Play It as It Lays
A Novel (FSG Classics)
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Play It as It Lays
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Narrated by:
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Lauren Fortgang
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By:
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Joan Didion
About this listen
A ruthless dissection of American life in the late 1960s, Joan Didion's Play It as It Lays captures the mood of an entire generation, the ennui of contemporary society reflected in spare prose that blisters and haunts the listener.
Set in a place beyond good and evil—literally in Hollywood, Las Vegas, and the barren wastes of the Mojave Desert, but figuratively in the landscape of an arid soul—it remains more than three decades after its original publication a profoundly disturbing novel, riveting in its exploration of a woman and a society in crisis and stunning in the still-startling intensity of its prose.
A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
©1970 Joan Didion and David Thomson (P)2024 Macmillan AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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A collection of original short stories offers an intimate and dark portrait of life in the United States as they journey through California seeking answers to our changing world, dealing with such topics as jealousy, AIDS, sex, and Jim Morrison. A new reissue of Babitz’s collection of nine stories that look back on the 1980s and early 1990s - decades of dreams, drink, and glimpses of a changing world. Black Swans further celebrates the phenomenon of Eve Babitz, cementing her reputation as the voice of a generation.
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Torrid affairs @ Chateau Marmont
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"Life changes fast....You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends." These were among the first words Joan Didion wrote in January 2004. Her daughter was lying unconscious in an intensive care unit, a victim of pneumonia and septic shock. Her husband, John Gregory Dunne, was dead. The night before New Year's Eve, while they were sitting down to dinner, he suffered a massive and fatal coronary. The two had lived and worked side by side for nearly 40 years.
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Eve Babitz knew everyone, tried everything (at least once), and was never shy about sharing her thoughts on any subject, be it sex, weight loss, drug use, or her ambivalence toward New York City. From the 1970s through the 1990s, Babitz wrote on a wild variety of topics for some of the biggest publications around, from Esquire to Vogue to The New York Times Book Review. I Used to Be Charming brings together this nonfiction work.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 51
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 42
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5 out of 5 stars
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Didion and Babitz
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- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 32
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 29
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Story4 out of 5 stars 29
Could you write what you write if you weren’t so tiny, Joan? —Eve Babitz, in a letter to Joan Didion, 1972. Joan Didion, revealed at last… Eve Babitz died on December 17, 2021. Found in the wrack, ruin, and filth of her apartment, a stack of boxes packed by her mother decades before. The boxes were pristine, the seals of duct tape unbroken. Inside, a lost world. This world turned for a certain number of years in the late sixties and early seventies, and centered on a two-story rental in a down-at-heel section of Hollywood.
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4 out of 5 stars
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I’m still Team Joan
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After Henry
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 27
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 25
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Story4 out of 5 stars 24
In her latest forays into the American scene, Joan Didion covers ground from Washington to Los Angeles, from a TV producer's gargantuan "manor" to the racial battlefields of New York's criminal courts. At each stop she uncovers the mythic narratives that elude other observers: Didion tells us about the fantasies the media construct around crime victims and presidential candidates; she gives us new interpretations of the stories of Nancy Reagan and Patty Hearst; she charts America's rollercoaster ride through evanescent booms and hard times that won't go away.
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4 out of 5 stars
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It'll blow a hole in your retina
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Goodbye, Columbus
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 7
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 5
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Story4 out of 5 stars 5
Goodbye, Columbus is the story of Neil Klugman and pretty, spirited Brenda Patimkin. Neil comes from poor Newark, while Brenda is of suburban Short Hills. On one summer break, they meet and dive into an affair that is as much about social class and suspicion as it is about love. The novella is accompanied by five short stories that range in tone from the iconoclastic to the astonishingly tender.
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5 out of 5 stars
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A masterpiece
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Where I Was From
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- Length: 6 hrs and 28 mins
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 171
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 146
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 143
In her moving and insightful new book, Joan Didion reassesses parts of her life, her work, her history and ours. A native Californian, Didion applies her scalpel-like intelligence to the state’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.
