Play It as It Lays Audiobook By Joan Didion cover art

Play It as It Lays

A Novel (FSG Classics)

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Play It as It Lays

By: Joan Didion
Narrated by: Lauren Fortgang
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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 Audio Coming of Age Family Life Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Women's Fiction

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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Everytime I reimmerse myself in Didion, I am grateful for her detachment, snark, and brutal and glacial storytelling.

Didion is a genius

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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.☺️

Exquisite 🤌🏻

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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.

For every woman who’s been told to be the good wife

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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.

Pointless

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