Alibi Bookshop Joan Didion August Book Club: South and West
Schedule
Wed, 23 Aug, 2023 at 07:00 pm
Location
Alibi Bookshop - Vallejo, CA | Vallejo, CA
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Please join us for the August meeting of The Joan Didion Book Club: "South and West." NOTE: Due to August Summer Nights in downtown Vallejo every Thursday night in August, our Book Clubs will be on Wednesdays!Joan Didion, the bestselling, award-winning author of The Year of Magical Thinking and Let Me Tell You What I Mean, has always kept notebooks—of overheard dialogue, interviews, drafts of essays, copies of articles. Here are two extended excerpts from notebooks she kept in the 1970s; read together, they form a piercing view of the American political and cultural landscape.
“Notes on the South” traces a road trip that she and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, took through Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. Her acute observations about the small towns they pass through, her interviews with local figures, and their preoccupation with race, class, and heritage suggest a South largely unchanged today.
“California Notes” began as an assignment from Rolling Stone on the Patty Hearst trial. Though Didion never wrote the piece, the time she spent watching the trial in San Francisco triggered thoughts about the West and her own upbringing in Sacramento. Here we not only see Didion’s signature irony and imagination in play, we’re also granted an illuminating glimpse into her mind and process.
“One of contemporary literature’s most revered essayists revives her raw records from a 1970s road trip across the American southwest … her acute observations of the country’s culture and history feel particularly resonant today.” —Harper’s Bazaar
"Didion’s notes, which surpass in elegance and clarity the finished prose of most other writers, are a fascinating record of this time. But they are also something more unsettling. Readers today will recognize, with some dismay and even horror, how much is familiar in these long-lost American portraits. Didion saw her era more clearly than anyone else, which is another way of saying that she was able to see the future." -- New York Review of Books
"Vintage Didion. . . . Remind[s] us of her brilliance as a stylist, social commentator and observer." -- The Washington Post
Books available in the shop and online: bookshop.org/shop/alibibookshop and audio: libro.fm/alibibookshop
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Where is it happening?
Alibi Bookshop - Vallejo, CA, 624 Marin St,Vallejo,CA,United StatesEvent Location & Nearby Stays:
