The Last Thing He Wanted

ISBN-13: 9780679752851 / Angielski / Miękka / 1997 / 240 str.

Joan Didion

Opis

In her first novel in twelve years, the legendary author of Play It As It Lays and Slouching Toward Bethlehem 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 provacative 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one such deal a deal that shortly goes spectacularly wrong that she finds herself on an island where tourism has been superseded by arms dealing, covert action, and assassination.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."

Recenzje

"Gripping ... Didion at her finest." USA Today

"Simultaneously lucid and surreal ... the result is entrancing." The New Yorker

"Remarkable.... Didion has created a menacing world where the reader is held hostage." Los Angeles Times

"Dark detail, understatement and intelligence work their astonishing magic." The New York Times Book Review

O autorze

JOAN DIDION was born in Sacramento in 1934 and graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1956. After graduation, Didion moved to New York and began working for Vogue, which led to her career as a journalist and writer. Didion published her first novel, Run River, in 1963. Didion s other novels include A Book of Common Prayer (1977), Democracy (1984), and The Last Thing He Wanted (1996).
 
Didion s first volume of essays, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, was published in 1968, and her second, The White Album, was published in 1979. Her nonfiction works include Salvador (1983), Miami (1987), After Henry (1992), Political Fictions (2001), Where I Was From (2003), We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live (2006), Blue Nights (2011), South and West (2017) and Let Me Tell You What I Mean (2021). Her memoir The Year of Magical Thinking won the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2005.
 
In 2005, Didion was awarded the American Academy of Arts & Letters Gold Medal in Criticism and Belles Letters. In 2007, she was awarded the National Book Foundation s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. A portion of National Book Foundation citation read: "An incisive observer of American politics and culture for more than forty-five years, Didion s distinctive blend of spare, elegant prose and fierce intelligence has earned her books a place in the canon of American literature as well as the admiration of generations of writers and journalists. In 2013, she was awarded a National Medal of Arts and Humanities by President Barack Obama, and the PEN Center USA s Lifetime Achievement Award.

Didion said of her writing: "I write entirely to find out what I m thinking, what I m looking at, what I see and what it means. She died in December 2021.