Description: Here on offer is a very nice copy of Joan Didion's classic L.A. novel, Play It As It Lays, included in Time magazine's list of The 100 Best English-Language Novels from 1923 to 2005. This copy is a 1st trade edition, 1st printing of the work published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 1970. The dust jacket is protected from further wear by a Mylar sleeve. ******************************************************************************************************************* "A ruthless dissection of American life in the late 1960s, from the author of The Last Thing He Wanted and A Book of Common Prayer. Somewhere out beyond Hollywood, resting actress Maria Wyeth drifts along the freeway in perpetual motion, anaesthetized to pain and pleasure, seemingly untainted by her personal history. She finds herself, in her early thirties, radically divorced from husband, lovers, friends, her own past and her own future. Play It As It Lays is set in a place beyond good and evil, literally in Los Angeles and Las Vegas and the barren wastes of the Mojave, but figuratively in the landscape of the arid soul. Capturing the mood of an entire generation, Didion chose Hollywood to serve as her microcosm of contemporary society and exposed a culture characterized by emptiness and ennui. Two decades after its original publication, it remains a profoundly disturbing novel, an immaculately wrought portrait of a world (California on the cusp of the 70s) where too much freedom made a lot of people ill. ////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// Joan Didion (December 5, 1934 – December 23, 2021) was an American writer. She is considered one of the pioneers of New Journalism along with Gay Talese, Hunter S. Thompson, and Tom Wolfe. Didion's career began in the 1950s after she won an essay contest sponsored by Vogue magazine. Her writing during the 1960s through the late 1970s engaged audiences in the realities of the counterculture of the 1960s, the Hollywood lifestyle, and the history and culture of California. Didion's political writing in the 1980s and 1990s often concentrated on the subtext of political and social rhetoric. In 1991, she wrote the earliest mainstream media article to suggest the Central Park Five had been wrongfully convicted. In 2005, Didion won the National Book Award for Nonfiction and was a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for The Year of Magical Thinking, a memoir of the year following the death of her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne. She later adapted the book into a play that premiered on Broadway in 2007. In 2013, she was awarded the National Humanities Medal by president Barack Obama. Didion was profiled in the Netflix documentary The Center Will Not Hold, directed by her nephew Griffin Dunne, in 2017. The above text was taken from, respectively, HarperCollins publishing (via Google Books) and Wikipedia.[Didion, Joan. Play it as it Lays. United Kingdom: HarperCollins Publishers, 2011.] This handsome copy would be a worthy addendum to you 1st editions library.
Price: 233.95 USD
Location: College Station, Texas
End Time: 2024-11-30T02:42:13.000Z
Shipping Cost: 10.08 USD
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Item Specifics
Restocking Fee: No
Return shipping will be paid by: Buyer
All returns accepted: Returns Accepted
Item must be returned within: 30 Days
Refund will be given as: Money Back
Binding: Hardcover
Language: English
Special Attributes: 1st Edition
Author: Joan Didion
Publisher: Farrar, Straus & Giroux
Topic: Literature, Modern
Subject: Literature & Fiction
Original/Facsimile: Original
