Joan Didion has 19 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 27 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4.4★ across 219 ratings. The most-rated is The Year of Magical Thinking.
The Year of Magical Thinking
Summary
National Book Award, Nonfiction, 2005"Life changes fast....You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends." These were among the first words Joan Didion wrote in January 2004. Her daughter was lying unconscious in an intensive care unit, a victim of pneumonia and septic shock. Her husband, John Gregory Dunne, was dead. The night before New Year's Eve, while they were sitting down to dinner, he suffered a massive and fatal coronary. The two had lived and worked side by side for nearly 40 years. The weeks and months that followed "cut loose any fixed idea I had about death, about illness, about probability and luck...about marriage and children and memory...about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself." In The Year of Magical Thinking, Didion explores with electric honesty and passion a private yet universal experience. Her portrait of a marriage, and a life, in good times and bad, will speak directly to anyone who has ever loved a husband, a wife, or a child.
©2005 Joan Didion (P)2005 HighBridge Company
Dune: The Battle of Corrin
Summary
Fifty-six hard years after the events of The Machine Crusade, after the death of Serena Butler, the bloodiest decades of the Jihad take place. The human worlds begin to hope that the end of the centuries-long conflict with the thinking machines is finally in sight. Unfortunately, Omnius has one last, deadly card to play. In a last-ditch effort to destroy humankind, virulent plagues are let loose throughout the galaxy, decimating the populations of whole planets. The war that has lasted many lifetimes will be decided in the apocalyptic Battle of Corrin. In the greatest battle of science fiction history, human and machine face off one last time....And on the desert planet of Arrakis, the legendary Fremen of Dune become the feared fighting force to be discovered by Paul Maud'Dib in Frank Herbert's classic, Dune.
©2004 Herbert Properties, LLC (P)2004 Audio Renaissance, a division of Holtzbrinck Publishers, LLC and Books on Tape, Inc.
Slouching Towards Bethlehem
Summary
Audie Award Nominee, Short Stories/Collections, 2013 Universally acclaimed from the time it was first published in 1968, Slouching Towards Bethlehem has been admired for decades as a stylistic masterpiece. Academy Award-winning actress Diane Keaton (Annie Hall, The Family Stone) performs these classic essays, including the title piece, which will transport the listener back to a unique time and place: the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco during the neighborhood’s heyday as a countercultural center. This is Joan Didion’s first work of nonfiction, offering an incisive look at the mood of 1960s America and providing an essential portrait of the Californian counterculture. She explores the influences of John Wayne and Howard Hughes, and offers ruminations on the nature of good and evil in a Death Valley motel room. Taking its title from W.B. Yeats’ poem "The Second Coming", the essays in Slouching Towards Bethlehem all reflect, in one way or another, that "the center cannot hold."
©1968 Joan Didion (P)2012 Audible, Inc.
The White Album
Summary
First published in 1979, The White Album records indelibly the upheavals and aftermaths of the 1960s. Examining key events, figures, and trends of the era - including Charles Manson, the Black Panthers, and the shopping mall - through the lens of her own spiritual confusion, Joan Didion helped to define mass culture as we now understand it. Written with a commanding sureness of tone and linguistic precision, The White Album is a central example of American reportage and a classic of American autobiography.
©1979 Joan Didion (P)2013 Audible, Inc.
Blue Nights
Summary
From one of our most powerful writers, a work of stunning frankness about losing a daughter. Richly textured with bits of her own childhood and married life with her husband, John Gregory Dunne, and daughter, Quintana Roo, this new book by Joan Didion examines her thoughts, fears, and doubts regarding having children, illness, and growing old. Blue Nights opens on July 26, 2010, as Didion thinks back to Quintana’s wedding in New York seven years before. Today would be her wedding anniversary. This fact triggers vivid snapshots of Quintana’s childhood—in Malibu, in Brentwood, at school in Holmby Hills. Reflecting on her daughter but also on her role as a parent, Didion asks the candid questions any parent might about how she feels she failed, either because cues were not taken or perhaps displaced. “How could I have missed what was clearly there to be seen?” Finally, perhaps we all remain unknown to each other. Seamlessly woven in are incidents Didion sees as underscoring her own age, something she finds hard to acknowledge, much less accept. Blue Nights—the long, light evening hours that signal the summer solstice, “the opposite of the dying of the brightness, but also its warning”—like The Year of Magical Thinking before it, is an iconic book of incisive and electric honesty, haunting and profoundly moving.
©2011 Joan Didion (P)2011 Random House
Play It As It Lays
Summary
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 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.
©1978 Joan Didion, Copyright renewed 1998 Joan Didion, Introduction Copyright 2005 David Thompson (P)2013 Audible, Inc.