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4 out of 5 stars
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California belongs to Joan Didion.
- By Darwin8u on 11-04-15
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Sontag
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 112
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No writer is as emblematic of the American 20th century as Susan Sontag. Mythologized and misunderstood, lauded and loathed, a girl from the suburbs who became a proud symbol of cosmopolitanism, Sontag left a legacy of writing on art and politics, feminism and homosexuality, celebrity and style, medicine and drugs, radicalism and Fascism and Freudianism and Communism and Americanism, that forms an indispensable key to modern culture.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Cloying voice
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Critic reviews
“There hasn't been another American writer of Joan Didion's quality since Nathanel West . . . A terrifying book.”—John Leonard, The New York Times
“Simple, restrained, intelligent, well-structured, witty, irresistibly relentless, forthright in diction, and untainted by the sensational, Play It As It Lays is a book of outstanding literary quality.”—Library Journal
“[A] scathing novel, distilling venom in tiny drops, revealing devastation in a sneer and fear in a handful of atomic dust.”—J. R. Frakes, Book World
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Who is Audrey Hoedemaker? It's a question her sister Maureen has heard more times than she can count, and she doesn't know what the short answer would be. Little sister, troubled teen, backpacker, musical theatre coach, con artist, childcare worker. Murderer. A tragic, traumatic childhood casts a long shadow on the Hoedemaker sisters. Maureen has worked hard to move beyond the violence of the past and build a good, honest life for herself. Audrey, however, just can't seem to do the same, careening from one state of chaos to another.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Good read with a not so good ending.
- By Katie A Scribner on 12-26-24
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The Answer Is No
- A Short Story
- By: Fredrik Backman, Elizabeth DeNoma - translator
- Narrated by: Stacy Gonzalez
- Length: 1 hr and 49 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 704
-
Performance4 out of 5 stars 669
-
Story4 out of 5 stars 669
Lucas knows the perfect night entails just three things: video games, wine, and pad thai. Peanuts are a must! Other people? Not so much. Why complicate things when he’s happy alone? Then one day the apartment board, a vexing trio of authority, rings his doorbell. And Lucas’s solitude takes a startling hike. They demand to see his frying pan. Someone left one next to the recycling room overnight, and instead of removing the errant object, as Lucas suggests, they insist on finding the guilty party. But their plan backfires. Colossally.
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3 out of 5 stars
-
Narrator doesn’t get Backman’s satire or rhythm
- By joey1603 on 12-01-24
By: Fredrik Backman, and others
-
George Orwell’s 1984
- An Audible Original adaptation
- By: George Orwell, Joe White - adaptation
- Narrated by: Andrew Garfield, Cynthia Erivo, Andrew Scott, and others
- Length: 3 hrs and 27 mins
- Original Recording
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 9,578
-
Performance5 out of 5 stars 9,087
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 9,086
It’s 1984, and life has changed beyond recognition. Airstrip One, formerly known as Great Britain, is a place where Big Brother is always watching, and nobody can hide. Except, perhaps, for Winston Smith. Whilst working at the Ministry of Truth, rewriting history, he secretly dreams of freedom. And in a world where love and sex are forbidden, where it’s hard to distinguish between friend and foe, he meets Julia and O’Brien and vows to rebel.
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5 out of 5 stars
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A Revelation!
- By wotsallthisthen on 04-07-24
By: George Orwell, and others
-
The Art of War
- By: Sun Tzu
- Narrated by: Aidan Gillen
- Length: 1 hr and 7 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 41,729
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 34,575
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 34,156
The 13 chapters of The Art of War, each devoted to one aspect of warfare, were compiled by the high-ranking Chinese military general, strategist, and philosopher Sun-Tzu. In spite of its battlefield specificity, The Art of War has found new life in the modern age, with leaders in fields as wide and far-reaching as world politics, human psychology, and corporate strategy finding valuable insight in its timeworn words.
