JOAN DIDION
Joan Didion (1934-2021 ) was a novelist, journalist, and memoirist from California who for over 50 years wrote some of the sharpest and most evocative analyses of American culture, politics, and mise en scène. Her novels captured a victorious postwar people struggling with anxieties, doubts, and the chloroform of abundance. Although the literary influences on her seem clear (Joseph Conrad, Hemingway, Graham Greene, noir, perhaps some Beat, definitely New Journalism), she is justly famous for her own cool, distanced, and all-seeing style. Her writing imbues us with awe. If you want to understand America, you must read Didion.
Play It As It Lays
Play It As It Lays
A ruthless dissection of American life in the late 1960s, Joan Didion's Play It as It Layscaptures 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.