Commanding Hope
Summary
From the number one best-selling thought leader: Calling on history, cutting-edge research, complexity science, and even Lord of the Rings, Thomas Homer-Dixon lays out the tools we can command to rescue a world on the brink. For three decades, the renowned author of The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization and The Ingenuity Gap: Can We Solve the Problems of the Future? has examined the threats to our future security - predicting a deteriorating global environment, extreme economic stresses, mass migrations, social instability, and wide political violence if humankind continued on its current course. He was called the Doom Meister, but we now see how prescient he was. Today just about everything we've known and relied on (our natural environment, economy, societies, cultures, and institutions) is changing dramatically - too often for the worse. Without radical new approaches, our planet will become unrecognizable as well as poorer, more violent, more authoritarian. In his fascinating long-awaited new book (dedicated to his young children), he calls on his extraordinary knowledge of complexity science, of how societies work and can evolve, and of our capacity to handle threats, to show that we can shift human civilization onto a decisively new path if we mobilize our minds, spirits, imaginations, and collective values. Commanding Hope marshals a fascinating, accessible argument for reinvigorating our cognitive strengths and belief systems to affect urgent systemic change, strengthen our economies and cultures, and renew our hope in a positive future for everyone on Earth.
©2020 Thomas Homer-Dixon (P)2020 Penguin Random House Canada
South and West
Summary
From the best-selling author of the National Book Award-winning The Year of Magical Thinking: two extended excerpts from her never-before-seen notebooks - writings that offer an illuminating glimpse into the mind and process of a legendary writer. 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. She writes about the stifling heat, the almost viscous pace of life, the sulfurous light, and the preoccupation with race, class, and heritage she finds in the small towns they pass through. And from a different notebook: the "California Notes" that began as an assignment from Rolling Stone on the Patty Hearst trial of 1976. Though Didion never wrote the piece, watching the trial and being in San Francisco triggered thoughts about the city, its social hierarchy, the Hearsts, and her own upbringing in Sacramento. Here, too, is the beginning of her thinking about the West, its landscape, the Western women who were heroic for her, and her own lineage, all of which would appear later in her acclaimed 2003 book Where I Was From. One of Time's most anticipated books of 2017 One of The New York Times Book Review's "What You'll Be Reading in 2017"
©2017 Joan Didion (P)2017 Random House Audio
The Year of Magical Thinking
Summary
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. Written with Didion’s trademark style of cool observation, The Year of Magical Thinking weaves back and forth in time, taking listeners on a poignant journey through heartbreak, grief, and resilience. It’s an unforgettable theatrical experience that resonates with anyone who has ever loved.
©2005 Joan Didion (P)2020 AO Media LLC
The Last Thing He Wanted
Summary
The legendary author of Play It As It Lays and Slouching Towards Bethlehem here trains her eye on the far frontiers of the Monroe Doctrine, where history dissolves into conspiracy (Dallas in 1963, Iran Contra in 1984), and fashions a moral thriller as hypnotic and provocative as any by Joseph Conrad or Graham Greene. In that latter year, 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.
©1996 Joan Didion (P)2013 Audible, Inc.
Salvador
Summary
"Terror is the given of the place." The place is El Salvador in 1982, at the ghastly height of its civil war. The writer is Joan Didion, who delivers an anatomy of that country's particular brand of terror - its mechanisms, rationales, and intimate relation to United States foreign policy. As ash travels from battlefields to body dumps, interviews a puppet president, and considers the distinctly Salvadoran grammar of the verb "to disappear," Didion gives us a book that is germane to any country in which bloodshed has become a standard tool of politics.
©1983 Joan Didion (P)2013 Audible, Inc.
Let Me Tell You What I Mean
Summary
A New York Times best seller From one of our most iconic and influential writers: 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. A Most Anticipated Book of 2021 from Vogue, Time, Bustle, The New York Times, and many more. These 12 pieces from 1968 to 2000, never before gathered together, offer an illuminating glimpse into the mind and process of a legendary figure. They showcase Joan Didion's incisive reporting, her empathetic gaze, and her role as "an articulate witness to the most stubborn and intractable truths of our time" (The New York Times Book Review). Here, Didion touches on topics ranging from newspapers ("the problem is not so much whether one trusts the news as to whether one finds it"), to the fantasy of San Simeon, to not getting into Stanford. In "Why I Write", Didion ponders the act of writing: "I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means." From her admiration for Hemingway's sentences to her acknowledgment that Martha Stewart's story is one "that has historically encouraged women in this country, even as it has threatened men", these essays are acutely and brilliantly observed. Each piece is classic Didion: incisive, bemused, and stunningly prescient.
