Books by Joan Didion

From one of America's iconic writers, a portrait of a marriage and a life - in good times and bad - that will speak to anyone who has ever loved a husband or wife or child. A stunning book of electric honesty and passion.Several days before Christmas 2003, John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion saw their only daughter, Quintana, fall ill. At first they thought it was flu, then pneumonia, then complete sceptic shock. She was put into an induced coma and placed on life support. Days later - the night before New Year's Eve -the Dunnes were just sitting down to dinner after visiting the hospital when John suffered a massive and fatal coronary. In a second, this close, symbiotic partnership of 40 years was over. Four weeks later, their daughter pulled through. Two months after that, arriving at LA airport, she collapsed and underwent six hours of brain surgery at UCLA Medical Centre to relieve a massive hematoma.This powerful book is Didion's 'attempt to make sense of the weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I ever had about death, about illness ... about marriage and children and memory ... about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself'. The result is an exploration of an intensely personal yet universal experience: a portrait of a marriage, and a life, in good times and bad.

Joan Didion's hugely influential collection of essays which defines, for many, the America which rose from the ashes of the Sixties.

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.

Joan Didion's savage masterpiece, which, since first publication in 1968, has been acknowledged as an unparalleled report on the state of America during the upheaval of the Sixties Revolution.

From one of America's greatest and most iconic writers: an honest and courageous portrait of age and motherhood.Several days before Christmas 2003, Joan Didion's only daughter, Quintana, fell seriously ill. In 2010, Didion marked the sixth anniversary of her daughter's death. 'Blue Nights' is a shatteringly honest examination of Joan Didion's life as a mother, a woman and a writer.Recently widowed, and becoming increasingly frail, 'Blue Nights' is Didion's attempt to understand our deepest fears, our inadequate adjustments to ageing and to put a name to what we refuse to see and as a consequence fail to face up to, 'this refusal even to engage in such contemplation, this failure to confront the certainties of ageing, illness and death. This fear.' This fear is tied to what we cherish most and fight to conserve, protect, and refuse to let go, for, 'when we are talking about mortality we are talking about our children.' To face death is to let go of memory, to be bereft once more, 'I know what it is I am now experiencing. I know what the frailty is, I know what the fear is.'The fear is not for what is lost.The fear is for what is still to be lost.You may see nothing still to be lost.Yet there is no day in her life on which I do not see her.A profound, poetic and powerful book about motherhood and the fierce way in which we continue to exalt and nurture our children, even if they only live on in memory.'Blue Nights' is an intensely personal, and yet, strangely universal account of how we love. It is both groundbreaking and a culmination of a stunning career.

'Blå timer' er en fritstående fortsættelse af 'Et år med magisk tænkning', og om muligt en endnu stærkere bog. Den handler især om datterens død. Om det frygteligt forkerte i at skulle begrave sin voksne datter kort tid efter hendes bryllup. Om at stå magtesløs tilbage. Og mærke alderdommen snige sig ind på en og forstærke denne magtesløshed, hvordan den rent fysisk nærmest tager over.Samtidig - fordi Joan Didion så modigt og fintfølende evner at registrere og reflektere over, det der sker i dette tilværelsesns og sjælelivets skumringsland - bliver denne tragiske beretning til en intens og livsklog og ja, livsbekræftende bog.Med udgangspunkt i de lykkelige minder netop fra datterens bryllyp - og fra de glimt af barndommen, der dukker op i forberedelserne af dette, opruller Joan Didion deres liv sammen. Mor og datter. Og med et helt særligt klarsyn, skærpet af sorgen og af den tydelige fornemmelse af selv at nærme sig sit livs aften, beskriver hun både de lykkeligste stunder og de smertelige øjeblikke og oplevelser af afstand, utilstrækkelighed og fravær.Joan Didion formår som få at stille skarpt på og beskrive tilværelsens mange facetter. Her skriver hun dybt bevægende og tankevækkende om at se hele sit liv - ikke mindst kærligheden til sit barn og sin egen rolle som forældre - i skumringens og sorgens tvelys.