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5 out of 5 stars
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The actual book The Art of War, not a commentary
- By Nemo71 on 12-31-19
By: Sun Tzu
-
Dead Med
- By: Freida McFadden
- Narrated by: Patricia Santomasso, Scott Merriman
- Length: 10 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 1,211
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 1,179
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 1,179
When Heather McKinley dreamed of becoming a doctor, she imagined curing sick kids and sporting pink stethoscopes. She never anticipated the sleepless nights, grueling exams, and endless labs. And she certainly never knew that her medical school earned the nickname Dead Med thanks to the tragic history of students overdosing on illegal drugs. But Heather would never consider doing anything like that. That is, until her longtime boyfriend dumps her, she finds herself failing anatomy, and her world starts to crumble.
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3 out of 5 stars
-
Hmm
- By Morgan Meaux on 08-22-24
By: Freida McFadden
-
Starship Troopers
- By: Robert A. Heinlein
- Narrated by: R.C. Bray
- Length: 8 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 1,482
-
Performance5 out of 5 stars 1,391
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 1,391
Johnnie Rico never really intended to join up—and definitely not the infantry. But now that he’s in the thick of it, trying to get through combat training harder than anything he could have imagined, he knows everyone in his unit is one bad move away from buying the farm in the interstellar war the Terran Federation is waging against the Arachnids. Because everyone in the Mobile Infantry fights. And if the training doesn’t kill you, the Bugs are more than ready to finish the job.
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5 out of 5 stars
-
The definitive version!
- By Kristopher G. Hesson on 10-03-24
-
Fahrenheit 451
- By: Ray Bradbury
- Narrated by: Tim Robbins
- Length: 5 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 32,769
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 29,159
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 29,114
Guy Montag is a fireman. In his world, where television rules and literature is on the brink of extinction, firemen start fires rather than put them out. His job is to destroy the most illegal of commodities, the printed book, along with the houses in which they are hidden. Montag never questions the destruction and ruin his actions produce, returning each day to his bland life and wife, Mildred, who spends all day with her television "family."
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4 out of 5 stars
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Wish I Hadn't Cliff Noted This in High School
- By Joel on 03-27-17
By: Ray Bradbury
-
The Mistake
- By: K. L. Slater
- Narrated by: Lucy Price-Lewis
- Length: 8 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 15,419
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 14,044
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 13,984
You think you know the truth about the people you love. But one discovery can change everything.... Eight-year-old Billy goes missing one day, out flying his kite with his sister Rose. Two days later he is found dead. Sixteen years on, Rose still blames herself for Billy's death. How could she have failed to protect her little brother? Rose has never fully recovered from the trauma, and one of the few people she trusts is her neighbour Ronnie, who she has known all her life.
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5 out of 5 stars
-
How much do we really know about the ones we love?
- By T. West on 12-03-17
By: K. L. Slater
-
Brain Damage
- By: Freida McFadden
- Narrated by: Megan Tusing
- Length: 9 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 2,224
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 2,103
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 2,102
As Charly struggles to recover from her brain injury, she begins to realize that the events of that fateful night are trapped in the damaged right side of her brain. Now, she must put the jigsaw pieces together to discover the identity of the man who tried to kill her...before he finishes the job he started.
-
5 out of 5 stars
-
Who Else Laughed, Cried, and Shuddered?
- By Jennifer Chichester on 09-16-22
By: Freida McFadden
-
Mary Jane
- By: Amy Herzog
- Narrated by: Rachel McAdams, April Matthis, Brenda Wehle, and others
- Length: 1 hr and 16 mins
- Original Recording
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 119
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 112
-
Story4 out of 5 stars 112
Academy Award nominee Rachel McAdams stars in Mary Jane, a poignant and intimate drama following a single mother’s journey caring for her chronically ill young son. Set in New York City, the play unfolds in two parts—Mary Jane's small Queens apartment and a pediatric hospital. With unflinching honesty and unexpected humor, we witness Mary Jane's tireless devotion, her interactions with medical professionals, and her struggle to maintain her sense of self.
