Blue Nights
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Rumpus Exclusive: Three Excerpts from AFTERWORDS
Three exclusive excerpts from …AFTERWORDS, a new series of distinctive commentaries on great works of contemporary literature from our friends at Fiction Advocate!
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Clothing and Loss
In the fashion world, understanding the zeitgeist is a way of orienting oneself within a temporal framework. And it’s in this way that style is woven so memorably through Didion’s writing. What someone is wearing betrays not just the aesthetic…
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Joan Didion Film
A film on Joan Didion is being created by her nephew, actor and director Chris Dunne. In a clip from the film—which Dunne describes as an “audiobook for the eyes”—the author reads from Blue Nights.
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Joan Didion On Blue Nights
“What she has written instead is a kind of biography of Joan Didion, and an elusive one at that. Like her novels, it’s more a work of accumulation than of argument, at the end of which Quintana the grown-up remains…
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With Every New Edition, A New Schema of Labeling
With the fifth edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) due for publication in May 2013, the classification of mental disorders and the categorization of psychiatric definitions is yet again being reviewed, revised,…
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Didion and Diagnoses
“Diagnosis never seems to lead to a cure, Didion observes, only an enforced debility. But as with a psychiatric evaluation of herself conducted in 1968 […] Didion sees and reflects on the truths of the assessment even as she ponders…