Play It As It Lays

VERY GOOD — DUST JACKET: Minor wear to top and bottom edges of spine, panels, folds and flaps. Very small closed tear to back panel, near spine. Very minor curling of laminate face at bottom edge of spine. Minor creasing to outside edges of flaps, primarily front. BOARDS: Very good condition. No issues. BOOK: Very good condition. No issues. Please inspect photos closely for condition details.

Here on offer is a very nice copy of Joan Didion's classic L.A. novel, Play It As It Lays, included in Time magazine's list of The 100 Best English-Language Novels from 1923 to 2005. This copy is a 1st trade edition, 1st printing of the work published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 1970. The dust jacket is protected from further wear by a Mylar sleeve.

*********************************************************

"A ruthless dissection of American life in the late 1960s, from the author of The Last Thing He Wanted and A Book of Common Prayer.

Somewhere out beyond Hollywood, resting actress Maria Wyeth drifts along the freeway in perpetual motion, anaesthetized to pain and pleasure, seemingly untainted by her personal history. She finds herself, in her early thirties, radically divorced from husband, lovers, friends, her own past and her own future.

Play It As It Lays is set in a place beyond good and evil, literally in Los Angeles and Las Vegas and the barren wastes of the Mojave, but figuratively in the landscape of the arid soul. Capturing the mood of an entire generation, Didion chose Hollywood to serve as her microcosm of contemporary society and exposed a culture characterized by emptiness and ennui.

Two decades after its original publication, it remains a profoundly disturbing novel, an immaculately wrought portrait of a world (California on the cusp of the 70s) where too much freedom made a lot of people ill.

//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

Joan Didion (December 5, 1934 – December 23, 2021) was an American writer. She is considered one of the pioneers of New Journalism along with Gay Talese, Hunter S. Thompson, and Tom Wolfe.

Didion's career began in the 1950s after she won an essay contest sponsored by Vogue magazine. 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. Didion's political writing in the 1980s and 1990s often concentrated on the subtext of political and social rhetoric. In 1991, she wrote the earliest mainstream media article to suggest the Central Park Five had been wrongfully convicted. In 2005, Didion won the National Book Award for Nonfiction and was a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for The Year of Magical Thinking, a memoir of the year following the death of her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne. She later adapted the book into a play that premiered on Broadway in 2007. In 2013, she was awarded the National Humanities Medal by president Barack Obama. Didion was profiled in the Netflix documentary The Center Will Not Hold, directed by her nephew Griffin Dunne, in 2017.

The above text was taken from, respectively, HarperCollins publishing (via Google Books) and Wikipedia.
[Didion, Joan. Play it as it Lays. United Kingdom: HarperCollins Publishers, 2011.]