New Releases by Joan Didion

The iconic writer''s electrifying first novel is a story of marriage, murder and betrayal that only she could tell with such nuance, sympathy, and suspense—from the bestselling, award-winning author of The Year of Magical Thinking and Let Me Tell You What I Mean. 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 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.

"Terror is the given of the place." The place is El Salvador in 1982, at the ghastly height of its civil war. Didion "brings the country to life" (The New York Times), delivering an anatomy of a particular brand of political terror—its mechanisms, rationales, and intimate relation to United States foreign policy. As ash travels from battlefields to body dumps, Didion interviews a puppet president, and considers the distinctly Salvadoran grammar of the verb "to disappear." Here, the bestselling, award-winning author of The Year of Magical Thinking and Let Me Tell You What I Mean gives us a book that is germane to any country in which bloodshed has become a standard tool of politics.

A RICH DISPLAY OF SOME OF THE BEST PROSE WRITTEN TODAY IN THE USA.

Uncorrected proof copy of The white album by Joan Didion, her second collection of essays, following her first, Slouching toward Bethlehem, published in 1968. The white album continues, and expands her first collection of essays in which she chronicled the dissolution of American moral culture in the late 1960s and beyond. Like the Beatles album from which this volume took its title, this collection is now considered something of a classic, with essays that may not have had quite the immediate impact of some of her earlier pieces but which have quietly endured and enjoyed a kind of timelessness.