Joan Didion: Memoirs & Later Writings (LOA #386)

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The ultimate Didion edition concludes with the brilliant and haunting works from her incomparable late phase.

Library of America now completes its definitive, three-volume edition of one of the most electric writers of our time with the final seven books: 

• Political Fictions (2001) offers a behind-the-scenes look at the American political landscape of the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s, its reflections on sound bites, photo ops, and an increasingly dysfunctional system still bracingly relevant.
• Fixed Ideas (2003), restored to print in this collection, traces the efforts of the Bush administration to “stake new ground in old domestic wars” in the wake of 9/11.
• Where I Was From (2003) explores the sunny myths and darker realities of Didion’s native California, her personal recollections interwoven with sketches of water wars, sexual predators, mass incarceration, and corporate corruption.
• The Year of Magical Thinking (2005), which brought Didion the National Book Award and legions of new readers, registers the shock of the death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, amid her daughter Quintana’s ultimately terminal illness. Looking back on her marriage of four decades, she faces the abyss of a grief that “turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it.”
• The Year of Magical Thinking: The Play (2007) is Didion’s lauded dramatic adaptation of the memoir.
• Blue Nights (2011) is Didion’s raw and haunting search for consolation amid despair.
• South and West (2017) revisits Didion’s notebooks from a happier time, recalling a roadtrip with her husband through the American South, and 1970s California. 

Here are the achingly beautiful memoirs and masterful collections of reportage and observation with which Joan Didion crowned the final decades of her extraordinary career.Joan Didion (1934–2021) was one of the most distinct American literary voices of the last century, the author of five novels and nine books of nonfiction, including Slouching Towards Bethlehem, The White Album, Play It As It Lays, and the New York Times best sellers The Year of Magical Thinking, Blue Nights, and South and West. She was the recipient of numerous awards, including the National Book Award for Nonfiction and the National Book Foundations’ Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.

David L. Ulin is the author or editor of numerous books, including Sidewalking: Coming to Terms with Los Angeles; the Library of America’s Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology, which won a California Book Award; and The Lost Art of Reading: Books and Resistance in a Troubled Time. The former book editor and book critic of the Los Angeles Times, he teaches at the University of Southern California.US

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