Download or read book Slouching Towards Los Angeles written by Steffie Nelson and published by . This book was released on 2020-02-11 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The White Album, Joan Didion famously wrote that "a place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively...loves it so radically that he remakes it in his image." Cruising in her Daytona yellow Corvette Stingray, taking it all in behind dark glasses, Joan Didion claimed California for all time. Slouching Towards Los Angeles is a multi-faceted portrait of the literary icon who, in turn, belongs to us. This collection of original essays covers the turf that made Didion a sensation--Hollywood and Patty Hearst; Malibu, Manson and the Mojave; the Summer of Love and the Central Park Five--while bringing together some of the finest voices of today's Los Angeles and beyond. Slouching Towards Los Angeles is a love letter and thank you note; personal memoir and social commentary; cultural history and literary critique. Fans of Didion, lovers of California, and fellow writers alike will all find something to dig into, in this rich exploration of the inner and outer landscapes Joan Didion traveled, shaping our own journeys in the process. Featuring essays by Ann Friedman Jori Finkel Margaret Wappler Jessica Hundley Christine Lennon Catherine Wagley Su Wu Joshua Wolf Shenk Lauren Sandler Michelle Chihara Sarah Tomlinson Linda Immediato Tracy McMillan Dan Crane Steph Cha Caroline Ryder Joe Donnelly Monica Corcoran Harel Alysia Abbott Stacie Stukin Heather John Fogarty Marc Weingarten Scott Benzel Ezrha Jean Black

Download or read book Slouching Towards Bethlehem written by Joan Didion and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 1990 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A RICH DISPLAY OF SOME OF THE BEST PROSE WRITTEN TODAY IN THE USA.

Download or read book South and West written by Joan Didion and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2017-03-07 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER • “One of contemporary literature’s most revered essayists revives her raw records from a 1970s road trip across the American southwest ... her acute observations of the country’s culture and history feel particularly resonant today.” —Harper’s Bazaar Joan Didion, the bestselling, award-winning author of The Year of Magical Thinking and Let Me Tell You What I Mean, has always kept notebooks—of overheard dialogue, interviews, drafts of essays, copies of articles. Here are two extended excerpts from notebooks she kept in the 1970s; read together, they form a piercing view of the American political and cultural landscape. “Notes on the South” traces a road trip that she and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, took through Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. Her acute observations about the small towns they pass through, her interviews with local figures, and their preoccupation with race, class, and heritage suggest a South largely unchanged today. “California Notes” began as an assignment from Rolling Stone on the Patty Hearst trial. Though Didion never wrote the piece, the time she spent watching the trial in San Francisco triggered thoughts about the West and her own upbringing in Sacramento. Here we not only see Didion’s signature irony and imagination in play, we’re also granted an illuminating glimpse into her mind and process.

Download or read book The Last Love Song written by Tracy Daugherty and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2015-08-25 with total page 753 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Biography of the American novelist, Joan Didion (1934).

Download or read book Where I Was From written by Joan Didion and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-01-26 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the bestselling, award-winning author of The Year of Magical Thinking: In this "arresting amalgam of memoir and historical timeline” (The Baltimore Sun), Didion—a native Californian—reassesses parts of her life, her work, her history, and ours. Didion applies her scalpel-like intelligence to California's ethic of ruthless self-sufficiency in order to examine that ethic’s often tenuous relationship to reality. Combining history and reportage, memoir and literary criticism, Where I Was From explores California’s romances with land and water; its unacknowledged debts to railroads, aerospace, and big government; the disjunction between its code of individualism and its fetish for prisons. Whether she is writing about her pioneer ancestors or privileged sexual predators, robber barons or writers (not excluding herself), Didion is an unparalleled observer, and this book is at once intellectually provocative and deeply personal.

Download or read book After Henry written by Joan Didion and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2017-05-09 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Incisive essays on Patty Hearst and Reagan, the Central Park jogger and the Santa Ana winds, from the New York Times–bestselling author of South and West. In these eleven essays covering the national scene from Washington, DC; California; and New York, the acclaimed author of Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album “capture[s] the mood of America” and confirms her reputation as one of our sharpest and most trustworthy cultural observers (The New York Times). Whether dissecting the 1988 presidential campaign, exploring the commercialization of a Hollywood murder, or reporting on the “sideshows” of foreign wars, Joan Didion proves that she is one of the premier essayists of the twentieth century, “an articulate witness to the most stubborn and intractable truths of our time” (Joyce Carol Oates, The New York Times Book Review). Highlights include “In the Realm of the Fisher King,” a portrait of the White House under the stewardship of Ronald and Nancy Reagan, two “actors on location;” and “Girl of the Golden West,” a meditation on the Patty Hearst case that draws an unexpected and insightful parallel between the kidnapped heiress and the emigrants who settled California. “Sentimental Journeys” is a deeply felt study of New York media coverage of the brutal rape of a white investment banker in Central Park, a notorious crime that exposed the city’s racial and class fault lines. Dedicated to Henry Robbins, Didion’s friend and editor from 1966 until his death in 1979, After Henry is an indispensable collection of “superior reporting and criticism” from a writer on whom we have relied for more than fifty years “to get the story straight” (Los Angeles Times).

