The Unruly Life of Woody Allen: A Biography (by Marion Meade, 2000)
"The Woody-Mia-Soon-Yi saga, which erupted into tabloid headlines and late-night monologues in August 1992, was more than your average celebrity soap opera. The relationship had lurid undertones of incest, innocence betrayed, and berserk revenge. It had pornographic Polaroids and a valentine with a real dagger through the heart. It had a murmuring chorus of psychiatrists and a locust-like swarm of lawyers in the foreground. It was standard Manhattan neurotic intrigue turned into melodrama, grand opera, the epic poem of our therapeutic culture. So it's probably inevitable that biographer-novelist Marion Meade, in The Unruly Life of Woody Allen, an evenhanded, prodigiously researched biography that addresses Woody's entire life and career, devotes more than a third of its pages to the scandal and its aftermath....The scandal resonated, Meade thinks, because Allen's fame and fortune were built on extracting comedy from the insecurities, identity crises, family and marital vendettas, death-obsessed depressions, and adolescent limbo of his endearing comedic alter ego."--Entertainment Weekly

Woody Allen: A Biography (by Eric Lax, 2000)
"This affectionate biography of Woody Allen is the best account of his life you can buy. Eric Lax, a longtime friend of Allen's, does not recite Allen's story by chronological rote. Instead, he begins in the present day and digresses from it to past events. The result is an anecdotal account that manages to give all the details of Allen's development as an artist and a man while remaining consistently entertaining, enlightening, and funny."--Amazon.com

Woody Allen: A Biography (by John Baxter, 1999)
"There is no dearth of books on Woody Allen, but Baxter's is the first to appear since Allen's split with Mia Farrow because of his affair with her adopted daughter, whom he later married. Some of Allen's diehard fans may be taken aback by Baxter's combination of tolerance of Allen's peccadilloes, including his unconventional love life, and unstinting criticism of such subpar films as Celebrity. Baxter details the development of Allen's nebbishy onscreen persona, showing how drastically it differs from the real-life Woody, and he demonstrates how closely Allen's art has paralleled his life, from sardonic gags about his wife in early stand-up routines to the character of the demon-plagued, creatively blocked protagonist of Deconstructing Harry (1997). Scandal and creative doldrums notwithstanding, Allen retains a sizable following likely to eagerly read a nonsycophantic account of him that is judgmental about his films rather than his life."--Gordon Flagg, Booklist

Woody Allen on Woody Allen: In Conversation with Stig Bjorkman
(by Woody Allen, Stig Bjorkman, 1995)
"Fans of Woody Allen have long waited to hear him tell us in his own words about his life, his tastes, and his films, but until recently he has been reluctant to give lengthy interviews. This book is the conversation we've been waiting for, a dialogue with Stig Bjorkman in which Allen speaks openly about himself and his art. Bjorkman invites the writer/director to talk at length about his lesser-known movies as well as his famous ones. We also learn about Allen's filmmaking technique, his feelings about his stock company of actors, his influences, and why Stardust Memories and The Purple Rose of Cairo are his two personal favorites."--Gordon Flagg, Booklist

Without Feathers (by Woody Allen, 1990)
"The title of Woody Allen's second collection of New Yorker-style sprint humor is a sly comment on Emily Dickinson's famous quote, "Hope is the thing with feathers." Without Feathers delivers Allen's hopeless schlub persona--you remember, what he used to be before he was either a lecher or an auteur, depending on your politics. In addition to being as funny as anything published since, to read Without Feathers is to return to a simpler time, when being a fan of his work was common, not controversial."--Michael Gerber

Side Effects (by Woody Allen, 1989)
"Before Woody Allen set his sights on becoming the next Ingmar Bergman, he made a fleeting (but largely successful) attempt at becoming the next S.J Perelman. Side Effects, his third and final collection of humor pieces, shows his efforts. These essays appeared in The New Yorker during the late 1970s, as he showed more and more discontent with his funnyman status. Fear not, humor fans--Allen's still funny. He is less manic, however, than in his positively goofy Getting Even/Without Feathers days, and this makes Side Effects a more nuanced read."--Michael Gerber

Getting Even (by Woody Allen, 1978)
"Woody Allen's Getting Even is a collection of 17 humorous essays, mostly from the New Yorker, on subjects such as death; obesity ("Notes from the Overfed," which he wrote after reading Dostoyevsky and a "Weight Watchers" magazine on the same plane trip); organized crime; the invention of the sandwich; and his own philosophy, as partially outlined in the "Critique of Pure Dread." The comic master queries (you can just hear his whining voice), "Can we really know the universe? My God, it's hard enough to find your way around Chinatown. The point, however, is: Is there anything out there? And why? And must they be so noisy?" He goes on to discuss "Eschatological Dialectics as a Means of Coping with Shingles" and "The Cosmos on Five Dollars a Day," in addition to sharing a list of useful aphorisms such as "Eternal nothingness is OK if you're dressed for it."--Amazon.com