Joan Didion

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • From one of America’s iconic writers, a stunning book of electric honesty and passion that 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

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In this memoir, the author shares her observations about her daughter as well as her own thoughts and fears about having children and growing old, in a personal account that discusses her daughter's wedding and her feelings of failure as a parent. It 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,...

"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...

11 essays "organized by place (Washington, D.C.; LA; New York) ... defining the culture of our cities ..."

"From the universally acclaimed, best-selling author of the National Book Award-winning The Year of Magical Thinking: ten pieces never before collected that offer an illuminating glimpse into the mind and process of a legendary writer. Here are six pieces written in 1968 from the "Points West" Saturday Evening Post column Joan Didion shared from 1964 to 1969 with her husband, John Gregory Dunne about: American newspapers; a session with Gamblers Anonymous;...

A compilation of essays and nonfiction writings spanning more than forty years includes the author's reflections on politics, lifestyle, place, and cultural figures, including such topics as Haight-Ashbury, the Manson family, the Black Panthers, California earthquakes, and Bill Clinton.

"Joan Didion's influence on postwar American letters is undeniable. Whether writing fiction, memoir, or trailblazing journalism, her gifts for narrative and dialogue, and her intimate but detached authorial persona, have won her legions of readers and admirers. Now Library of America launches its multi-volume edition of Didion's collected writings, prepared in consultation with the author, that brings together her fiction and nonfiction for the first...

Rock star John Norman Howard has noticed that his career has begun to decline. Too many years of concerts, bad managers and life on the road have made him cynical. Then he meets the innocent, pure and very talented singer Esther Hoffman. John shows Esther the way to stardom while forsaking his own career. As they fall in love, her success only makes his decline even more apparent.

Rock star John Norman Howard has noticed that his career has begun to decline. Too many years of concerts, bad managers and life on the road have made him cynical. Then he meets the innocent, pure and very talented singer Esther Hoffman. John shows Esther the way to stardom while forsaking his own career. As they fall in love, her success only makes his decline even more apparent.