* Joan Didion - Collected Novels and Nonfiction (23 books)

JOAN DIDION (1934 – 2021) was an American writer and journalist.  Whether writing fiction, memoir, or trailblazing journalism, her gifts for narrative and dialogue, and her intimate but detached authorial persona, won her legions of readers and admirers.  She is considered one of the pioneers of New Journalism along with Gay Talese, Hunter S. Thompson, and Tom Wolfe.  She was awarded the National Humanities Medal by president Barack Obama in 2013.

Over the course of her career, Didion wrote essays for many magazines, including The Saturday Evening Post, Life, Esquire, The New York Review of Books and The New Yorker.  Her writing during the 1960s through the late 1970s engaged audiences in the realities of the counterculture of the 1960s, the Hollywood lifestyle, and the history and culture of California.  Her first nonfiction book, SLOUCHING TOWARDS BETHLEHEM (1968), a collection of magazine pieces about her experiences in California, is an example of New Journalism, using novel-like writing to cover the non-fiction realities of hippie counterculture.  She wrote from her personal perspective; adding her own feelings and memories to situations, inventing details and quotes to make the stories more vivid.  The New York Times characterized her writing as containing "grace, sophistication, nuance, [and] irony."

Didion's political writing in the 1980s and 1990s often concentrated on the subtext of political rhetoric and the United States's foreign policy in Latin America.  These included the book-length essay SALVADOR (1983), a searing look at terror and Cold War politics in the Central American civil war of the early 1980s; MIAMI (1987), a portrait not just of a city but of immigration, exile, the cocaine trade, and political violence; and AFTER HENRY (1992), in which she reports on Patty Hearst, Nancy Reagan, the case of the Central Park Five, and the Los Angeles she once called home.  The novels DEMOCRACY (1984) and THE LAST THING HE WANTED (1996), are fast-paced, deftly observed narratives of power, conspiracy, and corruption in American political life.

THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING (2005) is a memoir of the year following the death of the author's husband John Gregory Dunne.  It was immediately acclaimed as a classic book about mourning and won the 2005 National Book Award for Nonfiction.  The title of the book refers to magical thinking in the anthropological sense, thinking that if a person hopes for something enough or performs the right actions then an unavoidable event can be averted.  Didion reports many instances of her own magical thinking, particularly the story in which she cannot give away Dunne's shoes, as he would need them when he returned.  The experience of insanity or derangement that is part of grief is a major theme.  Didion adapted the book for a successful Broadway play in 2007.


The following books are in ePUB format unless otherwise noted:

== FICTION ==

* A Book of Common Prayer (Vintage, 2011)
* Democracy (Vintage, 2011)
* The Last Thing He Wanted (Vintage, 2011)
* Play It as It Lays (Open Road,2017)
* Run River (Vintage, 2011)

== NONFICTION ==

* After Henry (Open Road, 2017)
* Blue Nights (Knopf, 2011)
* Collected Essays (Open Road, 2018)
* Fixed Ideas: America Since 9.11 (NYRB, 2003) – PDF
* Insider Baseball (Vintage, 2016)
* The Last Interview and Other Conversations (Melville House, 2022)
* Let Me Tell You What I Mean (Knopf, 2021)
* Miami (Open Road, 2017)
* Political Fictions (Vintage, 2002)
* Salvador (Vintage, 2011)
* Slouching Towards Bethlehem (Open Road, 2017)
* South and West (Knopf, 2017)
* We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live: Collected Nonfiction (Knopf, 2006) – PDF
* Where I Was From (Vintage, 2011)
* The White Album (Open Road, 2017)
* The Year of Magical Thinking (Vintage, 2007)

== OTHER ==

* Vintage Didion (Vintage, 2010)
* The Year of Magical Thinking: The Play (Vintage, 2009)


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