Download or read book Let Me Tell You What I Mean written by Joan Didion and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2021-01-26 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR • NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • From one of our most iconic and influential writers, the award-winning author of The Year of Magical Thinking: a timeless collection of mostly early pieces that reveal what would become Joan Didion's subjects, including the press, politics, California robber barons, women, and her own self-doubt. With a forward by Hilton Als, these twelve pieces from 1968 to 2000, never before gathered together, offer an illuminating glimpse into the mind and process of a legendary figure. They showcase Joan Didion's incisive reporting, her empathetic gaze, and her role as "an articulate witness to the most stubborn and intractable truths of our time" (The New York Times Book Review). Here, Didion touches on topics ranging from newspapers ("the problem is not so much whether one trusts the news as to whether one finds it"), to the fantasy of San Simeon, to not getting into Stanford. In "Why I Write," Didion ponders the act of writing: "I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means." From her admiration for Hemingway's sentences to her acknowledgment that Martha Stewart's story is one "that has historically encouraged women in this country, even as it has threatened men," these essays are acutely and brilliantly observed. Each piece is classic Didion: incisive, bemused, and stunningly prescient.

Download or read book Slouching Toward Nirvana written by Charles Bukowski and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-10-06 with total page 419 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Wordsworth, Whitman, William Carlos Williams, and The Beats in their respective generations moved poetry toward a more natural language. Bukowski moved it a little farther.”—Los Angeles Times Book Review “He brought everybody down to earth, even the angels.”—Leonard Cohen, songwriter Los Angeles slums, bars, and more are featured in Slouching Toward Nirvana, the third of five books of unpublished poems from Charles Bukowski, considered by many to be America’s most imitated and influential poet.

Download or read book Goodbye to All That Revised Edition written by Sari Botton and published by Seal Press. This book was released on 2021-04-06 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Roxane Gay to Leslie Jamison, thirty brilliant writers share their timeless stories about the everlasting magic—and occasional misery—of living in the Big Apple, in a new edition of the classic anthology. In the revised edition of this classic collection, thirty writers share their own stories of loving and leaving New York, capturing the mesmerizing allure the city has always had for writers, poets, and wandering spirits. Their essays often begin as love stories do, with the passion of something newly discovered: the crush of subway crowds, the streets filled with manic energy, and the sudden, unblinking certainty that this is the only place on Earth where one can become exactly who she is meant to be. They also share the grief that comes like a gut-punch, when the grand metropolis loses its magic and the pressures of New York's frenetic life wear thin for even the most dedicated dwellers. As friends move away, rents soar, and love—still—remains just out of reach, each writer's goodbye is singular and universal, just like New York itself.

Download or read book State of the Arts written by Barbara Isenberg and published by Ivan R. Dee Publisher. This book was released on 2005 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Celebrates California artists of all sorts and examines their relationship to their environment. Features 54 interviews with visual and performing artists, musicians, screenwriters, novelists, actors, and others. From Dave Brubeck's childhood on a Concord, CA, ranch to Clint Eastwood on his first memories of Carmel, to Luis Valdez's farmworkers' theater and Maxine Hong Kingston's writing of Chinese myth, these wide-ranging and revealing interviews shed light on the creative life in the land of plenty.--From publisher description.

Download or read book We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live written by Joan Didion and published by Everyman's Library. This book was released on 2006-10-17 with total page 1196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Publisher description

Download or read book Slouching Towards Utopia written by J. Bradford DeLong and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2022-09-06 with total page 532 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An instant New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller from one of the world’s leading economists, offering a grand narrative of the century that made us richer than ever, but left us unsatisfied “A magisterial history.”—​Paul Krugman Named a Best Book of 2022 by Financial Times * Economist * Fast Company Before 1870, humanity lived in dire poverty, with a slow crawl of invention offset by a growing population. Then came a great shift: invention sprinted forward, doubling our technological capabilities each generation and utterly transforming the economy again and again. Our ancestors would have presumed we would have used such powers to build utopia. But it was not so. When 1870–2010 ended, the world instead saw global warming; economic depression, uncertainty, and inequality; and broad rejection of the status quo. Economist Brad DeLong’s Slouching Towards Utopia tells the story of how this unprecedented explosion of material wealth occurred, how it transformed the globe, and why it failed to deliver us to utopia. Of remarkable breadth and ambition, it reveals the last century to have been less a march of progress than a slouch in the right direction.

