Joan Didion
Personal Information
Description
Joan Didion is an American author best known for her novels and her literary journalism. Her novels and essays explore the disintegration of American morals and cultural chaos, where the overriding theme is individual and social fragmentation. - Wikipedia
Books
We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live
"Slouching Towards Bethlehem captures the counterculture of the sixties, its mood and lifestyle, as symbolized by California, Joan Baez, Haight-Ashbury. The White Album covers the revolutionary politics and the "contemporary wasteland" of the late sixties and early seventies, in pieces on the Manson family, the Black Panthers, and Hollywood. Salvador is a riveting look at the social and political landscape of civil war. Miami exposes the secret role this largely Latin city played in the Cold War, from the Bay of Pigs through Watergate. In After Henry Didion reports on the Reagans, Patty Hearst, and the Central Park jogger case. The eight essays in Political Fictions - on censorship in the media, Gingrich, Clinton, Starr, and "compassionate conservatism," among others - show us how we got to the political scene of today. And in Where I Was From Didion shows that California was never the land of the golden dream."--BOOK JACKET
Salvador
"Previously published in ... The New York review of books in October 1982." Discusses the situation of anarchy and terrorism in El Salvador as of 1982.
Miami (Classics of Reportage)
Examines the relationship between the Cuban exiles of Miami and the larger body politic of the United States.
Prentice Hall Literature--Timeless Voices, Timeless Themes--Gold Level
Year of Magical Thinking, The
"this happened on December 30, 2003. That may seem a while ago but it won't when it happens to you . . ."In this dramatic adaptation of her award-winning, bestselling memoir (which Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times called "an indelible portrait of loss and grief . . . a haunting portrait of a four-decade-long marriage), Joan Didion transforms the story of the sudden and unexpected loss of her husband and their only daughter into a stunning and powerful one-woman play.The first theatrical production of The Year of Magical Thinking opened at the Booth Theatre on March 29, 2007, starring Vanessa Redgrave and directed by David Hare.From the Trade Paperback edition.
After Henry
""We tell ourselves stories in order to live" was the opening line of Joan Didion's celebrated The White Album. In After Henry, her new collection of pieces, most of them reported and written for The New York Review of Books and The New Yorker, she examines, precisely and suggestively, the stories people tell themselves - about murders and earthquakes and wildfires, about presidential politics and Patricia Hearst and Central Park "wilding," about boom years passing and hard times coming down - in Washington and in California and in New York." "Joan Didion's two previous collections, Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album, are now established as classics. Salvador and Miami stand as hallmarks of political reporting. After Henry is a major literary event."--BOOK JACKET.
Course of empire: paintings by Ed Ruscha. Exhibition, 51st International Art Exhibition, Venice, 2005
Democracy
Slouching Toward Bethlehem
American novelist Joan Didion's first volume of nonfiction essays, first published in 1968, consisting of twenty works that reflect the atmosphere in America during the 1960s, especially in California.
Run river
Everett McClellan and his wife, Lily, the great-grandchildren of California pioneers, become involved in murder and betrayal.
South and west
Two excerpts from never-before-seen notebooks offer insights into the author's literary mind and process and includes notes on her Sacramento upbringing, her life in the Gulf states, her views on prominent locals and her experiences during a formative "Rolling Stone" assignment.
The best American essays 1999
Includes essays by Joseph Brodsky, William H. Gass, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Edward Hoagland, Edna O'Brien, Cynthia Ozick, Grace Paley, John Edgar Wideman, and Tobias Wolff, among others.
Let Me Tell You What I Mean
From one of our most iconic and influential writers: 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. 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 visit to San Simeon; being rejected by Stanford; dropping in on Nancy Reagan, wife of the then-governor of California, while a TV crew filmed her at home; and an evening at the annual reunion of WWII veterans from the 101st Airborne Association at the Stardust Hotel in Las Vegas. Here too is a 1976 piece from the New York Times magazine on "Why I Write"; a piece about short stories from New West in 1978; and from The New Yorker, a piece on Hemingway from 1998, and on Martha Stewart from 2000. Each one is classic Didion: incisive, bemused, and stunningly prescient.
Prentice Hall Literature--The American Experience
Grade 11
