Product Description
An insightful analysis of how five prominent writers coped with the death of a beloved spouse ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

What a terrific book!
Joan Didion writes an honest, unsentimental account of death and grief. The pages almost turn themselves. Great book!

A heart-touching read
Joan Didion shares from her heart the story of the first year after the loss of her husband. She also gives much practical information which is helpful inunderstanding grief. I would recommend this book to anyone who is going through a time of grief. I believe it would be a great gift for a person who is grieving.

Not to be Missed
"The Year of Magical Thinking" is a book not to be missed,It is not for teenagers. Such provocative thinking on death and disaster and what kept this author going for the year after the sudden death of her husband and the tragedy of her daughter's illness is so personally described.
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Product Description
Joan Didion is a major contemporary American novelist and journalist whose works have popular appeal and are widely studied from a variety of literary perspectives as well as for philosophical, psychological, and political insights into the times and topics with which they deal. This volume collects an extensive range of critical commentary, both reviews and scholarly examinations, including newly commissioned essays, covering the entire canon: four works of fiction and five of nonfiction published between 1963 and 1992. Individually, the selections explore diverse critical approaches to Didion's canon; collectively, they establish a critical map that will serve as a guide to future scholarship. A substantive introduction assesses the canon and the critical reaction to it. Other features include a brief chronology of Didion's accomplishments, a bibliography, and contributors and subject indexes. ... Read more

Product Description
This work examines the unspoken in the work of four women writers - Jane Austen, Willa Cather, Katherine Anne Porter, and Joan Didion - as a consciously employed feminist rhetoric. Acknowledging that reticence is often enforced by patriarchal silencing of women. Stout argues that each of these writers turns that traditional limitation into a weapon of mockery of assault against masculine society. She shows a continuity extending from Austen to the other writers and explores differences in their use of a rhetoric of reticence. Austen, the fountainhead of the strategically reticent style in the novel, used irony to criticize covertly her society's treatment of women while seeming to observe its constraints. Cather, motivated both by her personal need for disguise and by her commitments to a Jamesian aesthetic of indirection, also developed techniques for conveying more than she actually said, persuading readers of gender injustice. Porter employed an Austenian style of clarifiction and a rhetoric of discretion, but her indignation at the anguish of women's lives is apparent. Didion's writing is terse, stripped, and intensely, angrily aggresive.All four writers avoid anti-patriarchal oratory, instead working subversively to question and at times to assault power structures based on gender. Stout points to the necessity of reading women's fiction in both an aesthetic and a social context in order to catch the elusive undertones of their style and also the need to recognize the common concerns of women writers from different national literatures. ... Read more

Product Description
This collection of writing by American essayist Joan Didion attempts to capture aspects of American life and culture and isolate them for public inspection. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Fragmentary evidence of civilization
Henry Robbins was a New York editor.He died in 1979.There was a memorial service for him at the Society of Ethical Culture.He was hurt when his authors got bad reviews.The editor gives the writer the idea of himself.

Joan Didion writes of the expectation the Ronald Reagans had that other people would take care of their needs.A presidential campaign is a set.It is moved at considerable expense from location to location.A campaign can be an isolating experience.Didion is hilarious about ball-playingon the tarmac.

We learn of the generations of Hearsts preceding Patricia Campbell Hearst.The original Wyntoon was a creation of the architect Bernard Maybeck.It burned down.Patty attended school at the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Menlo Park.Patricia Hearst wrote of her experience of being kidnapped.Life with the SLA had the distorted logic of dreams.

Living in Los Angeles requires the driving of great distances.There is an absence of narrative.Didion decides that narrative is sentimental anyway.

Joan Didion describes Vietnamese refugee camps in Hong Kong.The residents of the camps put their lives on hold waiting for the consular interview, hoping to achieve relocation.

In California movies are the industry.It is believed that writers can always be replaced.

Los Angeles was literally invented by the Los Angeles Times and its owners.To oppose the Chandlers was to oppose the perfection of Los Angeles. ... Read more

Product Description
'This happened on December 30, 2003. That may seem a while ago but it won't when it happens to you!'In this adaptation of her award-winning, bestselling memoir, Joan Didion transforms the story of the sudden and unexpected loss of her husband and their only daughter into a stunning and powerful one-woman play.The first production of 'The Year of Magical Thinking', starring Vanessa Redgrave and directed by David Hare, was a runaway hit on Broadway in 2007. The same production is transferring to the National Theatre from April to July 2008. ... Read more

Product Description
Nominee for the National Book Award, this collection of literarycriticism considers the careers of women writers as well as therepresentation of women in literature. Included are essays on the workof Virginia Woolf, the Brontes, and Sylvia Plath. [Hardwick's] superbwriting is a rare gift to the reader. ... Read more

Product Description
Inspired by the symmetrical, Jeffersonian layout of the American Pavilion's Neoclassical architecture, and by Thomas Cole's cycle of the same name, Ed Ruscha installed this ten-painting exhibition titled Course of Empire at the 2005 Venice Biennale. Five pieces are painted in color and five in black and white. The artist paired each work from his 1992 Blue Collar series with a new color canvas depicting the future of the same urban landscape, some deteriorated, some growing and changing, some seemingly gentrifying. The exhibition will travel in 2006 to The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Essays from Linda Norden, the U.S. Commissioner for the Venice Biennale, and artist Frances Stark celebrate the work, while Joan Didionís coolly written but deeply felt piece about her own brokenhearted longing for Los Angeles hits a perfect note. ... Read more