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Slouching Towards Bethlehem
- Picador Modern Classics
- Narrated by: Maya Hawke
- Length: 6 hrs and 23 mins
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Publisher's summary
This program is read by actor and singer-songwriter Maya Hawke, star of Netflix's Stranger Things.
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.”
A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
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- A Memoir
- By: Joan Didion
- Narrated by: Kimberly Farr
- Length: 4 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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From one of our most powerful writers, a work of stunning frankness about losing a daughter. Richly textured with bits of her own childhood and married life with her husband, John Gregory Dunne, and daughter, Quintana Roo, this new book by Joan Didion examines her thoughts, fears, and doubts regarding having children, illness, and growing old.
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Twilights turn Long and Blue
- By Darwin8u on 01-02-17
By: Joan Didion
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The Year of Magical Thinking
- By: Joan Didion
- Narrated by: Barbara Caruso
- Length: 5 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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"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 40 years.
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Great book to Read, but I didn’t like it
- By Michael on 05-08-15
By: Joan Didion
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Joan Didion at the 92nd Street Y
- By: Joan Didion
- Narrated by: Joseph Lelyveld
- Length: 46 mins
- Original Recording
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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.
By: Joan Didion
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Run, River
- By: Joan Didion
- Narrated by: Holly Cate
- Length: 7 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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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.
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Thought-provoking, riveting, memorable
- By Avalon on 08-23-13
By: Joan Didion
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Where I Was From
- By: Joan Didion
- Narrated by: Gabrielle De Cuir
- Length: 6 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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In her moving and insightful new book, Joan Didion reassesses parts of her life, her work, her history and ours. A native Californian, Didion applies her scalpel-like intelligence to the state’s ethic of ruthless self-sufficiency in order to examine that ethic’s often tenuous relationship to reality. Combining history and reportage, memoir and literary criticism, Where I Was From explores California’s romances with land and water; its unacknowledged debts to railroads, aerospace, and big government; the disjunction between its code of individualism and its fetish for prisons.
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California belongs to Joan Didion.
- By Darwin8u on 11-04-15
By: Joan Didion
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Let Me Tell You What I Mean
- An Essay Collection
- By: Joan Didion
- Narrated by: Kimberly Farr, Hilton Als
- Length: 4 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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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 by Hilton Als, these 12 pieces from 1968 to 2000, never before gathered together, offer an illuminating glimpse into the mind and process of a legendary figure.
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Didion deserves a better narrator
- By Pamela on 02-03-21
By: Joan Didion
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A Book of Common Prayer
- By: Joan Didion
- Narrated by: Marisa Vitali
- Length: 6 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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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.
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Strong tale badly told
- By A reader in Berkeley on 06-04-17
By: Joan Didion
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The Last Love Song
- A Biography of Joan Didion
- By: Tracy Daugherty
- Narrated by: Bernadette Dunne
- Length: 26 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Joan Didion lived a life in the public and private eye with her late husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, whom she met while the two were working in New York City, when Didion was at Vogue and Dunne was writing for Time. They became wildly successful writing partners when they moved to Los Angeles and cowrote screenplays and adaptations together. Didion is well known for her literary journalistic style in both fiction and nonfiction.
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Riveted for 1591 miles
- By Kaysi12 on 04-11-16
By: Tracy Daugherty
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South and West
- From a Notebook
- By: Joan Didion
- Narrated by: Kimberly Farr, Nathaniel Rich
- Length: 2 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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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 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.
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"Notes" Are Not a Book
- By Carole T. on 03-11-17
By: Joan Didion
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After Henry
- By: Joan Didion
- Narrated by: Elizabeth Hess
- Length: 9 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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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.
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It'll blow a hole in your retina
- By Darwin8u on 10-03-15
By: Joan Didion
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Democracy
- By: Joan Didion
- Narrated by: Denise Poirier
- Length: 5 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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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.
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Exquisite
- By Adam Burke on 04-17-23
By: Joan Didion
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The World According to Joan Didion
- By: Evelyn McDonnell
- Narrated by: Hillary Huber
- Length: 7 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Joan Didion was a writer’s writer; not only a groundbreaking journalist, essayist, novelist and screenwriter, but a keen observer who honed her sights on life’s telling details. Her insights continue to influence creatives and admirers, encouraging them to become close observers of the world, unsentimental critics, and meticulous stylists. The World According to Joan Didion is a meditation on the people, places, and objects that propelled Didion’s prose and an invitation to journalists, storytellers, and life adventurers to “throw themselves into the convulsions of the world,” as she said.
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Woke, revisionist retelling of Didion's life and work.
- By c on 02-10-24
By: Evelyn McDonnell
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Black Swans
- By: Eve Babitz
- Narrated by: Mia Barron
- Length: 6 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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A collection of original short stories offers an intimate and dark portrait of life in the United States as they journey through California seeking answers to our changing world, dealing with such topics as jealousy, AIDS, sex, and Jim Morrison. A new reissue of Babitz’s collection of nine stories that look back on the 1980s and early 1990s - decades of dreams, drink, and glimpses of a changing world. Black Swans further celebrates the phenomenon of Eve Babitz, cementing her reputation as the voice of a generation.
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Torrid affairs @ Chateau Marmont
- By Ariana Sweany on 10-29-24
By: Eve Babitz
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The Year of Magical Thinking
- By: Joan Didion
- Narrated by: Vanessa Redgrave
- Length: 1 hr and 28 mins
- Original Recording
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When celebrated writer Joan Didion’s life was altered forever, she wrote a new chapter. In this adaptation of her iconic memoir, Didion transforms the story of the shattering loss of her husband and their daughter into a one-woman play performed by Tony Award winner Vanessa Redgrave, who originated the role on Broadway in 2007.
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Difficult story, but worth it
- By Maya on 08-07-20
By: Joan Didion
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They're Going to Love You
- A Novel
- By: Meg Howrey
- Narrated by: Meg Howrey
- Length: 8 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Throughout her childhood, Carlisle Martin got to see her father, Robert, for only a few precious weeks a year when she visited the brownstone apartment in Greenwich Village he shared with his partner, James. Brilliant but troubled, James gave Carlisle an education in all that he held dear in life—literature, music, and, most of all, dance. Seduced by the heady pull of mentorship and hoping to follow in the footsteps of her mother—a former Balanchine ballerina—Carlisle’s aspiration to become a professional ballet dancer bloomed.
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Love you
- By Susan Carson on 01-16-23
By: Meg Howrey
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Didion and Babitz
- By: Lili Anolik
- Narrated by: Lili Anolik
- Length: 13 hrs
- Unabridged
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Joan Didion, in spite of her confessional style, is so little known or understood. She’s remained opaque, elusive. Until now. With deftness and skill, journalist Lili Anolik uses Babitz, Babitz’s brilliance of observation, Babitz’s incisive intelligence, and, most of all, Babitz’s diary-like letters—letters found in those sealed boxes, letters so intimate you don’t read them so much as breathe them—as the key to unlocking Didion.
By: Lili Anolik