DIDION, Joan. Play It As It Lays.

DIDION, Joan. Play It As It Lays. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. 1971 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 pain and pleasure, she has reached the 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