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Play It As It Lays

Joan Didion

Paperback | Pages: 231 pages

Rating: 3.88 | 27117 Users | 2077 Reviews

Identify Books Toward Play It As It Lays

Original Title:	Play It as It Lays
ISBN:	0374529949 (ISBN13: 9780374529949)
Edition Language:	English
Characters:	Maria Wyeth, Carter Lang, BZ
Setting:	Los Angeles, California(United States) Mojave Desert(United States) Las Vegas, Nevada(United States)

Representaion As Books Play It As It Lays

A ruthless dissection of American life in the late 1960s, 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 reader. 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.

Mention About Books Play It As It Lays

Title	:	Play It As It Lays
Author	:	Joan Didion
Book Format	:	Paperback
Book Edition	:	First Edition
Pages	:	Pages: 231 pages
Published	:	November 15th 2005 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux (first published 1970)
Categories	:	Fiction. Classics. Novels. Literary Fiction. Literature. Contemporary. American

Rating About Books Play It As It Lays

Ratings: 3.88 From 27117 Users | 2077 Reviews

Judgment About Books Play It As It Lays

This book is simply brilliant. The fatalism of it's heroine, Maria Wyeth, is absolutely heart-wrenching as she slowly grows more and more tired of life. Didion is a surgeon, each sentence like a scalpel cutting away a cancerous tumor. No one can match her for brutal honesty. While it's a very quick read at just over 200 pages, it deals a swift but heavy blow.

3.5/5 Stars.This is a fierce, sordid little novel about a woman in crisis. It takes place in 1960s Hollywood, where Maria, a struggling actress unhappily married to a movie director, engages in a series of self-destructive behaviors that culminate in her being committed.Maria is the kind of apathetic, amoral, detached woman you could picture hanging out with Patrick Bateman. In fact, this reminded me quite a bit of Bret Easton Ellis's Less Than Zero or even JG Ballard's Crash. There's a

Don't quite know how she did it, but it's rare I come across a novel that I found so alienating and distant, yet so warm at the same time. Didion's Play it as it lays which takes place across Los Angeles, the Mojave Desert and Las Vegas is full of excess truths that dart across it's pages more like a prophecy. And it seemed to me to do that thing that feels impossible: it connects to readers who are not of the ilk of the characters. Didion opens proceedings in not the greatest of places one

So that she would not have to stop for food she kept a hard-boiled egg on the passenger seat of the Corvette. She could shell and eat a hard-boiled egg at seventy miles an hour (crack it on the steering wheel, never mind salt, salt bloats, no matter what happened she remembered her body). Which author could possibly begin a novel with the words:What makes Iago evil? Some people ask. I never ask.Well surprisingly enough Joan Didion. And these words set in motion the inevitable direction that

When I finished reading this book the other day, I suddenly realized that I hadn't really appreciated it correctly. That I needed to reread it right away because I hadn't read it the right way and because there is a lot that you don't have enough information to make sense of the first time around.I don't understand how people can call this book cold and sterile. I just thought it was so rich and textured and heartbreaking. I feel like the little chapters are like puzzle pieces and each piece is

I remember when I read Where I Was From a couple years ago, Didion referred a lot to her novel Play It As It Lays and I thought it sounded really bad. About a year ago I found an old edition someplace with this enormous and brain-numbingly awesome picture of Didion with her cigarette and legendarily icy, ironical stare. I really came close to buying it just because of that image on the back, but then I had a real stern confrontation with myself in the used fiction aisle about the folly and

"I was raised to believe that what came in on the next roll would always be better than what when out on the last. I no longer believe that."- Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays (Warning: This book is not to be read if suicidal, heavily medicated, driving, pregnant, or if you ever dream of walking out, alone, into the Nevada desert and not coming back. This book is pure existential peril. I remember when I was four being specifically afraid of our church's bathroom. I remember thinking the church