Joan Didion
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English
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2024 FPPL May Older Adult Appreciation Month List
AMPL May Reading Challenge
Between Two Books
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AMPL May Reading Challenge
Between Two Books
More Lists...
Description
[In this book, the author] 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 Didion saw their only daughter, Quintana, fall ill with what seemed at first flu, then pneumonia, then complete septic shock. She was put into an induced coma and placed...
2) Blue nights
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English
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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
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English
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Description
"In November 1999, Joan Didion began seeing a psychiatrist because, as she wrote to a friend, her family had had 'a rough few years.' She described the sessions in a journal she created for her husband, John Gregory Dunne. For several months, Didion recorded conversations with the psychiatrist in meticulous detail. The initial sessions focused on alcoholism, adoption, depression, anxiety, guilt, and the heartbreaking complexities of her relationship...
Author
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English
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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.
"Joan Didion has always kept notebooks of overheard dialogue, observations, interviews, drafts of essays, and copies of articles. "Notes on the South" traces a road trip...
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English
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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;...
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English
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Description
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.
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English
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Creating a "menacing world where the reader is held hostage" ("Los Angeles Times"), the legendary author of "Slouching Toward Bethlehem" now trains her eye on the far frontiers of the Monroe Doctrine, where history dissolves into conspiracy--Dallas, 1963; Iran Contra in 1984--and fashions a moral thriller as hypnotic and provocative as any by Joseph Conrad or Graham Greene.
Author
Language
English
Description
A shimmering novel of innocence and evil: the gripping story of two American women in a failing Central American nation, from the bestselling, award-winning author of The Year of Magical Thinking and Let Me Tell You What I Mean
"[Didion's] most ambitious project in fiction, and her most successful ... glows with a golden aura of well-wrought classical tragedy.” —Los Angeles Times
Author
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...
11) Democracy
Author
Language
English
Description
From the bestselling, award-winning author of The Year of Magical Thinking and Let Me Tell You What I Mean—a gorgeously written, bitterly funny look at the relationship between politics and personal...
Author
Language
English
Description
A half-century after its initial publication in 1968, Joan Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem remains the essential portrait of America--and California in particular--during the sixties. The remarkable debut essay collection by one of the most distinctive prose stylists of our era, it explores such subjects as John Wayne and Howard Hughes; growing up in California; the nature of good and evil in a Death Valley motel room; and San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury,...
13) Salvador
Author
Language
English
Description
Discusses the situation of anarchy and terrorism in El Salvador as of 1982.
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Series
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
Series
Language
English
Description
The iconic writer whose prose was as influential and as it is unmistakably hers is joined in conversation with Sheila Heti, Hilton Als, Dave Eggers, Hari Kunzru and many more. Some writers define a generation. Some a genre. Joan Didion did both, and much more. Didion rose to prominence with her nonfiction collection, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, and she quickly became the writer who captured the zeitgeist of the washed-out, acid hangover of the 60s....
Author
Language
English
Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • A landmark work about grief, love, and survival from one of America’s most iconic writers One of The New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century • One of The Guardian’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century Joan Didion delivers a searing portrait of a marriage and a life – in good times and bad – that will speak to anyone who has ever loved and lost a husband or wife or...
20) Vintage Didion
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
The perfect introduction to one of our greatest modern writers: Joan Didion "has the instincts of an exceptional reporter and the focus of a historian, [with] a novelist’s appreciation of the surreal" (Los Angeles Times Book Review).
Whether she’s writing about civil war in Central America, political scurrility in Washington, or the tightly-braided myths and realities of her native California, Joan Didion expresses an...
Whether she’s writing about civil war in Central America, political scurrility in Washington, or the tightly-braided myths and realities of her native California, Joan Didion expresses an...









