Play It as It Lays
A Novel (FSG Classics)
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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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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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- By Jatai Pollock on 09-26-24
By: Michael Elliot
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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
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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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Wonderful narration. Mediocre stories.
- By Michael Fuchs on 11-07-23
By: Stephen Fry, and others
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Fahrenheit 451
- By: Ray Bradbury
- Narrated by: Tim Robbins
- Length: 5 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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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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Wish I Hadn't Cliff Noted This in High School
- By Joel on 03-27-17
By: Ray Bradbury
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Brain Damage
- By: Freida McFadden
- Narrated by: Megan Tusing
- Length: 9 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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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.
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Who Else Laughed, Cried, and Shuddered?
- By Jennifer Chichester on 09-16-22
By: Freida McFadden
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Starship Troopers
- By: Robert A. Heinlein
- Narrated by: R.C. Bray
- Length: 8 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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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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The definitive version!
- By Kristopher G. Hesson on 10-03-24
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Slayers: A Buffyverse Story
- By: Christopher Golden, Amber Benson
- Narrated by: Amber Benson, Charisma Carpenter, James Charles Leary, and others
- Length: 8 hrs and 2 mins
- Original Recording
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Original cast members from the beloved TV series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, reunite for an all-new adventure about connections that never die—even if you bury them. A decade has passed since the epic final battle that concluded Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV). The game-changing spell that gave power to all potential Slayers persists. With new Slayers constantly emerging, things are looking grim for the bad guys.
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A dream come true
- By Anonymous User on 10-12-23
By: Christopher Golden, 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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You Feel Like You Are There
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Slouching Towards Bethlehem
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More than perhaps any other book, this collection by one of the most distinctive prose stylists of our era captures the unique time and place of Joan Didion’s focus, exploring subjects such as John Wayne and Howard Hughes, growing up in California and the nature of good and evil in a Death Valley motel room, and, especially, the essence of San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury, the heart of the counterculture.
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Takes you to a different time
- By Josh on 11-15-24
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Blue Nights
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- Narrated by: Kimberly Farr
- Length: 4 hrs and 21 mins
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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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Twilights turn Long and Blue
- By Darwin8u on 01-02-17
By: Joan Didion
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Democracy
- By: Joan Didion
- Narrated by: Denise Poirier
- Length: 5 hrs and 16 mins
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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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Exquisite
- By Adam Burke on 04-17-23
By: Joan Didion
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A Book of Common Prayer
- By: Joan Didion
- Narrated by: Marisa Vitali
- Length: 6 hrs and 42 mins
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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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Strong tale badly told
- By A reader in Berkeley on 06-04-17
By: Joan Didion
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The Year of Magical Thinking
- By: Joan Didion
- Narrated by: Barbara Caruso
- Length: 5 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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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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Great book to Read, but I didn’t like it
- By Michael on 05-08-15
By: Joan Didion
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The White Album
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- Narrated by: Susan Varon
- Length: 7 hrs and 21 mins
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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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You Feel Like You Are There
- By Kelly Jo on 07-15-24
By: Joan Didion
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Slouching Towards Bethlehem
- Picador Modern Classics
- By: Joan Didion
- Narrated by: Maya Hawke
- Length: 6 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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More than perhaps any other book, this collection by one of the most distinctive prose stylists of our era captures the unique time and place of Joan Didion’s focus, exploring subjects such as John Wayne and Howard Hughes, growing up in California and the nature of good and evil in a Death Valley motel room, and, especially, the essence of San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury, the heart of the counterculture.
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Takes you to a different time
- By Josh on 11-15-24
By: Joan Didion
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Blue Nights
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- By: Joan Didion
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- Length: 4 hrs and 21 mins
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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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Twilights turn Long and Blue
- By Darwin8u on 01-02-17
By: Joan Didion
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Democracy
- By: Joan Didion
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- Length: 5 hrs and 16 mins
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Overall
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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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Exquisite
- By Adam Burke on 04-17-23
By: Joan Didion
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A Book of Common Prayer
- By: Joan Didion
- Narrated by: Marisa Vitali
- Length: 6 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
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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Strong tale badly told
- By A reader in Berkeley on 06-04-17
By: Joan Didion
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The Year of Magical Thinking
- By: Joan Didion
- Narrated by: Barbara Caruso
- Length: 5 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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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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Great book to Read, but I didn’t like it
- By Michael on 05-08-15
By: Joan Didion
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Black Swans
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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
- By Ariana Sweany on 10-29-24
By: Eve Babitz
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Where I Was From
- By: Joan Didion
- Narrated by: Gabrielle De Cuir
- Length: 6 hrs and 28 mins
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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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California belongs to Joan Didion.