©2021 Joan Didion (P)2021 Random House Audio
Miami
Summary
C'era una volta il mito della Miami patinata, di una metropoli dalle tinte pastello, evocata dagli spot pubblicitari o dalle corse sulla Ferrari bianca di Miami Vice. Era un miraggio di palme e cocaina, spiagge e grattacieli, che nascondeva una città spettacolarmente depressa in cui il Sud della Florida sembrava trascolorare nella Cuba del Nord. Un avamposto occidentale dei Caraibi che aveva poco a che vedere con New York e Los Angeles, e molto da spartire con Caracas e Bogotá. Miami era una chimera tropicale, ricca di pettegolezzi e povera di memoria. Proprio qui, Fidel Castro trovò il denaro per sconfiggere Batista, e due generazioni di espatriati cubani - terroristi e cospiratori, malviventi e idealisti visionari - cercarono le armi per combatterlo, mescolandosi al mondo cinico e ingannevole dell'intelligence americana. Fu in questa atmosfera rarefatta, in cui le istituzioni democratiche cedevano il passo al disordine sgargiante dell'America Latina, che si intrecciarono molti dei fili della Guerra fredda: dalla Baia dei Porci al Watergate, dalla crisi dei missili del 1961 all'assassinio di John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Joan Didion, fedele alla miglior tradizione del New Journalism americano, si immerge in questo caleidoscopio di sofferenza e vanità, esplorando e narrando in prima persona il mondo degli esuli cubani: un mondo in cui "divergenze di personalità" potevano spiegare qualsiasi cosa, da un semplice battibecco a un colpo di Stato, e in cui il concetto di patria sembrava indivisibile da un senso dell'onore tradito, sempre pronto a esplodere in violenza. Attraverso la scrittura penetrante che l'ha resa un'autrice di culto, autentica icona della letteratura americana, Joan Didion dona sostanza narrativa a un microcosmo in cui si inseguono tutte le lotte e contraddizioni celate sotto la superficie dorata della società americana. E ci consegna il racconto indelebile di una Miami che non sembra una città "ma una fiaba, una storia d'amore ai tropici, una specie di sogno a occhi aperti in cui tutto è possibile".
©2016 Il Saggiatore S.r.l. Tradotto da Teresa Martini (P)2019 Audible Studios
Selected Shorts
Summary
Selected Shorts: Travel Tales presents a collection of travel experiences, including: N.M. Kelby's "Jubilation, Florida", read by Joanne Woodward Max Steele's "The Hat of My Mother", read by Paul Hecht Nadine Gordimer's "The Ultimate Safari", read by Myra Lucretia Taylor Joan Didion's "Goodbye to All That", read by Mia Dillon Jason Brown's "Afternoon of the Sassanoa", read by Bradley Whitford Ring Lardner's "Liberty Hall", read by Christina Pickles Selected Shorts is an award-winning series of classic and contemporary short fiction read by acclaimed actors. The series originates at Peter Norton Symphony Space in New York City. The Selected Shorts radio series is a co-production of Symphony Space and WNYC, New York Public Radio, and is heard on public radio stations nationwide.
©2007 The Symphony Space, Inc. (P)2007 The Symphony Space, Inc.
After Henry
Summary
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. A bracing amalgam of skepticism and sympathy, After Henry is further proof of Joan Didion's infallible radar for the true spirit of our age.
©1992 Joan Didion (P)2013 Audible, Inc.
Democracy
Summary
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. As conceived by Joan Didion, these personages and events constitute the terminal fallout of democracy, a fallout that also includes fact-finding junkets, senatorial groupies, the international arms market, and the Orwellian newspeak of the political class. Moving deftly from Honolulu to Jakarta, between romance, farce, and tragedy, Democracy is a tour de force from a writer who can dissect an entire society with a single phrase.
©1984 Joan Didion (P)2013 Audible, Inc.
Run, River
Summary
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.
©1963 Joan Didion. Copyright renewed 1991 by Joan Didion (P)2013 Audible, Inc.
A Book of Common Prayer
Summary
Writing with the telegraphic swiftness and microscopic sensitivity that have made her one of our most distinguished journalists, Joan Didion creates a shimmering novel of innocence and evil. A Book of Common Prayer is the story of two American women in the derelict Central American nation of Boca Grande. Grace Strasser-Mendana controls much of the country's wealth and knows virtually all of its secrets; Charlotte Douglas knows far too little. "Immaculate of history, innocent of politics," she has come to Boca Grande vaguely and vainly hoping to be reunited with her fugitive daughter. As imagined by Didion, her fate is at once utterly particular and fearfully emblematic of an age of conscienceless authority and unfathomable violence.
©1977 Joan Didion (P)2013 Audible, Inc.
The Gift Inside the Box
Summary
Adam Grant, the best-selling author of Give and Take, teams with his wife, Allison, to share the lighthearted tale of a gift in search of a giver - a classic in the making and the perfect conversation starter about thoughtfulness. This delightful audiobook - one of Amazon's 2019 Holiday Gift Picks and Most Anticipated Books - is designed to start conversations with kids about generosity. In the tradition of Goodnight Gorilla, the words are intentionally spare. The audiobook is meant to be listened to interactively, with adults posing questions so kids can guess what's happening (and why). Praised by both parents and teachers for sparking imagination and eliciting discussion, the story can be interpreted differently in every family, by every child, and reinterpreted many times over. Give the gift of this clever, earnest audiobook about generosity - a new and nourishing fable for every child's library. It's a gift that keeps on giving. "Truly phenomenal...Kristen [Bell]'s favorite book we've read to the kids in a year." (Dax Shepard of the podcast Armchair Expert)
©2019 Adam Grant and Allison Sweet Grant (P)2019 Listening Library