Showing results by author "Joan Didion" in All Categories

Elena McMahon walks off the presidential campaign she has been covering for a major newspaper to do a favor for her father. Elena's father does deals. And it is while acting as his agent in one such deal - a deal that shortly goes spectacularly wrong - that she finds herself on an island where tourism has been superseded by arms dealing, covert action, and assassination. The Last Thing He Wanted is a tour de force - persuasive in its detail, dazzling in its ambiguities, enchanting in its style.

From one of America’s greatest and most iconic writers: an honest and courageous portrait of age and motherhood. Several days before Christmas 2003, Joan Didion’s only daughter, Quintana, fell seriously ill. In 2010, Didion marked the sixth anniversary of her daughter’s death. Blue Nights is a shatteringly honest examination of Joan Didion’s life as a mother, a woman and a writer.

The place is El Salvador in 1982, at the ghastly height of its civil war. The writer is Joan Didion, who delivers an anatomy of that country's particular brand of terror - its mechanisms, rationales, and intimate relation to United States foreign policy. As ash travels from battlefields to body dumps, interviews a puppet president, and considers the distinctly Salvadoran grammar of the verb "to disappear," Didion gives us a book that is germane to any country in which bloodshed has become a standard tool of politics.

Joan Didion's electrifying first novel is a haunting portrait of a marriage whose wrong turns and betrayals are at once absolutely idiosyncratic and a razor-sharp commentary on the history of California. Everett McClellan and his wife, Lily, are the great-grandchildren of pioneers, and what happens to them is a tragic epilogue to the pioneer experience, a story of murder and betrayal that only Didion could tell with such nuance, sympathy, and suspense.

First published in 1979, The White Album records indelibly the upheavals and aftermaths of the 1960s. Examining key events, figures, and trends of the era - including Charles Manson, the Black Panthers, and the shopping mall - through the lens of her own spiritual confusion, Joan Didion helped to define mass culture as we now understand it. Written with a commanding sureness of tone and linguistic precision, The White Album is a central example of American reportage and a classic of American autobiography.

Inez Victor knows that the major casualty of the political life is memory. But the people around Inez have made careers out of losing track. Her senator husband wants to forget the failure of his last bid for the presidency. Her husband's handler would like the press to forget that Inez's father is a murderer. And, in 1975, the year in which much of this bitterly funny novel is set, America is doing its best to lose track of its one-time client, the lethally hemorrhaging republic of South Vietnam.

Universally acclaimed from the time it was first published in 1968, Slouching Towards Bethlehem has been admired for decades as a stylistic masterpiece. Academy Award-winning actress Diane Keaton (Annie Hall, The Family Stone) performs these classic essays, including the title piece, which will transport the listener back to a unique time and place: the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco during the neighborhood’s heyday as a countercultural center.

Joyce Carol Oates called Joan Didion "an articulate witness to the most stubborn and intractable truths of our time." Ms. Didion is the author of the novels Play It as It Lays and The Last Thing He Wanted, the essay collections Slouching Toward Bethlehem and The White Album, and the memoirs Where I Was From and The Year of Magical Thinking.

In her latest forays into the American scene, Joan Didion covers ground from Washington to Los Angeles, from a TV producer's gargantuan "manor" to the racial battlefields of New York's criminal courts. At each stop she uncovers the mythic narratives that elude other observers: Didion tells us about the fantasies the media construct around crime victims and presidential candidates; she gives us new interpretations of the stories of Nancy Reagan and Patty Hearst; she charts America's rollercoaster ride through evanescent booms and hard times that won't go away.

Selected Shorts: Travel Tales presents a collection of classic travel experiences. Selected Shorts is an award-winning series of classic and contemporary short fiction read by acclaimed actors. The Selected Shorts radio series is a co-production of Symphony Space and WNYC, New York Public Radio, and is heard on public radio stations nationwide.

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.

It is where Fidel Castro raised money to overthrow Batista and where two generations of Castro's enemies have raised armies to overthrow him, so far without success. It is where the bitter opera of Cuban exile intersects with the cynicism of U.S. foreign policy. It is a city whose skyrocketing murder rate is fueled by the cocaine trade, racial discontent, and an undeclared war on the island 90 miles to the south.

Angst og glamour præger Joan Didions barske Hollywood-roman "Intet gælder" - en helt central bog i det 20. århundredes amerikanske litteratur, som nu for første gang foreligger på dansk. Bogen udkommer i "Skala"-serien, der består af genopdagede hovedværker, også bøger, der tidligere har været glemt, misforstået eller dømt ude. "Gyldendal Skala" er nye klassikere til en ny tid.

Un'eroina-reporter in bancarotta emotiva, un'ambientazione sospesa tra America e Centroamerica, una prosa di filo spinato, un narratore ellittico, un intrigo politico. Ecco Joan Didion al suo quinto e ultimo romanzo, ovvero le variazioni autobiografiche dell'autrice-reporter-saggista divenuta icona attraverso libri come "L'anno del pensiero magico" e "Verso Betlemme", consegnando a uno stile ruvido e nudo la propria epoca e il proprio dolore.

C'era una volta il mito della Miami patinata, di una metropoli dalle tinte pastello, evocata dagli spot pubblicitari o dalle corse sulla Ferrari bianca di Miami Vice. Era un miraggio di palme e cocaina, spiagge e grattacieli, che nascondeva una città spettacolarmente depressa in cui il Sud della Florida sembrava trascolorare nella Cuba del Nord. Un avamposto occidentale dei Caraibi che aveva poco a che vedere con New York e Los Angeles, e molto da spartire con Caracas e Bogotá. Miami era una chimera tropicale, ricca di pettegolezzi e povera di memoria.

La vita cambia in un istante. Passa dalla normalità alla catastrofe. John Gregory Dunne, sposato da quarant'anni con Joan Didion, muore all'improvviso la sera del 30 dicembre 2003. Ed è così che per Joan inizia l'anno del pensiero magico. Un anno in cui tutto viene rimesso in discussione, riconsiderato, riformulato.

Un'ereditiera californiana viene rapita dall'Esercito di liberazione simbionese, diventa l'amante di uno dei terroristi e terrorista lei stessa, poi sposa la sua guardia del corpo e va a vivere con figli e cani in una casa finto-spagnola iper-blindata. Una banchiera d'affari di Manhattan mentre fa jogging a Central Park viene aggredita da sei adolescenti neri e ispanici, stuprata, torturata con dei rami e ridotta in fin di vita.