
Slouching Towards Bethlehem
Picador Modern Classics
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Narrated by:
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Maya Hawke
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By:
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Joan Didion
Long-listed, Los Angeles Times Best Books of the Year, 2017
Long-listed, Slate Best Books of the Year, 2024
This program is read by actor and singer-songwriter Maya Hawke, star of Netflix's Stranger Things.
"Narrating in a voice as clear and sustaining as a cool glass of water, Hawke’s unflashy approach allows the words to reveal their magic."—The Orange County Register
“Maya Hawke performs this classic collection superbly...Hawke gets Didion's measured pace and thoughtful tone just right as she conveys the much admired author's idiosyncratic, elegant language.”—AudioFile (Earphones Award Winner)
Celebrated, iconic, and indispensable, Joan Didion’s first work of nonfiction, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, is considered a watershed moment in American writing. First published in 1968, the collection was critically praised as one of the “best prose written in this country.”
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. As Joyce Carol Oates remarked: “[Didion] has been an articulate witness to the most stubborn and intractable truths of our time, a memorable voice, partly eulogistic, partly despairing; always in control.”
A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
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Critic reviews
“In her portraits of people, Didion is not out to expose but to understand, and she shows us actors and millionaires, doomed brides and naive acid-trippers, left wing ideologues and snobs of the Hawaiian aristocracy in a way that makes them neither villainous nor glamorous, but alive and botched and often mournfully beautiful.... A rich display of some of the best prose written today in this country.” —Dan Wakefield, The New York Times Book Review
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Great voice for Joan Dideon. Just the right tone and cadence.
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The narrator does an amazing job conveying Didion’s diction throughout.
Joan Didion is a must read for any American.
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The vivid imagery.
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listen to it.
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Mesmerizing
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No, Maya, No
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I thought everything was good - but not great. The narration was fine, aside from a few mispronunciations (Chapultepec and others), the writing intriguing but not spectacular. I am glad that I sampled Didion’s work, especially resonant were the chapters toward the beginning and end - the woman accused of killing her husband and her recollections of Hawaii and New York.
Takes you to a different time
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Thought Provoking Essays
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Excellent
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