Blue Nights

In her first book since The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion has now written with stunning frankness about her daughter, Quintana Roo, as well as thoughts and fears about having children and about growing old. Blue Nights opens on July 26, 2010, as Didion thinks back to Quintana’s wedding in New York seven years before. Today would be her wedding anniversary. This fact triggers vivid snapshots of Quintana’s childhood—in Malibu, in Brentwood, at school in Holmby Hills. Reflecting on her daughter but also on her role as a parent, Didion asks the candid questions any parent might about how she feels she failed either because cues were missed or perhaps displaced. Seamlessly woven in are incidents Didion sees as underscoring her own age, something she finds hard to acknowledge, much less accept.

Published 2011

The Year of Magical Thinking

Didion's journalistic skills are displayed as never before in this National Book Award-winning story of a year in her life that began with her daughter in a medically induced coma and her husband unexpectedly dead due to a heart attack. With vulnerability and passion, she explores an intensely personal yet universal experience of love and loss. It speaks directly to anyone who has ever loved a husband, wife, or child. TIME magazine called it, "An act of consummate literary bravery."

Published 2005

(Source: Publisher)

Slouching Towards Bethlehem

Upon its publication in 1968, Slouching Towards Bethlehem confirmed Didion as one of the most prominent writers on the literary scene. In essay after essay, she captures the dislocation of the 1960s, the disorientation of a country shredding itself apart with social change. Her essays not only describe the subject at hand -- the murderous housewife, the little girl trailing the rock group, the millionaire bunkered in his mansion -- but also offer a broader vision of America, one that is both terrifying and tender, ominous and uniquely her own.

Published 1969

(Source: Publisher)

Fixed Ideas: America Since September 11th

Didion writes about the refusal of Americans to openly discuss and debate the Bush administration's new unilateralism toward both domestic and international policies since 9/11. This provocative and persuasive essay was originally published in The New York Review of Books, and garnered a tremendous response from the magazine's readers. In a preface commissioned for this book edition, Frank Rich, the popular op-ed columnist for The New York Times, echoes her argument with his own passionate analysis. Fixed Ideas is an incisive, timely political commentary from an American virtuoso.

Published 2003

(Source: New York Review of Books)

We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live: Collected Non-Fiction

Joan Didion's incomparable and distinctive essays and journalism are admired for their acute, incisive observations and their spare, elegant style. Now the seven books of nonfiction that appeared between 1968 and 2003 have been brought together into one thrilling collection.

Published 2006

(Source: Knopf)

Democracy

Moving between Honolulu, Jakarta and Saigon, against the historical backdrop of the final withdrawal from Vietnam, this novel is a bitingly funny, cumulatively devastating post-mortem of our national mores and institutions. A U.S. Senator, his wife, senatorial groupies and international arms dealing intersect with one another in this blistering indictment of American amnesia. A tour de force from a writer who can dissect an entire society with a single phrase.

Published 1995

(Source: Publisher)

Where I Was From

Where I Was From, in Didion's words, "represents an exploration into my own confusions about the place and the way in which I grew up, confusions as much about America as about California, misapprehensions and misunderstandings so much a part of who I became that I can still to this day confront them only obliquely."

Published 2003

(Source: Publisher)

Political Fictions

In these coolly observant essays, Didion looks at the American political process and at "that handful of insiders who invent, year in and year out, the narrative of public life." Through the deconstruction of the sound bites and photo ops of three presidential campaigns, one presidential impeachment, and an unforgettable sex scandal, she reveals the mechanics of American politics. She tells us the uncomfortable truth about the way we vote, the candidates we vote for, and the people who tell us to vote for them. A disturbing portrait of the American political landscape, providing essential reading on our democracy.

Published 2002

(Source: Publisher)

Miami

The city is Miami, and no one has observed its pastel surfaces and murky intrigues more astutely than Joan Didion. As this unerring social commentator follows Miami's drift into a Third World capital, she also locates its position in the secret history of the Cold War, from the Bay of Pigs to the Reagan doctrine and from the Kennedy assassination to the Watergate break-in. Miami is not just a portrait of a city, but a masterly study of immigration and exile, passion and hypocrisy.

Published 1998

The White Album

The White Album is a mosaic of the late sixties and seventies. It includes, among other bizarre artifacts and personalities, the dark journeys and impulses of the Manson family, a Black Panther Party press conference, the story of John Paul Getty's museum, the romance of water in an arid landscape, and the swirl and confusion of the sixties. With commanding sureness of mood and language, Didion exposes the realities and dreams of that age of self-discovery whose spiritual center was California.

Published 1979

(Source: Publisher)

River Run

Didion's electrifying first novel is a haunting portrait of a marriage whose wrong turns and betrayals are at once absolutely idiosyncratic and a razor-sharp commentary on the history of California. Anne Tyler called it, "A slant of vision that is arresting and unique," and said, "Didion might be an observer from another planet -- one so edgy and alert that she ends up knowing more about our own world than we know ourselves."

Published 1994

(Source: Publisher)