With witty text, dazzling photography, and corralled into thematic chapters, this is the first flamboyant and poignant survey of drag culture. Drag is not just for fabulous queens and drag enthusiasts, but for anyone interested in gender fluidity and the culture surrounding it.

What do Grace Jones, Benjamin Disraeli, Salvador Dali, K-Pop, and a giant art nouveau vase covered in fairies and stuffed with peacock feathers have in common? Answer: they are all, wildly, completely, and utterly ... Camp. Yes, C-A-M-P, that strange,
hard-to-define quality.

Over the last few decades, Camp has been tucked up in her four-poster, fast asleep. But now, having been roused from slumber by Anna Wintour for the 2019 Met Ball, Camp is back, and she might just be the thing you need to make sense of - and add some humor and irony to - this crazy, all-too-serious world.

In this hilarious, era-defining book, author and cultural commentator Simon Doonan gets to grips with Camp. Who is she? Where did she come from, and where did she go? Why is she back? Just who is Susan Sontag when she's at home?! Beautifully illustrated throughout, the book includes 100 entries that are completely and unapologetically Camp - of course, Dynasty, poodles and RuPaul are here, but vampires, tattoos, Queen Victoria and even cake? Absolutely. Doonan makes the Camp case for these as well.

The Camp 100 is a manifesto like no other, a manifesto to turn down the temperature dial and take the world a bit less seriously. In seeing 'Camp' in the most unlikely places, this book might revolutionize the way you see the world entirely.

Proclaimed the most brilliant, brash thing in type by Liz Smith, Simon Doonan's saucy prose has established him as an emerging star among literary humorists. In this break-through memoir, reminiscent of both Sedaris and Burroughs, he revisits the landscape of his youth, and displays the irresistible charm that earned him his dedicated audience.

Long before he became a celebrity in his own right--as the author of best-selling books, as the style arbiter of VH1 and America's Top Model, and the marketing genius behind Barney's New York--Simon Doonan was a scabby knee'd troll in Reading, England. In Beautiful People, Doonan returns to the working-class neighborhood of his youth, and chronicles the misadventures of the Doonan clan in all their wacky glory. Readers meet his mother Betty, whose gravity-defying, peroxide hairdo signified her natural glamour; his father Terry, an amateur vintner who turned parsnips into the legendary Chateau Doonan; his grandfather D.C., a hard-drinking betting man who plotted to win his fortune by turning Simon into a jockey; and his demented grandma Narg and schizophrenic Uncle Ken, both of whom lived upstairs.

Fearing he would fall victim to the insanity that runs in his family, or, worse, the banality of suburban life, Doonan decamps with his flamboyant best-friend Biddie to London, where they hope to find the Beautiful People, that elusive clan who luxuriate on floor pillows and amuse each other with bon mots. Throughout the memoir--in essays about family holidays, the tart who lived next door, his first job--Doonan continues his bumbling pursuit of the fabulous life, only to learn, in the end, that perhaps the Beautiful People were the ones he left behind.

How to Be Yourself is a cheeky, kind and vibrant look at what it takes to shape your one beautiful and wild life. - Amy Poehler

An irreverent book of radically honest advice by renowned fashion arbiter and legendary window dresser Simon Doonan

Illustrated with amusing vintage and contemporary photographs, some lifted from the Doonan family album, How to Be Yourself is an inspiring, joyful and entertaining survival guide - a literary GPS that promises to transport you away from your phone and back to yourself.

Revolutionary and renegade, Keith Haring was an artist for the people, creating an instantly recognisable repertoire of symbols - barking dogs, space-ships, crawling babies, clambering faceless people - which became synonymous with the volatile culture of 1980s. Like a careening, preening pinball, Keith Haring playfully slammed into all aspects of this decade - hip-hop, new-wave, graffiti, funk, art, style, gay culture - and brought them together.

Haring's fanatical drive propelled him into the orbit of the most interesting people of his time: Jean Michel Basquiat envied him; Warhol, William Boroughs and Grace Jones collaborated with him. Madonna and he shared the same tastes in men. Famous at 25, dead from AIDS at 31, Keith Haring is remembered as a Pied Piper, an unpretentious communicator who appeared happiest when mentoring a gang of kids, arming them with brushes and attacking the nearest wall.

