Joan Didion
Author
Language
English
Appears on these lists
2024 Reading Challenge: Book about time or has a measure of time in the title
2025 Reading Challenge—New York Times 100 Best Books of the 21st Century
2025 Reading Challenge—New York Times 100 Best Books of the 21st Century (Reader Favorites)
2025 Reading Challenge—New York Times 100 Best Books of the 21st Century
2025 Reading Challenge—New York Times 100 Best Books of the 21st Century (Reader Favorites)
Description
""Life changes fast. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends." These were among the first words Joan Didion wrote in January 2004. Her daughter was lying unconscious in an intensive care unit, a victim of pneumonia and septic shock. Her husband, John Gregory Dunne, was dead. The night before New Year's Eve, while they were sitting down to dinner, he suffered a massive and fatal coronary. The two had lived and worked side by side for nearly...
2) Blue nights
Author
Language
English
Description
Shares the author's frank 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.
Author
Pub. Date
2017.
Language
English
Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • “One of contemporary literature’s most revered essayists revives her raw records from a 1970s road trip across the American southwest ... her acute observations of the country’s culture and history feel particularly resonant today.” —Harper’s Bazaar
Joan Didion, the bestselling, award-winning author of The Year of Magical Thinking and...
Joan Didion, the bestselling, award-winning author of The Year of Magical Thinking and...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
"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;...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
"We tell ourselves stories in order to live." So begins Joan Didion's legendary essay collection The White Album, a landmark literary mosaic by one of American writing's true greats illuminating in unerring prose subjects ranging from the Manson cult to the Black Panthers, from painter Georgia O'Keefe to the author's own struggles with depression and anxiety in the late 1960s. In "Good Citizens," we meet the First Lady of California Nancy Reagan.
...Author
Series
Library of America volume 325
Publisher
The Library of America
Pub. Date
[2019]
Language
English
Description
"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...
Author
Publisher
Literatura Random House
Pub. Date
[2021]
Language
Español
Description
De uno de nuestros escritores más icónicos e influyentes: doce piezas que ofrecen una mirada esclarecedora a la mente y el proceso de una figura legendaria. Estos ensayos de 1968 a 2000, que no han sido recopilados hasta ahora, muestran el incisivo reportaje de Joan Didion, su mirada empática y sus ideas sobre la escritura. Tocan temas que van desde los periódicos ("el problema no es tanto si uno confía en las noticias como si las encuentra"),...
Author
Publisher
Open Road Media
Pub. Date
2017
Language
English
Description
New York Times Bestseller: An “elegant” mosaic of trenchant observations on the late sixties and seventies from the author of Slouching Towards Bethlehem (The New Yorker).
In this landmark essay collection, Joan Didion brilliantly interweaves her own “bad dreams” with those of a nation confronting the dark underside of 1960s counterculture.
From a jailhouse visit to...
In this landmark essay collection, Joan Didion brilliantly interweaves her own “bad dreams” with those of a nation confronting the dark underside of 1960s counterculture.
From a jailhouse visit to...
Author
Publisher
Zola Books
Pub. Date
2015
Language
English
Description
"She has been an articulate witness to the most stubborn and intractable truths of our time."—Joyce Carol Oates, The New York Times Book Review. Here in digital format for the first time is Joan Didion's landmark collection of essays Slouching Towards Bethlehem, work that helped define the New Journalism of the late 1960s and today stands as some of the very finest nonfiction writing ever produced by an American writer. Reflective and brilliantly
...Author
Series
Library of America volume 386
Publisher
The Library of America
Pub. Date
[2024]
Language
English
Description
"Faced with the deaths of her husband and her only child within a two-year span, Joan Didion confronted a grief that 'none of us know until we reach it.' Two of her finest works, 'The year of magical thinking' (a winner of the National Book Award) and 'Blue nights,' chart this experience with startling honesty. These unforgettable memoirs, and the dramatic adaptation 'The year of magical thinking : the play,' are brought together here in the capstone...
Author
Publisher
Books on Tape
Pub. Date
2021
Language
English
Description
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR • NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • From one of our most iconic and influential writers, the award-winning author of The Year of Magical Thinking: a timeless collection of mostly early pieces that reveal what would become Joan Didion's subjects, including the press, politics, California robber barons, women, and her own self-doubt.
With a forward...
With a forward...
16) South and West
Author
Publisher
Books on Tape
Pub. Date
[2017]
Language
English
Description
From the best-selling author of the National Book Award-winning The Year of Magical Thinking: 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--and here is one such draft that traces a road trip she took with her husband, John Gregory...
Author
Publisher
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Pub. Date
2005
Language
English
Description
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...
Author
Publisher
Vintage International, a division of Random House, Inc
Pub. Date
1995.
Language
English
Description
"Writing with the telegraphic swiftness and microscopic sensitivity that have made her one of our most distinguished journalists, Joan Didion creates a shimmering novel of innocence and evil.A Book of Common Prayer is the story of two American women in the derelict Central American nation of Boca Grande. Grace Strasser-Mendana controls much of the country's wealth and knows virtually all of its secrets; Charlotte Douglas knows far too little. "Immaculate...