- By Darwin8u on 11-04-15
By: Joan Didion
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Let Me Tell You What I Mean
- An Essay Collection
- By: Joan Didion
- Narrated by: Kimberly Farr, Hilton Als
- Length: 4 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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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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Didion deserves a better narrator
- By Pamela on 02-03-21
By: Joan Didion
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Run, River
- By: Joan Didion
- Narrated by: Holly Cate
- Length: 7 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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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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Thought-provoking, riveting, memorable
- By Avalon on 08-23-13
By: Joan Didion
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Acts of Desperation
- By: Megan Nolan
- Narrated by: Lauren Coe
- Length: 6 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Performance
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Story
In the first scene of this provocative gut-punch of a novel, our unnamed narrator meets a magnetic writer named Ciaran and falls, against her better judgment, completely in his power. After a brief, all-consuming romance, he abruptly rejects her, sending her into a tailspin of jealous obsession and longing. If he ever comes back to her, she resolves to hang onto him and his love at all costs, even if it destroys her.
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Wonderful and tortured
- By Dr Sophie Henshaw on 05-01-21
By: Megan Nolan
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Briefly, a Delicious Life
- By: Nell Stevens
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- Length: 9 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1473, fourteen-year-old Blanca dies in a hilltop monastery in Mallorca. Nearly four hundred years later, when George Sand, her two children, and her lover Frederic Chopin arrive in the village, Blanca is still there: a spirited, funny, righteous ghost, she’s been hanging around the monastery since her accidental death, spying on the monks and the townspeople and keeping track of her descendants.
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Solid book
- By Jeremy K on 11-19-22
By: Nell Stevens
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South and West
- From a Notebook
- By: Joan Didion
- Narrated by: Kimberly Farr, Nathaniel Rich
- Length: 2 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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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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"Notes" Are Not a Book
- By Carole T. on 03-11-17
By: Joan Didion
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The Lover
- By: Marguerite Duras
- Narrated by: Kathleen Gati
- Length: 3 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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Set in the prewar Indochina of Marguerite Duras's childhood, this is the haunting tale of a tumultuous affair between an adolescent French girl and her Chinese lover. In spare yet luminous prose, Duras evokes life on the margins of Saigon in the waning days of France's colonial empire, and its representation in the passionate relationship between two unforgettable outcasts.
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Not a favorite
- By Sharon Isaac on 10-12-24
By: Marguerite Duras
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Brutes
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- By: Dizz Tate
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Story
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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No idea what was happening at any time
- By Amazon Customer on 04-02-24
By: Dizz Tate
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The World According to Joan Didion
- By: Evelyn McDonnell
- Narrated by: Hillary Huber
- Length: 7 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
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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Woke, revisionist retelling of Didion's life and work.
- By c on 02-10-24
By: Evelyn McDonnell
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Acts of Service
- A Novel
- By: Lillian Fishman
- Narrated by: Rebecca Lowman
- Length: 7 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
Eve has an adoring girlfriend, an impulsive streak, and a secret fear that she’s wasting her brief youth with just one person. So one evening she posts some nudes online. This is how Eve meets Olivia, and through Olivia the charismatic Nathan. Despite her better instincts, the three soon begin a relationship—one that disturbs Eve as much as it enthralls her.
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Just Awesome
- By Stephen D. Sloan on 03-29-23
By: Lillian Fishman
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After Henry
- By: Joan Didion
- Narrated by: Elizabeth Hess
- Length: 9 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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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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It'll blow a hole in your retina
- By Darwin8u on 10-03-15
By: Joan Didion
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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- 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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- 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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- 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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