Joan Didion

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 Joan Didion examines her thoughts, fears, and doubts regarding having children, illness, and growing old. Blue Nights opens on July 26, 2010, as Didion thinks back to Quintana’s wedding in New York seven years before....

Two excerpts from never-before-seen notebooks offer insights into the author's literary mind and process and includes notes on her Sacramento upbringing, her life in the Gulf states, her views on prominent locals and her experiences during a formative "Rolling Stone" assignment. Joan Didion has always kept notebooks of overheard dialogue, observations, interviews, drafts of essays, and copies of articles. "Notes on the South" traces a road trip she...

The “dazzling” and essential portrayal of 1960s America from the author of South and West and The Year of Magical Thinking (The New York Times).
Capturing the tumultuous landscape of the United States, and in particular California, during a pivotal era of social change, the first work of nonfiction from one of American literature’s most distinctive prose stylists is a modern classic.
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"[This] 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. 'Immaculate of history, innocent of politics, ' she has come to Boca Grande vaguely and vainly hoping to be reunited with her fugutive daughter. As imagined by [the author], her fate is at once utterly particular...

Incisive essays on Patty Hearst and Reagan, the Central Park jogger and the Santa Ana winds, from the New York Times–bestselling author of South and West. In these eleven essays covering the national scene from Washington, DC; California; and New York, the acclaimed author of Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album confirms her reputation as one of our sharpest and most trustworthy cultural observers. Whether dissecting the 1988 presidential...

Slouching Towards Bethlehem: America in the 1960s-a pivotal era of social change and generational divide. Here is Joan Didion on the "misplaced children" of Haight-Ashbury as well as John Wayne in Hollywood; folk singer Joan Baez and reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes; the extremes of both Death Valley and Las Vegas. Named to Time magazine's list of the one hundred best and most influential nonfiction books, this is "a rare display of some of the...

When a filmmaker investigates the devastating migraine attacks which have her daughter in their grip, she discovers migraine is not just the terrible headache she always thought it to be, but a mysterious neurological disease afflicting nearly a billion people worldwide. She decides to make a film and trace the journey, as mother and daughter seek understanding and ever-elusive treatment. Along the way we hear from doctors, neuroscientists, and...