From one of the most important chroniclers of our time, come two extended excerpts from her never-before-seen notebooks-writings that offer an illuminating glimpse into the mind and process of a legendary writer.

A memoir of land, family and perseverance from one of the most influential writers in America.In this moving and surprising book, Joan Didion reassesses parts of her life, her work, her history - and America's. Where I Was From, in Didion's words, "e;represents an exploration into my own confusions about the place and the way in which I grew up, misapprehensions and misunderstandings so much a part of who I became that I can still to this day confront them only obliquely."e;The book is a haunting narrative of how her own family moved west with the frontier from the birth of her great-great-great-great-great-grandmother in Virginia in 1766 to the death of her mother on the edge of the Pacific in 2001; of how the wagon-train stories of hardship and abandonment and endurance created a culture in which survival would seem the sole virtue. Didion examines how the folly and recklessness in the very grain of the California settlement led to the California we know today - a state mortgaged first to the railroad, then to the aerospace industry, and overwhelmingly to the federal government.Joan Didion's unerring sense of America and its spirit, her acute interpretation of its institutions and literature, and her incisive questioning of the stories it tells itself make this fiercely intelligent book a provocative and important tour de force from one of America's greatest writers.

From one of our most iconic and influential writers: twelve pieces never before collected that offer an illuminating glimpse into the mind and process of this legendary figure.

Reportage resists easy definition and comes in many forms - travel essay, narrative history, autobiography - but at its finest it reveals hidden truths about people and events that have shaped the world we know.

El Salvador, 1982, is the height of a ghastly civil war. The author travels from battlefields to body dumps, interviews a puppet president, considers the distinctly Salvadoran meaning of the verb 'to disappear' and trains a merciless eye on the terror there as well as on the depredations and evasions of US foreign policy.

Slæber sig mod Betlehem er titlen på Joan Didions ikoniske essaysamling fra 1968. Bogen udkommer i SKALA-serien for genopdagede mesterværker. Den er og bliver det mest væsentlige portræt af USA og særligt Californien i 1960’erne, der er skrevet, og den blev et kæmpe gennembrud for Didion. Bogen er en milepæl inden for New Journalism-genren og handler om alt fra John Wayne til selvrespekt og det titelbærende essay fra San Franciscos Haight-Ashbury-kvarter, som var selve hjertet i hippie-bevægelsen. I bogen beskriver Didion et USA, som er ved at falde fra hinanden i jagten på stoffer, sex og frihed, og hendes oplevelse af opløsning og forskydning i tiden er en rød tråd gennem værket. Hvis man vil forstå USA, og hvis man vil forstå 1968, er denne bog uomgængelig.

Angst og glamour præger Joan Didions barske Hollywood-roman INTET GÆLDER – en helt central bog i det 20. århundredes amerikanske litteratur, som nu for første gang foreligger på dansk. Bogen udkommer i Skala-serien, der består af genopdagede hovedværker, også bøger, der tidligere har været glemt, misforstået eller dømt ude. Gyldendal Skala er nye klassikere til en ny tid.

A thrilling and exhilarating exploration of U.S. politics in Central America from Joan Didion, the hugely acclaimed author of The Year of Magical Thinking.

An engrossing novel about political and personal life in Central America, from the award-winning author of The Year of Magical Thinking.Set in the ruined Central American nation of Boca Grande, A Book of Common Prayer is the story of two American women and their conflicting experiences of wealth, politics and personal history. We follow the intriguing life of Grace Strasser-Mendana - an American expatriate and member of one of Boca Grande's most influential families - alongside the story of Charlotte Douglas, whose daughter Medin has run off with a group of Marxist radicals. What follows is an exploration of the women's ability to make sense of the behaviour that surrounds them, as their worlds are made hazy by the atmosphere of evil and innocence that envelops their strained and entangled lives.