A series of brief biographies of the great artists, Lives of the Artists takes as its inspiration Giorgio Vasari's five-hundred-year-old masterwork, updating it with modern takes on the lives of key artists past and present. Focusing on the life of the artist rather than examining their work, each book also includes key images illustrating the artist's life. Hardbound, but pocket-sized, the books each sport a specially-commissioned portrait of their subject on the half-jacket.

By no means a typical how-to manual, Eccentric Glamour is a mixture of cultural commentary and personal disclosure, generously seasoned with gushings of wildly dictatorial, provocative, and reckless style advice. Through cautionary tales and inspirational examples, Doonan shows how to develop your own brand of eccentric glamour -- by magnifying everything that is already unique and idiosyncratic about you.

In these comic essays, interspersed with one-on-one interviews with some of the world's most glamorous eccentrics (including Iman, Lucy Liu, Tilda Swinton, Malcolm Gladwell, and many more), Simon Doonan offers the women of America an alternative to the cheapness and tackiness that currently pass for personal style. Eccentric Glamour is intended as an antidote to the epidemic of slutty dressing and porno-chic that has taken over since the arrival of Paris Hilton and Anna Nicole Smith (may she rest in peace). While the typical TV boobs 'n' Botox makeovers force every woman to look the same, the transformations this book strives to inspire are the very opposite. Dressing like a ho is not just bad taste but boring! In Simon Doonan's book, conformity is the only crime and dressing down the only faux pas.

Eccentric Glamour is every woman's birthright. SO SAY NO TO HO!...and yes to ECCENTRIC GLAMOUR!

In the pages of Wacky Chicks readers will find life lessons from a group of fearlessly inappropriate and fabulously eccentric women, including comedienne Amy Sedaris; fashion designer turned park ranger Spider Fawke; Warhol muse Brigid Berlin; Suzanne Bartsch, the woman who showed Madonna how to vogue; and many more.

Distinguished primarily by their wild originality and rule-breaking chutzpah, these women defy rules, shape the cultural landscape, and enrich the world. They are about as diverse a flock as you can imagine, but all of them are Belligerent, Resilient, Uninhibited, Naughty, Creative, and Hilarious (B.R.U.N.C.H. for short).

In a word, they are Wacky, and they are ready to enlighten you. A book that pays tribute to the wild and unstoppable female in each of us, Wacky Chicks is the ultimate guide to embracing your inner rebel.

Doonan has seen it all: from dealing with models unable to work for fear of ghosts, to deep-sea fishing with a couturier pal and his jailbird companion, to watching Anna Wintour remain perfectly calm while the ceiling fell--literally--in the middle of Fashion Week. The outlandish family Doonan knew as a child has given way to alarmingly similar lunatic peers in the fashion world: style insiders see patterns and trends in everything; they suffer from outsize personality disorders and delusions of grandeur; and, of course, they have a predilection for theatrical makeup and artfully destroyed clothing. No one is more suited to the asylum than the truly die-hard fashionista--after all, eccentricity and extremism are the foundations of great style.

Hailed as a must-read for fashionistas and non-fashionistas alike, (Michael Kors) and raucous and revelatory (Booklist), Doonan's critically acclaimed collection gives us the scoop on the kooky, cutthroat--but always fabulous--fashion world, and proves the author to be one of the sharpest humorists writing today.

At 9.30pm on 2nd October 2008, BBC2 will air the first in an 8-part adaptation of Beautiful People. Produced by Jon Plowman, the man behind The Office and Ab Fab, this is the charming and funny memoir of escaping a bonkers family and following your dreams

Simon Doonan's childhood was a curious mix of small town boredom and bright light city dreams. Growing up in a working class area of Reading with the mad-cap Doonan clan - Mother Betty, Father Terry, blind Aunt Phyllis, grandmother Narg and Grandfather D.C. - he yearned to get out and find the Beautiful People whom he imagined lived fabulous lives of glitz and glamour.

This is the story of how Simon eventually finds a way out and escapes to London with best friend Biddie Biddlecombe. Along the way they stumble upon punks, drunks, ladies of the night, the long arm of the law and all sorts of camps, vamps and outrageous scamps.

But does he ever find the Beautiful People? Or could they be the ones he left behind...?