Download or read book Bluets written by Maggie Nelson and published by Wave Books. This book was released on 2009-10-01 with total page 113 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color . . . A lyrical, philosophical, and often explicit exploration of personal suffering and the limitations of vision and love, as refracted through the color blue. With Bluets, Maggie Nelson has entered the pantheon of brilliant lyric essayists. Maggie Nelson is the author of numerous books of poetry and nonfiction, including Something Bright, Then Holes (Soft Skull Press, 2007) and Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions (University of Iowa Press, 2007). She lives in Los Angeles and teaches at the California Institute of the Arts.

Download or read book Always Crashing in the Same Car On Art Crisis and Los Angeles California written by Matthew Specktor and published by Tin House Books. This book was released on 2021-07-27 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Best Book of the Year at The Atlantic Los Angeles Times Bestseller "[An] absorbing and revealing book. . . . nestling in the fruitful terrain between memoir and criticism." —Geoff Dyer, author of Out of Sheer Rage Blending memoir and cultural criticism, Matthew Specktor explores family legacy, the lives of artists, and a city that embodies both dreams and disillusionment. In 2006, Matthew Specktor moved into a crumbling Los Angeles apartment opposite the one in which F. Scott Fitzgerald spent the last moments of his life. Fitz had been Specktor’s first literary idol, someone whose own passage through Hollywood had, allegedly, broken him. Freshly divorced, professionally flailing, and reeling from his mother’s cancer diagnosis, Specktor was feeling unmoored. But rather than giving in or “cracking up,” he embarked on an obsessive journey to make sense of the mythologies of “success” and “failure” that haunt the artist’s life and the American imagination. Part memoir, part cultural history, part portrait of place, Always Crashing in the Same Car explores Hollywood through a certain kind of collapse. It’s a vibrant and intimate inspection of failure told through the lives of iconic, if under-sung, artists—Carole Eastman, Eleanor Perry, Warren Zevon, Tuesday Weld, and Hal Ashby, among others—and the author’s own family history. Through this constellation of Hollywood figures, he unearths a fascinating alternate history of the city that raised him and explores the ways in which curtailed ambition, insufficiency, and loss shape all our lives. At once deeply personal and broadly erudite, it is a story of an art form (the movies), a city (Los Angeles), and one person’s attempt to create meaning out of both. Above all, Specktor creates a moving search for optimism alongside the inevitability of failure and reveals the still-resonant power of art to help us navigate the beautiful ruins that await us all.

Download or read book Inter State written by José Vadi and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2021-09-14 with total page 157 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A "must read" debut collection of poetic, linked essays investigating the past and present state of California, its conflicting histories and their impact on a writer's family and life (Los Angeles Times). California has been advertised as a destiny manifested for those ready to pull up their bootstraps and head west across to find wealth on the other side of the Sierra Nevada since the 19th century. Across the seven essays in the debut collection by José Vadi, we hear from the descendants of those not promised that prize. Inter State explores California through many lenses: an aging obsessed skateboarder; a self-appointed dive bar DJ; a laid-off San Francisco tech worker turned rehired contractor; a grandson of Mexican farmworkers pursuing the crops they tilled. Amidst wildfires, high speed rail, housing crises, unprecedented wealth and its underlying decay, Inter State excavates and roots itself inside those necessary stories and places lost in the ever-changing definitions of a selectively golden state.

Download or read book Live and Learn written by Joan Didion and published by HarperPerennial. This book was released on 2005 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Live and Learn comprises three of the personal essay collections that established Joan Didion as a major figure in the modern canon ? arranged in chronological order so that readers can appreciate not only the qualities of the essays per se, but also their evolution over time. It also includes a new introduction by Joan Didion herself. modern classic, capturing the mood of 1960s America and especially the center of its counterculture, California. The cornerstone essay, an extraordinary report on San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury, sets the agenda for the rest of this book ? depicting and America where, in some way or another, things are falling apart and ?the center cannot hold'. The White Album (1979) is a syncopated, swirling mosaic of the 60s and 70s, covering people and artifacts from the Black Panthers and the Manson family to John Paul Getty's museum. Sentimental Journeys (1992) shifts its perspective slightly to take in Vietnamese refugee camps in Hong Kong, the Reagan campaign trail, and the inequities of Los Angeles real estate. Joan Didion, and an essential reference for readers old and new. It confirms the power of this uniquely unbiased, moving writer, and showcases her artful yet simple prose.

Download or read book The Book of Common Prayer written by and published by . This book was released on 1850 with total page 1106 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: