
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
About this listen
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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“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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- 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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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
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Joan Didion at the 92nd Street Y
- By: Joan Didion
- Narrated by: Joseph Lelyveld
- Length: 46 mins
- Original Recording
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Joyce Carol Oates called Joan Didion "an articulate witness to the most stubborn and intractable truths of our time." Ms. Didion is the author of the novels Play It as It Lays and The Last Thing He Wanted, the essay collections Slouching Toward Bethlehem and The White Album, and the memoirs Where I Was From and The Year of Magical Thinking.
By: Joan Didion
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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 Year of Magical Thinking
- By: Joan Didion
- Narrated by: Vanessa Redgrave
- Length: 1 hr and 28 mins
- Original Recording
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When celebrated writer Joan Didion’s life was altered forever, she wrote a new chapter. In this adaptation of her iconic memoir, Didion transforms the story of the shattering loss of her husband and their daughter into a one-woman play performed by Tony Award winner Vanessa Redgrave, who originated the role on Broadway in 2007.
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Difficult story, but worth it
- By Maya on 08-07-20
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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Didion and Babitz
- By: Lili Anolik
- Narrated by: Lili Anolik, Emma Roberts
- Length: 12 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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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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I’m still Team Joan
- By Dorothy L. Lipman on 11-16-24
By: Lili Anolik
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Democracy
- By: Joan Didion
- Narrated by: Denise Poirier
- Length: 5 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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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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The Last Thing He Wanted
- By: Joan Didion
- Narrated by: Elisabeth Rodgers
- Length: 5 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Elena McMahon walks off the presidential campaign she has been covering for a major newspaper to do a favor for her father. Elena's father does deals. And it is while acting as his agent in one such deal - a deal that shortly goes spectacularly wrong - that she finds herself on an island where tourism has been superseded by arms dealing, covert action, and assassination. The Last Thing He Wanted is a tour de force - persuasive in its detail, dazzling in its ambiguities, enchanting in its style.
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Ugh—find a different book
- By K. Hendry on 02-27-21
By: Joan Didion
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Miami
- By: Joan Didion
- Narrated by: Jennifer Van Dyck
- Length: 5 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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It is where Fidel Castro raised money to overthrow Batista and where two generations of Castro's enemies have raised armies to overthrow him, so far without success. It is where the bitter opera of Cuban exile intersects with the cynicism of U.S. foreign policy. It is a city whose skyrocketing murder rate is fueled by the cocaine trade, racial discontent, and an undeclared war on the island 90 miles to the south.
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Havana vanities come to dust in Miami.
- By Darwin8u on 09-22-15
By: Joan Didion
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Black Swans
- By: Eve Babitz
- Narrated by: Mia Barron
- Length: 6 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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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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Eve's Hollywood
- By: Eve Babitz
- Narrated by: Mia Barron
- Length: 8 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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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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A fun read!
- By Ryan Stanley on 09-11-18
By: Eve Babitz
What listeners say about Slouching Towards Bethlehem
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Anne
- 03-20-25
The vivid imagery.
I wasn’t sure what to expect exactly but was happily surprised. The California memories were relatable for me but the trip to the 60’s made it much more exciting.
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- Josh
- 11-15-24
Takes you to a different time
I’ve heard from many in the literary community that Joan Didion is one of the very best to ever do it and was excited to see Slouching Towards Bethlehem done as an audiobook.
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.
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- NRo
- 03-07-25
Thought Provoking Essays
I very much enjoyed these essays, each varies greatly from one another; each leaves the reader with a lesson in social equity and with a moral lesson as well as so much to think about.
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- Anonymous User
- 01-12-25
Great voice for Joan Dideon. Just the right tone and cadence.
Liked all of it. Reminded me of my 40 years in California. The enigma of California. The taming of our last American wilderness.
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- Jack Frey
- 02-25-25
Joan Didion is a must read for any American.
Joan Didion is the preeminent writer of her generation. The authority and command in which she writes is truly remarkable and her stories about the 60s provide a window into just how strange it was to be alive & young at that time.
The narrator does an amazing job conveying Didion’s diction throughout.
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- Thomas Mink
- 11-25-24
Mesmerizing
Narration by Maya Hawke excellent and soothing. Hope hear more from her. Non fiction snapshot of the 60s with a literary delivery.
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- Anonymous User
- 02-15-25
No, Maya, No
Poor kid mispronounced way too many words to have this gig. Garden of Ahh-la?
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