-
3 out of 5 stars
-
Amazing performance
- By Andrew Reynolds on 12-28-24
By: Amy Herzog
-
Ghost Stories: Stephen Fry's Definitive Collection
- By: Stephen Fry, Washington Irving, M.R. James, and others
- Narrated by: Stephen Fry
- Length: 8 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 691
-
Performance5 out of 5 stars 595
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 595
As the days grow shorter and the temperature drops, Halloween approaches. Come, brave listener, pull up a chair, and spend some time with master storyteller Stephen Fry as he tells us some of his favourite ghost stories of all time, in truly terrifying spatial audio. From the headless horseman of Sleepy Hollow to the tortured spirits of M.R. James, from Edgar Allan Poe’s terrifying tale of a doppelganger to Charlotte Riddell’s Open Door that should definitely stay shut, join Stephen as he tells you some truly terrifying tales.
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4 out of 5 stars
-
Wonderful narration. Mediocre stories.
- By Michael Fuchs on 11-07-23
By: Stephen Fry, and others
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First published in 1979, Joan Didion's The White Album records indelibly the upheavals and aftermaths of the 1960s. Examining key events, figures, and trends of the era—including Charles Manson, the Black Panthers, and the shopping mall—through the lens of her own spiritual confusion, Joan Didion helped to define mass culture as we now understand it. Written with a commanding sureness of tone and linguistic precision, The White Album is a central text of American reportage and a classic of American autobiography.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Great voice for Joan Dideon. Just the right tone and cadence.
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From one of our most powerful writers, a work of stunning frankness about losing a daughter. Richly textured with bits of her own childhood and married life with her husband, John Gregory Dunne, and daughter, Quintana Roo, this new book by Joan Didion examines her thoughts, fears, and doubts regarding having children, illness, and growing old.
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3 out of 5 stars
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A Book of Common Prayer
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 46
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Performance3 out of 5 stars 38
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Writing with the telegraphic swiftness and microscopic sensitivity that have made her one of our most distinguished journalists, Joan Didion creates a shimmering novel of innocence and evil. A Book of Common Prayer is the story of two American women in the derelict Central American nation of Boca Grande. Grace Strasser-Mendana controls much of the country's wealth and knows virtually all of its secrets; Charlotte Douglas knows far too little.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Strong tale badly told
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Black Swans
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 44
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A collection of original short stories offers an intimate and dark portrait of life in the United States as they journey through California seeking answers to our changing world, dealing with such topics as jealousy, AIDS, sex, and Jim Morrison. A new reissue of Babitz’s collection of nine stories that look back on the 1980s and early 1990s - decades of dreams, drink, and glimpses of a changing world. Black Swans further celebrates the phenomenon of Eve Babitz, cementing her reputation as the voice of a generation.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Torrid affairs @ Chateau Marmont
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Let Me Tell You What I Mean
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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 12 pieces from 1968 to 2000, never before gathered together, offer an illuminating glimpse into the mind and process of a legendary figure.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Didion deserves a better narrator
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The White Album
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 15
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5 out of 5 stars
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You Feel Like You Are There
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Overall5 out of 5 stars 20
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5 out of 5 stars
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Great voice for Joan Dideon. Just the right tone and cadence.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Twilights turn Long and Blue
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A Book of Common Prayer
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 46
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Performance3 out of 5 stars 38
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3 out of 5 stars
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Strong tale badly told
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4 out of 5 stars
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Torrid affairs @ Chateau Marmont
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 133
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4 out of 5 stars
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Didion deserves a better narrator
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Democracy
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 46
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 39
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Inez Victor knows that the major casualty of the political life is memory. But the people around Inez have made careers out of losing track. Her senator husband wants to forget the failure of his last bid for the presidency. Her husband's handler would like the press to forget that Inez's father is a murderer. And, in 1975, the year in which much of this bitterly funny novel is set, America is doing its best to lose track of its one-time client, the lethally hemorrhaging republic of South Vietnam.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Exquisite
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Slow Days, Fast Company
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 102
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 86
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Eve Babitz captured the voluptuous quality of LA in the 1960s in a wildly original, totally unique voice. These stories are time capsule gems, as poignant and startling today as they were when published in the early 1970s. Eve Babitz is not well known today, but she should be. Her firsthand experiences in the LA cultural scene, translated into haunting fiction, are an unforgettable glimpse at a lost world and a magical time.
