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We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live by Joan Didion
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We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live

Collected Nonfiction; Introduction by John Leonard

By Joan Didion
Introduction by John Leonard

By Joan Didion
Introduction by John Leonard

Best Seller

Part of Everyman's Library Contemporary Classics Series

Hardcover $40.00

Oct 17, 2006 | ISBN 9780307264879

We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live by Joan Didion
Hardcover $40.00
Oct 17, 2006 | ISBN 9780307264879

Buy from Other Retailers:

Hardcover
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  • Hardcover $40.00

    Oct 17, 2006 | ISBN 9780307264879

    Buy from Other Retailers:

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About We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live

From the bestselling, award-winning author of The Year of Magical Thinking and Let Me Tell You What I Mean, this collection includes seven books in one volume: the full texts of Slouching Towards Bethlehem; The White Album; Salvador; Miami; After Henry; Political Fictions; and Where I Was From.

As featured in the Netflix documentary Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold.

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.

Slouching Towards Bethlehem captures the counterculture of the sixties, its mood and lifestyle, as symbolized by California, Joan Baez, Haight-Ashbury. The White Album covers the revolutionary politics and the “contemporary wasteland” of the late sixties and early seventies, in pieces on the Manson family, the Black Panthers, and Hollywood. Salvador is a riveting look at the social and political landscape of civil war. Miami exposes the secret role this largely Latin city played in the Cold War, from the Bay of Pigs through Watergate. In After Henry Didion reports on the Reagans, Patty Hearst, and the Central Park jogger case. The eight essays in Political Fictions–on censorship in the media, Gingrich, Clinton, Starr, and “compassionate conservatism,” among others–show us how we got to the political scene of today. And in Where I Was From Didion shows that California was never the land of the golden dream.

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About Joan Didion

JOAN DIDION was born in Sacramento in 1934 and graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1956. After graduation, Didion moved to New York and began working for Vogue, which led to her career as a journalist and writer. Didion… More about Joan Didion

Product Details

Category: Literary Collections | Literary Criticism | Reference

Hardcover | $40.00
Published by Everyman’s Library
Oct 17, 2006 | 1160 Pages | 5 x 8 | ISBN 9780307264879
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Praise

“[Didion’s is] one of the most recognizable—and brilliant—literary styles to emerge in America during the past four decades . . . [She is] a great American writer.”
—New York Times Book Review

“One beautiful sentence follows another . . . Didion has remained a clearheaded and original writer all her long life.”
—Newsweek

“Her intelligence is as honed as ever . . . Her vision is ice-water clear . . . Didion has captured the mood of America.”
—New York Times

“Many of us have tried, and failed, to master [Didion’s] gift for the single ordinary deflating word, the word that spins an otherwise flat sentence through five degrees of irony. But her sentences could only be hers.”
—Chicago Tribune

“I have been trying forever to figure out why [Didion’s] sentences are better than mine or yours . . . Something about [their] cadence. They come at you, if not from ambush, then in gnomic haikus, ice pick laser beams, or waves. Even the space on the page around these sentences is more interesting than it ought to be, as if to square a sandbox for a Sphinx.”
—from the Introduction by John Leonard

Table Of Contents

Introduction by John Leonard
Select Bibliography
Chronology

Slouching Towards Bethlehem
The White Album
Salvador
Miami
After Henry
Political Fictions
Where I Was From

Notes to Miami

Acknowledgments

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