Joan Didion Play It As It Lays Pdf
PLAY IT AS IT LAYS JOAN DIDION 1970. MARIA WHAT MAKES IAGO EVIL? Some people ask. Order, and I gave him some chips to play. Colin Winnette admires the writer Nicholas Rombes, so he asked Nicholas to suggest a book. Nicholas suggested Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion. Then they talked.
Author by: Joan Didion Language: en Publisher by: Open Road Media Format Available: PDF, ePub, Mobi Total Read: 58 Total Download: 670 File Size: 52,6 Mb Description: A harrowing tale of Hollywood, Las Vegas, and a young woman in pursuit of oblivion by the New York Times–bestselling author of The White Album. Spare, elegant, and terrifying, Play It as It Lays is the unforgettable story of a woman and a society come undone. Raised in the ghost town of Silver Wells, Nevada, Maria Wyeth is an ex-model and the star of two films directed by her estranged husband, Carter Lang. But in the spiritual desert of 1960s Los Angeles, Maria has lost the plot of her own life. Her daughter, Kate, was born with an “aberrant chemical in her brain.” Her long-troubled marriage has slipped beyond repair, and her disastrous love affairs and strained friendships provide little comfort. Her only escape is to get in her car and drive the freeway—in the fast lane with the radio turned up high—until it runs out “somewhere no place at all where the flawless burning concrete just stopped.” But every ride to nowhere, every sleepless night numbed by pills and booze and sex, makes it harder for Maria to find the meaning in another day.
Told with profound economy of style and a “vision as bleak and precise as Eliot’s in ‘The Wasteland’,” Play It as It Lays ruthlessly dissects the dark heart of the American dream (The New York Times). It is a searing masterpiece “from one of the very few writers of our time who approaches her terrible subject with absolute seriousness, with fear and humility and awe” (Joyce Carol Oates, The New York Times Book Review). Author by: Lynn Marie Houston Language: en Publisher by: ABC-CLIO Format Available: PDF, ePub, Mobi Total Read: 9 Total Download: 512 File Size: 51,6 Mb Description: This book is a compelling reference guide for book clubs on the work of Joan Didion, with summaries of her major works and discussion questions.
Discussion questions on Joan Didion's works, literary movements, and literary analysis. An exhaustive bibliography of additional writings about Didion as well as similar authors and books. Author by: Kevin R. McNamara Language: en Publisher by: Cambridge University Press Format Available: PDF, ePub, Mobi Total Read: 78 Total Download: 571 File Size: 42,9 Mb Description: Los Angeles has a tantalizing hold on the American imagination. Its self-magnifying myths encompass Hollywood glamour, Arcadian landscapes, and endless summer, but also the apocalyptic undertow of riots, environmental depredation, and natural disaster.
This Companion traces the evolution of Los Angeles as the most public staging of the American Dream - and American nightmares. The expert contributors make exciting, innovative connections among the authors and texts inspired by the city, covering the early Spanish settlers, African American writers, the British and German expatriates of the 1930s and 1940s, Latino, and Asian LA literature. The genres discussed include crime novels, science fiction, Hollywood novels, literary responses to urban rebellion, the poetry scene, nature writing, and the most influential non-fiction accounts of the region. Diverse, vibrant, and challenging as the city itself, this Companion is the definitive guide to LA in literature. Author by: Jeffrey Berman Language: en Publisher by: SUNY Press Format Available: PDF, ePub, Mobi Total Read: 74 Total Download: 630 File Size: 52,6 Mb Description: Explores how memoirs of widowhood can help us understand the reality of bereavement and the critical role of writing and reading in recovery. The death of a beloved spouse after a lifetime of companionship is a life-changing experience. To help understand the reality of bereavement, Jeffrey Berman focuses on five extraordinary American writers—Joan Didion, Sandra Gilbert, Gail Godwin, Kay Redfield Jamison, and Joyce Carol Oates—each of whom has written a memoir of spousal loss.
In each chapter, Berman gives an overview of the writer’s life and art before widowhood, including her early preoccupation with death, and then discusses the writer’s memoir and her life as a widow. He discovers that writing was, for all of these authors, both a solace and a lifeline, enabling them to maintain bonds with their lost loved ones while simultaneously moving on with their lives. These memoirs of widowhood, Berman maintains, reveal not only courage and resilience in the face of loss, but also the critical role of writing and reading in bereavement and recovery. “Writing Widowhood is a stunning achievement that combines biography, literary history, and theoretical and philosophical exploration into the nature of grief as well as mental illness—all seamlessly executed.
Berman elegantly and lucidly conveys a range of theories and perspectives to suit both academic and general readers. Berman never compromises complexity while remaining accessible and straightforward throughout.” — Virginia L. Blum, author of Flesh Wounds: The Culture of Cosmetic Surgery “Writing Widowhood contributes to the field of autobiography/biography, and particularly to women’s writing within that generic field, by discussing five memoirs which Berman categorizes as the ‘widow memoir.’ No other critic that I know has shaped commentaries into a newly defined genre.
Didion Play It As It Lays Summary
Berman’s book, thus, makes an important contribution to the overall field.” — Linda Wagner-Martin, author of Telling Women’s Lives: The New Biography. Author by: Krista Comer Language: en Publisher by: UNC Press Books Format Available: PDF, ePub, Mobi Total Read: 34 Total Download: 135 File Size: 47,5 Mb Description: In the early 1970s, empowered by the civil rights and women's movements, a new group of women writers began speaking to the American public. Their topic, broadly defined, was the postmodern American West. By the mid-1980s, their combined works made for a bona fide literary groundswell in both critical and commercial terms. However, as Krista Comer notes, despite the attentions of publishers, the media, and millions of readers, literary scholars have rarely addressed this movement or its writers.
Too many critics, Comer argues, still enamored of western images that are both masculine and antimodern, have been slow to reckon with the emergence of a new, far more 'feminine,' postmodern, multiracial, and urban west. Here, she calls for a redesign of the field of western cultural studies, one that engages issues of gender and race and is more self-conscious about space itselfespecially that cherished symbol of western 'authenticity,' open landscape. Surveying works by Joan Didion, Wanda Coleman, Maxine Hong Kingston, Leslie Marmon Silko, Barbara Kingsolver, Pam Houston, Louise Erdrich, Sandra Cisneros, and Mary Clearman Blew, Comer shows how these and other contemporary women writers have mapped new geographical imaginations upon the cultural and social spaces of today's American West.
Kate Didion Play It As It Lays
Author: Joan Didion Year Released: 1970 Didion’s mordant lucidity is like L.A. Sunlight, a thing so bright sometimes it hurts. She’s a descendant of the old California, the great- great-granddaughter of pioneers. But she was also schooled at Berkeley and in the literary circles of Paris and New York, so she’s fully versed in the predicaments of a shaky modernity that she does not care for in the least. To drive home her belief that the world, or at least the part around L.A., is coming to a bad end, she gives us Maria Wyeth, a model turned actress turned hollowed-out woman who speaks to us from the mental institution where she has fetched up after a long slide into despair. Passing through a pointless career, a toxic marriage, an abortion, finally holding the hand of a close friend while he commits suicide; when she tells you, “I know what ‘nothing’ means,” you believe her.