Reality television is the ultimate guilty pleasure -- a nonstop parade of cast members and scenarios that make fictional ones seem downright dull. Increasingly absurd challenges, hair-yanking catfights, and hot tub makeouts dripping with yet-to-be-acknowledged regret are only part of its appeal.

In this collection of wry and moving essays, bestselling authors explore the programs we obsess over, cringe at, and occasionally feel inspired by. From a Real World casting call and American Idol tattoo to a look at the appeal of Big Brother, Survivor, The Real Housewives, and more, a vibrant mix of literary luminaries examine the form of entertainment that's dominated our TV screens for more than a decade.

Entertaining and insightful, Reality Matters is a must-read for anyone who adores reality TV, wants to know what kind of an impact it's having on our society, or simply wonders just how real any of it actually is.

Anna David's True Tales of Lust and Love began as a one-time-only reading and storytelling show in January of 2012, a venue for writers and comedians to share and laugh at their dating disaster stories. But after selling out the venue and attracting immediate press and buzz--with articles in "The LA Weekly, LA Times, Time Out, Flavorpill," and "LAist," among others--David agreed to produce the show every month. It has continued not only to sell out but also to attract a growing list of authors, comedians, and Hollywood writers. As Time Out declared, "This is the place to go to see strong female performers."
With the show now booked indefinitely, and with audio recordings of each performance available on iTunes, Anna has collected the most popular and entertaining pieces into the first ever True Tales of Lust and Love anthology. The book includes essays organized into three sections--Casual Sex, Dating, and Out of the Ordinary--which collectively offer up funny, raucous, insightful, and surprisingly touching confessions about the quest for lust and love. Everyone has dating disaster stories, everyone needs to share and laugh at them, and this anthology will give readers the opportunity to do just that, with contributions from the funniest writers and comedians around, pulled from the world of books, TV, and film. "True Tales of Lust and Love" is the perfect complement for a funny or cynical Valentine's Day--and beyond.

"Funny, smart, and compulsively likeable, Anna David is this decade's answer to Carrie Bradshaw. There won't be a single second you won't root for her as she bravely tries to answer the resonating question: how can I be my best self?"
--Allison Winn Scotch, New York Times bestselling author of The Department of Lost and Found

The sex-and-relationship expert on G4's Attack of the Show, author of Party Girl and Bought, and the editor of Reality Matters, Anna David is smart, successful, and single. Falling for Me is Anna's provocative, eye-opening, and inspiring chronicle of the year she changed her life by following the advice of Cosmopolitan Magazine guru Helen Gurley Brown in her classic Sex and the Single Girl. Anna's story of "How I Hung Curtains, Learned to Cook, Traveled to Seville, and Fell in Love"--and her determination to either find "the one" or accept once and for all that it's not in the cards--is touching and transformative, exhilarating and uplifting, and belongs on every bookshelf next to Eat, Pray, Love and The Happiness Project.

Celebrity journalist Amelia Stone is the quintessential Hollywood party girl: she stays out late, rubs shoulders (and occasionally more) with celebrities, and ingests copious amounts of cocaine.

But after losing her job, her friends, and much of her mind, Amelia makes the drastic decision to end her drug abuse. Once sober, she's hired by a big-name magazine to write a column detailing her wild adventures and she starts seeing the man who could be her Mr. Right.

There's just one problem. Overnight, Amelia has become the new face of Hollywood nightlife, and her editors--who don't know she's come clean --want her to play the part. As the lure of her former fast-and-furious lifestyle begins to pull at her, she must decide whether to save herself or salvage her reputation as the ultimate party girl.

Tom Sizemore has been called many things. Brilliant. Brutal. Fiercely talented. Angry. Drug addicted. In reality, he's all of them. He's a survivor of the Detroit ghetto, the fifty-year-old father of twin boys, and a veteran of dozens of movies. He's also now sober, after his addiction took his life just about as far down as any human being could go.
Through screen-stealing performances in the 1990s movies True Romance, Heat, and Natural Born Killers, Sizemore was so in demand that even when it was widely known that he had a drug problem, directors like Steven Spielberg were offering him roles and begging him to stay sober for them. Robert De Niro personally recruited him for the role of Michael
Cheritto in Heat after asking him to dinner and expressing his admiration. Jack Nicholson, Robert Downey, Jr., and Johnny Depp each went out of their way to befriend him. But this same man went from romancing Elizabeth Hurley and Juliette Lewis to being accused of domestic violence by the world's most famous madam, and moved from a Beverly Hills mansion to a solitary-confinement cell at Chino State Prison and later a desolate, abandoned cabin in a town best known for being where Charles Manson hid Rosemary LaBianca's wallet.
For years, Sizemore's days were filled with overdoses, suicide attempts, and homelessness. The simple fact is that people don't come back from where Tom Sizemore landed--yet miraculously, he did. By Some Miracle I Made It Out of There is a harrowing journey into the heart of addiction, told in riveting and often shocking detail--a terrifying cautionary tale for anyone who's peered over the abyss of drug abuse. By turns gritty and heartbreaking, it is also one man's look at a particular moment in entertainment history--a window into the drug-fueled spotlight that sent Robert Downey, Jr., to jail and killed River Phoenix, Heath Ledger, and Chris Farley and many others far before their time.
***
"I CAN'T TELL YOU WHAT I'D GIVE TO BE THE GUY YOU DIDN'T KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT. . . .
I'VE DONE A LOT OF THINGS THAT WOULD MAKE THAT IMPOSSIBLE, AND I KNOW THAT TELLING YOU ALL ABOUT THEM WON'T HELP ME TO BECOME AMERICA'S FAVORITE SON.
BUT IT MAY HELP YOU TO UNDERSTAND HOW EVERYTHING HAPPENED THE WAY IT DID. . . ."
--TOM SIZEMORE

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Anna David turns her reporter's eye for detail toward Tinseltown's seedy underbelly yet again and "eloquently and humorously unveil[s] what could be a new subgenre: Chick Lit with a Message" ("New York Post").

Tired of gathering banal quotes from the B-list on the sidelines of the red carpet, Emma Swanson publicly yearns for a more substantial career but privately dreams of a hotshot boyfriend to transport her into the beating heart of the Hollywood scene. Instead, she meets Jessica--beautiful, cavalier, manipulative--who shamelessly trades sex for the gifts it can bring. Convinced that writing a story about Jessica and her ilk would seriously boost her journalistic cred, Emma soon finds herself sucked into a world where the luxuries of prettied-up prostitution may cost more than she ever expected.