AMELIA AND GEORGE

This is the decade-long tale on the tumultuous relationship between aviator Amelia Earhart and publishing guru George Palmer Putnam, who divorced the heir to the Crayola fortune over his steamy affair with Amelia, and later married her.

This previously untold story upends the traditional "Where is her plane?" narrative that has come to be the Amelia Earhart trope and instead considers why she died. The surprising answer, in part, is because of her own recklessness, but mostly because of her clandestine lover-turned-husband's disregard of danger in the face of maintaining financial success during the Great Depression.

Putnam was considered the P.T. Barnum of publishing during the heady Roaring Twenties, and this master of book ideas and publicity plucked Amelia - who was a fairly inexperienced pilot - from obscurity and helped create her legend from whole cloth. But as time passed, she became his primary source of revenue, which led to extraordinary risk and to her eventual demise.

Laurie Gwen Shapiro is a native of New York City's Lower East Side. She has most recently written articles for publications including The New Yorker, New York Magazine, The Daily Beast, Lapham's Quarterly, Slate, Aeon, Los Angeles Review of Books, and has her own history column focusing on unsung heroes for The Forward. Shapiro is also a documentary filmmaker who won an Independent Spirit Award for directing IFC's Keep the River On Your Right: A Modern Cannibal Tale and an Emmy nomination for producing HBO's Finishing Heaven. The Stowaway is her first non-fiction book.

Her Indie Next selection The Stowaway is on its fourth edition, and published in French and large print. Her next book will be Amelia and George a narrative nonfiction book on the decade-long relationship between Amelia Earhart and George Palmer Putnam.