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5 out of 5 stars
-
obsessed with Eve
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-
Eve's Hollywood
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 88
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 73
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Journalist, party girl, bookworm, artist, muse: By the time she'd hit 30, Eve Babitz had played all of these roles. She was immortalized as the nude beauty facing down Duchamp and as one of Ed Ruscha's Five 1965 Girlfriends, and Babitz's first book showed her to be a razor-sharp writer with tales of her own. Eve's Hollywood is an album of vivid snapshots of Southern California's haute bohemians, of outrageously beautiful high school ingenues and enviably tattooed Chicanas, of rock stars sleeping it off at the Chateau Marmont.
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4 out of 5 stars
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A fun read!
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The Year of Magical Thinking
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"Life changes fast....You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends." These were among the first words Joan Didion wrote in January 2004. Her daughter was lying unconscious in an intensive care unit, a victim of pneumonia and septic shock. Her husband, John Gregory Dunne, was dead. The night before New Year's Eve, while they were sitting down to dinner, he suffered a massive and fatal coronary. The two had lived and worked side by side for nearly 40 years.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Great book to Read, but I didn’t like it
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By: Joan Didion
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South and West
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 110
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 91
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Joan Didion has always kept notebooks: of overheard dialogue, observations, interviews, drafts of essays and articles—and here is one such draft that traces a road trip she took with her husband, John Gregory Dunne, in June 1970, through Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. She interviews prominent local figures, describes motels, diners, a deserted reptile farm, a visit with Walker Percy, a ladies' brunch at the Mississippi Broadcasters' Convention.
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3 out of 5 stars
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"Notes" Are Not a Book
- By Carole T. on 03-11-17
By: Joan Didion
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Brutes
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- Length: 6 hrs and 9 mins
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Overall3.5 out of 5 stars 21
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Performance3.5 out of 5 stars 18
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In Falls Landing, Florida—a place built of theme parks, swampy lakes, and scorched bougainvillea flowers—something sinister lurks in the deep. A gang of thirteen-year-old girls obsessively orbit around the local preacher's daughter, Sammy. She is mesmerizing, older, and in love with Eddie. But suddenly, Sammy goes missing. Where is she? Watching from a distance, they edge ever closer to discovering a dark secret about their fame-hungry town and the cruel cost of a ticket out. What they see will continue to haunt them for the rest of their lives.
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2 out of 5 stars
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No idea what was happening at any time
- By Amazon Customer on 04-02-24
By: Dizz Tate
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Run, River
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- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 51
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 42
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Story4 out of 5 stars 43
Joan Didion's electrifying first novel is a haunting portrait of a marriage whose wrong turns and betrayals are at once absolutely idiosyncratic and a razor-sharp commentary on the history of California. Everett McClellan and his wife, Lily, are the great-grandchildren of pioneers, and what happens to them is a tragic epilogue to the pioneer experience, a story of murder and betrayal that only Didion could tell with such nuance, sympathy, and suspense.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Thought-provoking, riveting, memorable
- By Avalon on 08-23-13
By: Joan Didion
-
Where I Was From
- By: Joan Didion
- Narrated by: Gabrielle De Cuir
- Length: 6 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 171
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 146
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 143
In her moving and insightful new book, Joan Didion reassesses parts of her life, her work, her history and ours. A native Californian, Didion applies her scalpel-like intelligence to the state’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.
