Play It As It Lays, Joan Didion
Play It As It Lays, Joan Didion
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Play It As It Lays
A Novel

Author: Joan Didion

Narrator: Lauren Fortgang

Unabridged: 3 hr 51 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 06/25/2024

Synopsis

A ruthless dissection of American life in the late 1960s, Joan Didion's Play It as It Lays captures the mood of an entire generation, the ennui of contemporary society reflected in spare prose that blisters and haunts the reader.

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.

A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

About Joan Didion

Joan Didion (1934-2021) was the National Book Award-winning author of many works of fiction and nonfiction. After earning a Bachelor’s degree in English at the University of California, Berkeley, she started her literary career writing articles and essays for Vogue, Mademoiselle, Life, The Saturday Evening Post, and National Review, establishing herself as a prominent member of the New Journalism movement. Her books include The White Album, Play It As It Lays, and Slouching Towards Bethlehem.Shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize, Didion’s revelatory memoir The Year of Magical Thinking was adapted as a one-woman stage show starring Vanessa Redgrave on Broadway. She also wrote several screenplays with her husband John Gregory Dunne, including Panic in Needle Park with Al Pacino, the second remake of A Star is Born with Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson, and an adaptation of her own Play It As It Lays with Tuesday Weld and Anthony Perkins.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Miranda on February 11, 2018

Somebody was definitely drunk while writing this.......more

Goodreads review by Aruna Kumar on February 13, 2021

Funny at times gives you an impression of a nonsense filled story. Illustrations add fun to the story.......more

Goodreads review by William on September 10, 2014

At first, the names and creatures were amusing, but after saying Tumblerum Wollycobble the slobbadunk out loud dozens of times, we abbreviated his name to T.W.......more

Goodreads review by Sarah on December 23, 2016

Dick King-Smith has an extraordinary written voice for telling children's stories.......more

Quotes

“There hasn't been another American writer of Joan Didion's quality since Nathanel West . . . A terrifying book.” —John Leonard, The New York Times

“Simple, restrained, intelligent, well-structured, witty, irresistibly relentless, forthright in diction, and untainted by the sensational, Play It As It Lays is a book of outstanding literary quality.” —Library Journal

“[A] scathing novel, distilling venom in tiny drops, revealing devastation in a sneer and fear in a handful of atomic dust.” —J. R. Frakes, Book World

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