Books by Cynthia Carr
Candy Darling: Dreamer, Icon, Superstar
by Cynthia Carr
🏆 Winner of the 2025 National Book Critics Circle Prize for Biography
“This is a compassionate portrait of Candy Darling, who lived a pretty tough life. She was born James Lawrence Slattery, but from the beginning it was very apparent that she wanted to become a woman, a very glamorous woman. So she left Queens and wound up in this group of people that flocked around Andy Warhol. Andy ended up using her in his films, and she became a movie star of sorts, although not the kind of movie star she really wanted to be. The hard part is that nobody really took care of her, including Warhol. She was often homeless.” Read more...
The Best Biographies: The 2025 NBCC Shortlist
Mary Ann Gwinn, Journalist
Interviews where books by Cynthia Carr were recommended
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1
Dark Renaissance: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare's Greatest Rival
by Stephen Greenblatt -
2
The Colonialist: The Vision of Cecil Rhodes
by William Kelleher Storey -
3
Fulvia: The Woman Who Broke All the Rules in Ancient Rome
by Jane Draycott -
4
The Traitors Circle: The True Story of a Secret Resistance Network in Nazi Germany and the Spy Who Betrayed Them
by Jonathan Freedland -
5
Baldwin: A Love Story
by Nicholas Boggs -
6
True Nature: The Pilgrimage of Peter Matthiessen
by Lance Richardson
New Biographies
New Biographies
Among the new biographies coming out in 2025, the lives of literary figures have been particularly prominent, including new books about Robert Louis Stevenson, the Scottish adventure writer, and Shakespeare’s rival Christopher Marlowe, who was stabbed to death aged 29. Also popular are reconstructions of lives from the distant past that we know little about, including the first King of England and Fulvia, the first wife of Mark Antony.
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1
Candy Darling: Dreamer, Icon, Superstar
by Cynthia Carr -
2
Candida Royalle and the Sexual Revolution: A History from Below
by Jane Kamensky -
3
Family Romance: John Singer Sargent and the Wertheimers
by Jean Strouse -
4
Night Flyer: Harriet Tubman and the Faith Dreams of a Free People
by Tiya Miles -
5
The World She Edited: Katharine S. White at The New Yorker
by Amy Reading
The Best Biographies: The 2025 NBCC Shortlist, recommended by Mary Ann Gwinn
The Best Biographies: The 2025 NBCC Shortlist, recommended by Mary Ann Gwinn
We always look forward to the shortlists for the National Book Critics Awards, on the basis that literary critics are probably the best read people out there. Here, we asked the garlanded critic Mary Ann Gwinn to talk us through the five biographies highlighted in 2025.
