Play It As It Lays

Author: Joan Didion

Stock information

General Fields

  • : $22.99 AUD
  • : 9780007414987
  • : HarperCollins
  • : Fourth Estate
  • : 0.164
  • : April 2017
  • : 197mm X 130mm
  • :
  • : 22.99
  • : March 2012
  • :
  • : books

Special Fields

  • :
  • :
  • : Joan Didion
  • : Paperback
  • :
  • :
  • : 214
  • :
  • :
  • :
  • :
  • :
  • :
  • :
Barcode 9780007414987
9780007414987

Description

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.

Author description

Joan Didion is one of America's most respected writers, her work constituting some of the greatest portraits of modern-day American culture. Over the four decades of her career, she has produced widely-acclaimed journalistic essays, personal essays, novels, non-fiction, memoir and screenplays. Her memoir The Year of Magical Thinking won the National Book Award in 2005.