David L. Ulin (Editor)
Joan Didion: The 1980s & 90s
(Library of America, April 2021)
Library of America continues its definitive edition of one of the most electric writers of our time with a volume gathering her iconic reporting and novels from mid-career
This second volume in Library of America’s definitive Didion edition includes two novels and three remarkable essay collections with which she extended the compass of the extraordinary journalistic eye first developed in the celebrated books Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album. Gather here are Salvador, a searing look at terror and Cold War politics in the Central American civil war of the early 1980s; Miami, a portrait not just of a city but of immigration, exile, the cocaine trade, and political violence; and After Henry, in which she reports on Patty Hearst, Nancy Reagan, the case of the Central Park Five, and the Los Angeles she once called home. The novels Democracy and The Last Thing He Wanted, the latter recently adapted for film by Netflix, are fast-paced, deftly observed narratives of power, conspiracy, and corruption in American political life. Taken together, these five books mark the remarkable mid-career evolution of one of the most dynamic writers of our time.
David L. Ulin is the former Book Critic for the Los Angeles Times. A 2015 Guggenheim Fellow, his other books include: The Lost Art of Reading; Sidewalking: Coming to Terms with Los Angeles, shortlisted for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay; Labyrinth; and The Myth of Solid Ground: Earthquakes, Prediction, and the Fault Line Between Reason and Faith, which was selected as a best book of the year by the Chicago Tribune and the San Francisco Chronicle. He is also the editor of three anthologies, and his writing has appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, The New York Times, Bookforum, The Paris Review, Zyzzyva, and on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered.