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Joan Didion’s savage masterpiece, which, since first publication in 1968, has been acknowledged as an unparalleled report on the state of America during the upheaval of the Sixties Revolution.
In her non-fiction work, Joan Didion not only describes the subject at hand – her younger self loving and leaving New York, the murderous housewife, the little girl trailing the rock group, the millionaire bunkered in his mansion – but also offers a broader vision of the world, one that is both terrifying and tender, ominous and uniquely her own.
Introducing the Collins Modern Classics, a series featuring some of
the most significant books of recent times, books that shed light
on the human experience - classics which will endure for
generations to come. A single person is missing for you, and the
whole world is empty John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion saw their
daughter fall ill. At first they thought it was flu, then she was
placed on life support. Days later, the Dunnes were sitting down to
dinner when John suffered a massive and fatal coronary. 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'. The result is a personal yet universal portrait of
marriage and life, in good times and bad, from one of the defining
voices of American literature. 'Beautiful and devastating ...
Didion has always been a precise, humane and meticulously truthful
writer, but on the subject of death she becomes essential' Zadie
Smith
Joan Didion’s hugely influential collection of essays which
defines, for many, the America which rose from the ashes of the
Sixties. We tell ourselves stories in order to live. The princess
is caged in the consulate. The man with the candy will lead the
children into the sea. In this now legendary journey into the
hinterland of the American psyche, Didion searches for stories as
the Sixties implode. She waits for Jim Morrison to show up, visits
the Black Panthers in prison, parties with Janis Joplin and buys
dresses with Charles Manson’s girls. She and her reader emerge,
cauterized, from this devastating tour of that age of self
discovery into the harsh light of the morning after.
Twelve early pieces never before collected that offer an
illuminating glimpse into the mind and process of Joan Didion.
Mostly drawn from the earliest part of her astonishing five-decade
career, the wide-ranging pieces in this collection include Didion
writing about a Gamblers Anonymous meeting, a visit to San Simeon,
and a reunion of WWII veterans in Las Vegas, and about topics
ranging from Nancy Reagan to Robert Mapplethorpe to Martha Stewart.
Here are subjects Didion has long written about - the press,
politics, California robber baronsac, women, the act of writing,
and her own self-doubt. Each piece is classic Didion: incisive and,
in new light, stunningly prescient.
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. 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 childhood - in 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. Blue Nights - the long, light evening hours that signal the
summer solstice, 'the opposite of the dying of the brightness, but
also its warning' - like The Year of Magical Thinking before it, is
an iconic book of incisive and electric honesty.
A profoundly disturbing novel that ruthlessly dissects American
life in the late 1960s, from the author of The White Album and The
Year of Magical Thinking. Benny called for a round of Cuba Libres
and I gave him some chips to play for me and went to the ladies'
room and never came back. Somewhere out beyond Hollywood,
hollowed-out actress Maria Wyeth's life plays out in a numbing
routine of perpetual freeway driving. In her early thirties,
divorced from her husband, dislocated from friends, anesthetized to
pain and please, Wheth is a woman who has run out of both desires
and motives - the epitome of a generation made ill by too much
freedom.
This is a surprising portrait of the pastel city, a masterly study
of Cuban immigration and exile, and a sly account of vile moments
in the Cold War. Miami may be the sunniest place in America but
this is Didion's darkest book, in which she explores American
efforts to overthrow the Castro regime, Miami's civic corruption
and racist treatment of its large black community.
From one of the most important chroniclers of our time, come two
extended excerpts from her never-before-seen notebooks - writings
that offer an illuminating glimpse into the mind and process of a
legendary writer. Joan Didion has always kept notebooks: of
overheard dialogue, observations, interviews, drafts of essays and
articles Here is one such draft that traces a road trip she took
with her husband, John Gregory Dunne, in June 1970, through
Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. She interviews prominent local
figures, describes motels, diners, a deserted reptile farm, a visit
with Walker Percy, a ladies' brunch at the Mississippi
Broadcasters' Convention. She writes about the stifling heat, the
almost viscous pace of life, the sulfurous light, and the
preoccupation with race, class, and heritage she finds in the small
towns they pass through. And from a different notebook: the
"California Notes" that began as an assignment from Rolling Stone
on the Patty Hearst trial of 1976. Though Didion never wrote the
piece, watching the trial and being in San Francisco triggered
thoughts about the city, its social hierarchy, the Hearsts, and her
own upbringing in Sacramento. Here, too, is the beginning of her
thinking about the West, its landscape, the western women who were
heroic for her, and her own lineage.
Joan Didion's electrifying first novel begins with a murder on the bank of the Sacramento River--a murder that is at once an act of vengeance and a blind attempt to shore up a disintegrating marriage. Out of that act, Didion constructs a tragic and beautifully nuanced work of fiction.
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.
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.
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.
A memoir of land, family and perseverance from one of the most
influential writers in America. In this moving and surprising 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.
Didion examines how the folly and recklessness in the very grain of
the California settlement led to the California we know today - a
state mortgaged first to the railroad, then to the aerospace
industry, and overwhelmingly to the federal government. Joan
Didion's unerring sense of America and its spirit, her acute
interpretation of its institutions and literature, and her incisive
questioning of the stories it tells itself make this fiercely
intelligent book a provocative and important tour de force from one
of America's greatest writers.
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Joan Didion: What She Means (Hardcover)
Joan Didion; Edited by Hilton Als, Connie Butler; Introduction by Ann Philbin; Text written by Joan Didion
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R1,018
Discovery Miles 10 180
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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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.
Didion chronicles the experience of losing her husband, the writer
John Gregory Dunne, to a massive coronary, just weeks after the two
of them watched as their only daughter was put into an induced coma
to save her life. With honesty and passion, Didion explores this
intensely personal yet universal experience.
In 1988, Joan Didion began looking at the American political process for The New York Review of Books. What she found was not a mechanism that offered the nation’s citizens a voice in its affairs but one designed by—and for—“that handful of insiders who invent, year in and year out, the narrative of public life.” The eight pieces collected here from The New York Review build, one on the other, to a stunning whole, a portrait of the American political landscape that tells us, devastatingly, how we got where we are today.
In Political Fictions, tracing the dreamwork that was already clear at the time of the first Bush ascendance in 1988, Didion covers the ways in which the continuing and polarizing nostalgia for an imagined America led to the entrenchment of a small percentage of the electorate as the nation’s deciding political force, the ways in which the two major political parties have worked to narrow the electorate to this manageable element, the readiness with which the media collaborated in this process, and, finally and at length, how this mindset led inexorably over the past dozen years to the crisis that was the 2000 election. In this book Didion cuts to the core of the deceptions and deflections to explain and illuminate what came to be called “the disconnect”—and to reveal a political class increasingly intolerant of the nation that sustains it.
Joan Didion’s profound understanding of America’s political and cultural terrain, her sense of historical irony, and the play of her imagination make Political Fictions a disturbing and brilliant tour de force.
In this moving and unexpected book, Joan Didion reassesses parts of her life, her work, her history, and ours. 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, confusions as much about America as about California, 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. In Where I Was From," Didion turns what John Leonard has called "her sonar ear, her radar eye" onto her own work, as well as that of such California writers as Frank Norris and Jack London and Henry George, to examine how the folly and recklessness in the very grain of the California settlement led to the California we know today-a state mortgaged first to the railroad, then to the aerospace industry, and overwhelmingly to the federal government, a dependent colony of those political and corporate owners who fly in for the annual encampment of the Bohemian Club. Here is the one writer we always want to read on California showing us the startling contradictions in its-and in America's-core values. Joan Didion's unerring sense of America and its spirit, her acute interpretation of its institutions and literature, and her incisive questioning of the stories it tells itself make this fiercelyintelligent book a provocative and important tour de force from one of our greatest writers. "From the Hardcover edition.
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.
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.
Several days before Christmas 2003, John Gregory Dunne and Joan
Didion saw their only daughter, Quintana, fall ill with what seemed
at first flu, then pneumonia, then complete septic 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 Gregory Dunne suffered
a massive and fatal coronary. In a second, this close, symbiotic
partnership of forty years was over. Four weeks later, their
daughter pulled through. Two months after that, arriving at LAX,
she collapsed and underwent six hours of brain surgery at UCLA
Medical Center 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."""
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