This collection of writing by American essayist Joan Didion attempts to capture aspects of American life and culture and isolate them for public inspection.

Sentimental Journeys

DIDION, JOAN

HarperColinsPublishers

Run River

Literature & Fiction

Literary

I. Obolensky

The White Album

First published in 1979, The White Album is a mosaic of the late sixties and seventies. It includes, among other bizarre artifacts and personalities, the dark journeys and impulses of the Manson family, a Balck Panther Party press conference, the story of John Paul Getty's museum, the romance of water in an arid landscape, and the swirl and confusion of the sixties. With commanding sureness of mood and language, Joan Didion exposes the realities and dreams of that age of self-discovery whose spiritual center was California.

Classics

Noonday

A ruthless dissection of American life in the late 1960s, from the author of The Last Thing He Wanted and A Book of Common Prayer. Somewhere out beyond Hollywood, resting actress Maria Wyeth drifts along the freeway in perpetual motion, anaesthetized to pain and pleasure, seemingly untainted by her personal history. She finds herself, in her early thirties, radically divorced from husband, lovers, friends, her own past and her own future. Play It As It Lays is set in a place beyond good and evil, literally in Los Angeles and Las Vegas and the barren wastes of the Mojave, but figuratively in the landscape of the arid soul. Capturing the mood of an entire generation, Didion chose Hollywood to serve as her microcosm of contemporary society and exposed a culture characterized by emptiness and ennui. Two decades after its original publication, it remains a profoundly disturbing novel, an immaculately wrought portrait of a world (California on the cusp of the 70s) where too much freedom made a lot of people ill.

Play It As It Lays

Contemporary

Flamingo

A memoir of land, family and perseverance from one of the most influential writers in America. Didion's ancestors were pioneers, pushing westward to settle the vast lands of California, and with great pride, grit and graft, to turn that desert state into the fifth biggest economy in the world. What kind of people made that magic possible? In this moving and unexpected book, Joan Didion reassesses parts of her life, her work, her history, and America's. Where I Was From, in Didion's words, "represents an exploration into my own confusions about the place and the way in which I grew up, misapprehensions and misunderstandings so much a part of who I became that I can still to this day confront them only obliquely. " The book is a haunting narrative of how her own family moved west with the frontier from the birth of her great-great-great-great-great-grandmother in Virginia in 1766 to the death of her mother on the edge of the Pacific in 2001; of how the wagon-train stories of hardship and abandonment and endurance created a culture in which survival would seem the sole virtue.

Where I Was from

This comprehensive edition brings together for the first time three seminal collections by legendary essayist and journalist Joan Didion: Slouching toward Bethlehem, White Album and Sentimental Journeys. Prefaced with a new introduction by Joan Didion.Live and Learn comprises three of the personal essay collections that established Joan Didion as a major figure in the modern canon – arranged in chronological order so that readers can appreciate not only the qualities of the essays per se, but also their evolution over time. It also includes a new introduction by Joan Didion herself.The stylistic masterpiece Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968) has become a modern classic, capturing the mood of 1960s America and especially the center of its counterculture, California. The cornerstone essay, an extraordinary report on San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury, sets the agenda for the rest of this book – depicting and America where, in some way or another, things are falling apart and “the center cannot hold”. The White Album (1979) is a syncopated, swirling mosaic of the 60s and 70s, covering people and artifacts from the Black Panthers and the Manson family to John Paul Getty’s museum. Sentimental Journeys (1992) shifts its perspective slightly to take in Vietnamese refugee camps in Hong Kong, the Reagan campaign trail, and the inequities of Los Angeles real estate.An important collection, Live and Learn is the perfect one-stop primer on Joan Didion, and an essential reference for readers old and new. It confirms the power of this uniquely unbiased, moving writer, and showcases her artful yet simple prose.

Live and Learn: Slouching Towards Bethlehem, The White Album, After Henry

Essays & Correspondence

Harper-perennial

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.

The Year Of Magical Thinking

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

From one of America's iconic writers, 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. A stunning book of electric honesty and passion. Several days before Christmas 2003, John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion saw their only daughter, Quintana, fall ill. At first they thought it was flu, then pneumonia, then complete sceptic shock. She was put into an induced coma and placed on life support. Days later - the night before New Year,s Eve -the Dunnes were just sitting down to dinner after visiting the hospital when John suffered a massive and fatal coronary. In a second, this close, symbiotic partnership of 40 years was over. Four weeks later, their daughter pulled through. Two months after that, arriving at LA airport, she collapsed and underwent six hours of brain surgery at UCLA Medical Centre to relieve a massive hematoma. This powerful book is Didion,s 'attempt to make sense of the weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I ever had about death, about illness ...about marriage and children and memory ...about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself,. The result is an exploration of an intensely personal yet universal experience: a portrait of a marriage, and a life, in good times and bad.

The Year of Magical Thinking

Paperback. Pub Date :2011-11-10 Pages: 300 Language: English Publisher: HarperCollins UK An engrossing examination of political and personal life in Central America. from the award-winning author of The Year of Magical Thinking.Writing with the economical swiftness and concentrated perception that has made her one of America's most distinguished writers. Joan Didion creates a gleaming novel of innocence and evil.Set in the ruined Central American nation of Boca Grande. A Book of Common Prayer is the story of two American women and their conflicting experiences of wealth. politics and personal history.We follow the intriguing life of Grace Strasser-Mendana - an American expatriate and member of one of Boca Grande's most influential families - alongside the story of Charlotte Douglas. whose daughter Medin has run off with a group of Marxist radicals.What follows is an explorat...

Book Of Common Prayer

United States

Fourth Estate

Blue Nights

From one of our most powerful writers, a work of stunning frankness about losing a daughter. Richly textured with bits of her own childhood and married life with her husband, John Gregory Dunne, and daughter, Quintana Roo, this new book by Joan Didion examines her thoughts, fears, and doubts regarding having children, illness, and growing old. Â  Blue Nights opens on July 26, 2010, as Didion thinks back to Quintana’s wedding in New York seven years before. Today would be her wedding anniversary. This fact triggers vivid snapshots of Quintana’s childhoodâin Malibu, in Brentwood, at school in Holmby Hills. Reflecting on her daughter but also on her role as a parent, Didion asks the candid questions any parent might about how she feels she failed either because cues were not taken or perhaps displaced. “How could I have missed what was clearly there to be seen?” Finally, perhaps we all remain unknown to each other. Seamlessly woven in are incidents Didion sees as underscoring her own age, something she finds hard to acknowledge, much less accept. Â  Blue Nightsâthe long, light evening hours that signal the summer solstice, “the opposite of the dying of the brightness, but also its warning”âlike The Year of Magical Thinking before it, is an iconic book of incisive and electric honesty, haunting and profoundly moving.

Vintage Books/Random House

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