Author: Joan Didion
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Keywords: novel, lays, play
Number of Pages: 214
Published: 2005-11-15
List price: $13.00
ISBN-10: 0374529949
ISBN-13: 9780374529949

A ruthless dissection of American life in the late 1960s, Play It as It Lays captures the mood of an entire generation, the ennui of contemporary society reflected in spare prose that blisters and haunts the reader. Set in a place beyond good and evil-literally in Hollywood, Las Vegas, and the barren wastes of the Mojave Desert, but figuratively in the landscape of an arid soul-it remains more than three decades after its original publication a profoundly disturbing novel, riveting in its exploration of a woman and a society in crisis and stunning in the still-startling intensity of its prose.

Author: Joan Didion
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Keywords: fsg, classics, essays, bethlehem, towards, slouching
Number of Pages: 238
Published: 2008-10-28
List price: $14.00
ISBN-10: 0374531382
ISBN-13: 9780374531386

The first nonfiction work by one of the most distinctive prose stylists of our era, Slouching Towards Bethlehem remains, forty years after its first publication, the essential portrait of America— particularly California—in the sixties. It focuses on such subjects as John Wayne and Howard Hughes, growing up a girl in California, ruminating on the nature of good and evil in a Death Valley motel room, and, especially, the essence of San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury, the heart of the counterculture. Joan Didion is the author of several novels and works of nonficti

Author: Joan Didion
Publisher: Vintage
Keywords:
Number of Pages: 240
Published: 2004-09-14
List price: $13.95
ISBN-10: 0679752862
ISBN-13: 9780679752868

In her moving and insightful new book, Joan Didion reassesses parts of her life, her work, her history and ours. A native Californian, Didion applies her scalpel-like intelligence to the state’s ethic of ruthless self-sufficiency in order to examine that ethic’s often tenuous relationship to reality.Combining history and reportage, memoir and literary criticism, Where I Was From explores California’s romances with land and water; its unacknowledged debts to railroads, aerospace, and big government; the disjunction between its code of individualism and its fetish for prisons.

Author: Joan Didion
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Keywords: classics, fsg, essays, album
Number of Pages: 224
Published: 2009-11-10
List price: $14.00
ISBN-10: 0374532079
ISBN-13: 9780374532079

First published in 1979, The White Album records indelibly the upheavals and aftermaths of the 1960s. Examining key events, figures, and trends of the era—including Charles Manson, the Black Panthers, and the shopping mall—through the lens of her own spiritual confusion, Joan Didion helped to define mass culture as we now understand it. Written with a commanding sureness of tone and linguistic precision, The White Album is a central text of American reportage and a classic of American autobiography.

Author: Joan Didion
Publisher: Vintage
Keywords: thinking, magical, year
Number of Pages: 227
Published: 2007-02-13
List price: $14.95
ISBN-10: 1400078431
ISBN-13: 9781400078431

From one of America’s iconic writers, a stunning book of electric honesty and passion. Joan Didion explores an intensely personal yet universal experience: a portrait of a marriage--and a life, in good times and bad--that will speak to anyone who has ever loved a husband or wife or child.

Author: Joan Didion
Publisher: Vintage
Keywords: prayer, common, book
Number of Pages: 272
Published: 1995-04-11
List price: $14.95
ISBN-10: 0679754865
ISBN-13: 9780679754862

In this Conradian masterpiece of American innocence and evil set in the fictional Central American country of Boca Grande, two American women face the harsh realities, political and personal, of living on the edge in a land with an uncertain future. Writing with her signature telegraphic swiftness, the author creates a terrifying commentary on an age of conscienceless authority.

Author: Joan Didion
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Keywords: essays, bethlehem, towards, slouching
Number of Pages: 238
Published: 1990-10-01
List price: $14.00
ISBN-10: 0374521727
ISBN-13: 9780374521721

Universally acclaimed when it was first published in 1968, Slouching Towards Bethlehem has become a modern classic. More than any other book of its time, this collection captures the mood of 1960s America, especially the center of its counterculture, California. These essays, keynoted by an extraordinary report on San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury, all reflect that, in one way or another, things are falling apart, "the center cannot hold." An incisive look at contemporary American life, Slouching Towards Bethlehem has been admired for several decades as a stylistic masterpiece.Contents:I. L