Joan Didion

Slouching Towards Bethlehem

CA$160

Introduced By Hilton Als

Joan Didion’s visceral view of 1960s America is told in her first collection of journalism, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, presented in a new edition by Folio. Introduction and image selection by Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Hilton Als.

CA$160

Book Details

Presentation Box & BindingBound in blocked textured paper printed with a portrait of Joan Didion by Don Bachardy
Plain slipcase
Ribbon marker

Dimensions8¾ inches x 5½ inches 

FontSet in Kennerley with Windsor as display

Pages280 pages

AuthorJoan Didion

Illustration18 pages of illustrations

Publication Date07/05/2024

Editor's Notes

Slouching Towards Bethlehem is Joan Didion's seminal essay collection in which she narrates the political and social climate of 1960s America through the unique lens that would soon establish her as a supreme chronicler of American life. In 20 crackingly sharp essays, Didion addresses the beauty, ugliness and fragility of the decade: the slippage of the Californian Dream; the hippy counterculture of Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco; the recent case of a California suburban housewife who, one night when they ran out of milk, set fire to her husband; a Las Vegas wedding chapel; a millionaire bunkered in his mansion, and a handful of personal pieces including musings about returning home to Sacramento for a family visit and a beautiful elegy for her younger self on first going to live in New York.

ABOUT THE PHOTOGRAPHY

A Political Portrait in Personal Prose

Pulitzer Prize-winning critic and art curator, Hilton Als, has selected unusual, unexpected and inspiring images that present a wonderful portrait of Didion and her times. Images include photography by Richard Avedon, Diane Arbus and Garry Winogrand, as well as paintings, watercolours and photos of Didion herself. Hilton Als has also contributed an introductory essay on Didion's work and a new foreword in which he writes about how he brought together words and images to create this unique edition.

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ABOUT THE PHOTOGRAPHY

A Political Portrait in Personal Prose

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ABOUT THE PHOTOGRAPHY

A Political Portrait in Personal Prose

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ABOUT THE PHOTOGRAPHY

A Political Portrait in Personal Prose

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Contents

Part I: Life Styles in the Golden Land

Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream
John Wayne: A Love Song
Where the Kissing Never Stops
Comrade Laski, C.P.U.S.A. (M.-L.)
7000 Romaine, Los Angeles 38
California Dreaming
Marrying Absurd
Slouching Towards Bethlehem

Part II: Personals

On Keeping a Notebook
On Self-Respect
I Can’t Get That Monster Out of My Mind
On Morality
On Going Home

Part III: Seven Places of the Mind

Notes from a Native Daughter
Letter from Paradise, 21° 19ʹ N., 157° 52ʹ W.
Rock of Ages
The Seacoast of Despair
Guaymas, Sonora
Los Angeles Notebook
Goodbye to All That

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Joan Didion (1934–2021) was an American novelist, essayist and journalist whose career began at Vogue in the 1950s and who became internationally renowned for investigating the dark, dangerous currents of the 1960s counterculture, in magazine pieces collected as Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album. Later she wrote about other subjects, including Latin America and American politics, as well as an acclaimed memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking; her novels, too, are classics of modern American fiction, particularly Play As it Lays. Among many other honours, Didion was presented with the National Humanities Medal by President Obama and she received a Lifetime Achievement Award from PEN.

Hilton Als is a Pulitzer Prize-winning staff writer and theatre critic for the New Yorker. He has curated numerous exhibitions, teaches at Berkeley and Columbia universities, and is a former staff writer for the Village Voice as well as a contributor to many other publications, including the New York Review of Books. Als’s own books include White Girls (which was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award) (2013) and, most recently, My Pinup: A Paean to Prince (2022). Long associated with Joan Didion, he curated the Didion exhibition at the Hammer Museum in LA and has written extensively about her.

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