as both require high levels of creative thinking, improvisation, disguise and role-play, they inevitably attract some remarkably similar personalities. Stars and Spies is the first history of the interplay between the two worlds.

For the last two years, Frank Skinner has managed to squeeze in a weekly column for The Times. Without fail, he sat down every week and wracked his brain to think of something to write 900 words about. This is the brilliant result.

Norman Wisdom's early years could easily have come straight from the pages of a Dickens novel. Left by their frightened mother and ill-treated by a brutal father, Norman and his brother were forced to fend for themselves, sleeping rough in London and stealing food to survive. This is a rags to riches tale of the man Charlie Chaplin said would take his mantle and who went on to make millions laugh around the world for over five decades.