DIDION, Joan. Play It As It Lays. 8vo. Original pink cloth lettered in gilt to the spine, in the dust-jacket designed by Janet Halverson, priced 30s net to the front flap; [8], 214, [2]; a little softened to spine tips, gilt lettering a touch rubbed (probably in production), a few light spots to upper edge; wrapper a little faded to spine and with light rubbing and curling to edges; a near fine copy in very good wrapper.
An attractive copy of the uncommon first UK printing of Joan Didion's coolly devastating portrait of late-1960s Los Angeles.
Somewhere beyond Hollywood, Maria Wyeth drifts through a landscape of freeways, failed relationships, and emotional exhaustion. Divorced, isolated, and increasingly anaesthetised to both pain and pleasure, she has reached a point at which desire itself begins to disappear. Spare, unsettling, and exact, Play It as It Lays captures the moral vacancy, illusory glamour, and emotional dislocation of late-1960s Los Angeles with great precision, securing its place among the defining American novels of the post-war period. Time included the novel in its list of the hundred greatest English-language novels published between 1923 and 2005.
SKU: 2125746