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4 out of 5 stars
-
California belongs to Joan Didion.
- By Darwin8u on 11-04-15
By: Joan Didion
-
The World According to Joan Didion
- By: Evelyn McDonnell
- Narrated by: Hillary Huber
- Length: 7 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 4
-
Performance4 out of 5 stars 4
-
Story4 out of 5 stars 4
Joan Didion was a writer’s writer; not only a groundbreaking journalist, essayist, novelist and screenwriter, but a keen observer who honed her sights on life’s telling details. Her insights continue to influence creatives and admirers, encouraging them to become close observers of the world, unsentimental critics, and meticulous stylists. The World According to Joan Didion is a meditation on the people, places, and objects that propelled Didion’s prose and an invitation to journalists, storytellers, and life adventurers to “throw themselves into the convulsions of the world,” as she said.
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1 out of 5 stars
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Woke, revisionist retelling of Didion's life and work.
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By: Evelyn McDonnell
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The Death of the Heart
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 50
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 41
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Story4 out of 5 stars 41
In this piercing story of innocence betrayed set in the 30s, the orphaned Portia is stranded in the sophisticated and politely treacherous world of her wealthy half-brother's home in London. There she encounters the attractive, carefree cad Eddie. To him, Portia is at once child and woman, and her fears her gushing love. To her, Eddie is the only reason to be alive. But when Eddie follows Portia to a sea-side resort, the flash of a cigarette lighter in a darkened cinema illuminates a stunning romantic betrayal.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Beautifully Crafted Story
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By: Elizabeth Bowen
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The Water Cure
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 332
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King has tenderly staked out a territory for his wife and three daughters, Grace, Lia, and Sky. He has lain the barbed wire; he has anchored the buoys in the water; he has marked out a clear message: Do not enter. Or viewed from another angle: Not safe to leave. Here women are protected from the chaos and violence of men on the mainland. The cult-like rituals and therapies they endure fortify them from the spreading toxicity of a degrading world. But when their father, the only man they've ever seen, disappears, they retreat further inward until the day two men and a boy wash ashore.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Unique, strange, beautiful
- By Brittany Clemens on 01-08-19
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Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
- By: Jeanette Winterson
- Narrated by: Jeanette Winterson
- Length: 6 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 223
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 188
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 186
Jeanette is a bright and rebellious orphan who is adopted into an evangelical household in the dour, industrial North of England and finds herself embroidering grim religious mottoes and shaking her little tambourine for Jesus. But as this budding missionary comes of age, and comes to terms with her unorthodox sexuality, the peculiar balance of her God-fearing household dissolves. Jeanette’s insistence on listening to truths of her own heart and mind - and on reporting them with wit and passion - makes for an unforgettable chronicle of an eccentric, moving passage into adulthood.
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3 out of 5 stars
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quirky and odd
- By Kelly on 01-06-20
What listeners say about Play It as It Lays
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Connor
- 07-24-24
Exquisite 🤌🏻
Captivating story and the narrator did an excellent job with portraying the essence. The book played out like an episode of “Welcome to NightVale”. I was very impressed.☺️
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
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Performance4 out of 5 stars
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Story4 out of 5 stars
- Otter Pop
- 11-08-24
For every woman who’s been told to be the good wife
This story felt grueling at times and even when I was 3/4 of the way through the book, I wasn’t sure I enjoyed it. Yet the point of it all does matter. The ending will wash over you like a sleeper wave. Didion has done something here that not many could, by painting a picture of perpetuated dysfunction and the outcomes.
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Overall1 out of 5 stars
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Performance3 out of 5 stars
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Story1 out of 5 stars
- Sara Scott
- 07-17-24
Pointless
Pointless nihilist nothingness I can hardly finish it. Absolutely waste of my time. I liked your other books a lot better. This one was pointless.
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