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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)

Play It As It Lays

Joan Didion

Paperback | Pages: 231 pages

Rating: 3.88 | 27117 Users | 2077 Reviews

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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.

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Title	:	Play It As It Lays
Author	:	Joan Didion
Book Format	:	Paperback
Book Edition	:	Anniversary 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 Based On Books Play It As It Lays

Ratings: 3.88 From 27117 Users | 2077 Reviews

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A beautiful book that you can finish in one sitting. However, don't read this when you are depressed because it can make you more depressed. In fact, it made me stop reading for a while because I felt so sad because I could not shake off from my mind the disheartening scenes in the book. This book that is included in the Time Magazine's 100 Best English Novels from 1923 to 2005. The book is about a 30-year old mother, Maria Wyeth who lives in the 60's America as a struggling actress. She meets

"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

Gambling, domestic violence, sexual abuse, drugs, alcohol, promiscuity, insanity, depression, snakes, suicide. These are all elements of Play It As It Lays, and much, much more. This is stark, wide-eyed, slap in the face prose that grabs the reader and holds you from beginning to end. It's not a pleasant read, no way. Watching Maria Wyeth's life unfold is like watching the proverbial train wreck that you can't look away from. Set in the 1960's, it's about Hollywood and the movie industry; it's

The city burning is Los Angeles's deepest image of itself.Joan Didion, quoted not from Play It As It Lays, but from Vanessa Place's LA MEDUSA, which I happened to read just before this*. Here, L.A. is not in flames but a void. Nothingness lies at the heart of everything and everyone here, chilling even when constrained by ostensibly ordinary events. I read this in a single day, which seems to be the way to go, in and around train rides, industrial voids, an encounter with the police, and a

Oof. The Sheltering Sky meets The Great Gatsby as rewritten by Raymond Carver? Only... even more depressing and bleak than that sounds? Hence the "oof," you know.Normally I just want books about poor, poor rich people to spare me, but this one worked by never losing sight of the fact that these hedonists were constantly digging their own holes.

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

There was silence. Something real was happening: this was, as it were, her life. If she could keep that in mind she would be able to play it through, do the right thing, whatever that meant. Joan DidionWhenever Maria called, it was as if the ringing of the phone heralded the end of any conviviality I might have been harboring. I always had the impression when I talked with her that the Fun to Be Around Maria was dying in another room, and all I was left with was the beautiful corpse. She was