• Slouching Towards Bethlehem

  • Picador Modern Classics
  • By: Joan Didion
  • Narrated by: Maya Hawke
  • Length: 6 hrs and 23 mins

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Slouching Towards Bethlehem

By: Joan Didion
Narrated by: Maya Hawke
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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.

©2017 Joan Didion (P)2025 Macmillan Audio
  • Unabridged Audiobook
  • Categories: History
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Critic reviews

“In her portraits of people, Didion is not out to expose but to understand, and she shows us actors and millionaires, doomed brides and naive acid-trippers, left wing ideologues and snobs of the Hawaiian aristocracy in a way that makes them neither villainous nor glamorous, but alive and botched and often mournfully beautiful.... A rich display of some of the best prose written today in this country.” —Dan Wakefield, The New York Times Book Review

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