Joan Didion Livres

Une soirée ordinaire, fin décembre à New York. Joan Didion s'apprête à dîner avec son mari, l'écrivain John Gregory Dunne - quand ce dernier s'écroule sur la table de la salle à manger, victime d'une crise cardiaque foudroyante. Pendant une année entière, elle essaiera de se résoudre à la mort du compagnon de toute sa vie et de s'occuper de leur fille, plongée dans le coma à la suite d'une grave pneumonie. La souffrance, l'incompréhension, l'incrédulité, la méditation obsessionnelle autour de cet événement si commun et pourtant inconcevable : dans un récit impressionnant de sobriété et d'implacable honnêteté, Didion raconte la folie du deuil et dissèque, entre sécheresse clinique et monologue intérieur, la plus indicible expérience - et sa rédemption par la littérature. L'année de la pensée magique a été consacré " livre de l'année 2006 " aux Etats-Unis. Best-seller encensé par la critique, déjà considéré comme un classique de la littérature sur le deuil, ce témoignage bouleversant a été couronné par le National Book Award et vient d'être adapté pour la scène à Broadway, par l'auteur elle-même, dans une mise en scène de David Hare, avec Vanessa Redgrave.

Joan Didion’s incomparable and distinctive essays and journalism are admired for their acute, incisive observations and their spare, elegant style. Now the seven books of nonfiction that appeared between 1968 and 2003 have been brought together into one thrilling collection.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.

Exploring Joan Didion's life and work, Hilton Als presents a chronological mosaic that captures the complexities of her identity as a writer influenced by both coasts of America. The narrative reflects Didion's critical yet affectionate view of her native California and her insightful observations on the political landscape from New York. The book features contributions from 50 artists across various mediums, alongside three previously uncollected texts by Didion, enriching the understanding of her impact on literature and culture.

This comprehensive edition brings together for the first time three seminal collections by legendary essayist and journalist Joan Didion: Slouching toward Bethlehem, White Album and Sentimental Journeys. Prefaced with a new introduction by Joan Didion.

From one of America's greatest and most iconic writers: an honest and courageous portrait of age and motherhood and a work of stunning frankness about losing a daughter.

Classic literary journalism which defined, for many, the state of America during the upheaval of the Sixties Revolution "It was not a country in open revolution. It was not a country under enemy siege. It was the United States of America in the cold late spring of 1967, and the market was steady and the GNP high and a great many articulate people seemed to have a sense of high social purpose and it might have been a spring of brave hopes and national promise, but it was not..." "So physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate" that people tended to forget that her presence ran counter to their best interests, Joan Didion slipped herself into the heart of the Sixties Revolution, only to slip out again with this savage masterpiece, which, since first publication in 1968, has been acknowledged as an unparalleled report on the state of America during those curious days. Now that some of the posturing and pronouncements of those times are being recycled, Didion's sobering reflections are timely once again: 'the future always looks good in the golden land, because no one remembers the past."

Beautifully repackaged as part of the Picador Modern Classics Series, this special edition is small enough to fit in your pocket and bold enough to stand out on your bookshelf. Celebrated, iconic, and indispensable, Joan Didion’s first work of nonfiction, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, is considered a watershed moment in American writing. First published in 1968, the collection was critically praised as one of the “best prose written in this country.” More than perhaps any other book, this collection by one of the most distinctive prose stylists of our era captures the unique time and place of Joan Didion’s focus, exploring subjects such as John Wayne and Howard Hughes, growing up in California and the nature of good and evil in a Death Valley motel room, and, especially, the essence of San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury, the heart of the counterculture. As Joyce Carol Oates remarked: “[Didion] has been an articulate witness to the most stubborn and intractable truths of our time, a memorable voice, partly eulogistic, partly despairing; always in control.”

This comprehensive edition brings together three seminal collections by legendary essayist and journalist Joan Didion: Slouching toward Bethlehem, White Album and Sentimental Journeys. WE TELL OURSELVES STORIES IN ORDER TO LIVE Looking for plausible stories as the Sixties are about to implode, Joan Didion sets out, notebook in hand, on a now-legendary journey into the hinterland of the American psyche: she kills time waiting for Jim Morrison to show up, parties with Janis Joplin, visits the Black Panthers in prison, watches a campus combust, dines with Tate and Polanski, buys dresses with Charlie Manson's girls, and gravitates towards biker movies 'because there on screen was some news I was not getting from the New York Times'. She and her reader emerge, cauterized, from this devastating tour of the myths and realities of that age of self-discovery into the harsh light of the morning after...

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Didion's "reportorial pieces afford the pleasures of literature.... She is an expert geographer of the landscape of American public culture" (The New York Times Book Review). Here, the National Book Award–winning author of The Year of Magical Thinking 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. A bracing amalgam of skepticism and sympathy, After Henry is further proof of Joan Didion's infallible radar for the true spirit of our age.

Somewhere out beyond Hollywood, has-been actress Maria Wyeth's life is going off the rails. But her permanent catatonic state leaves her a mere bystander to her own downward spiral. Observing her life with detachment, Wyeth epitomises a generation left lost and inert by too much freedom.