South and West From a Notebook [Paperback]

National Bestseller 

One of the Best Books of the Year: NPR,Harper's Bazaar

Joan Didion has always kept notebooks—of overheard dialogue, interviews, drafts of essays, copies of articles.South and Westgives us two extended excerpts from notebooks she kept in the 1970s; read together, they form a piercing view of the American political and cultural landscape.
 
“Notes on the South” traces a road trip that she and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, took through Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. Her acute observations about the small towns they pass through, her interviews with local figures, and their preoccupation with race, class, and heritage suggest a South largely unchanged today. “California Notes” began as an assignment fromRolling Stoneon the Patty Hearst trial. Though Didion never wrote the piece, the time she spent watching the trial in San Francisco triggered thoughts about the West and her own upbringing in Sacramento. Here we not only see Didion’s signature irony and imagination in play, we’re also granted an illuminating glimpse into her mind and process.

 
 “Vintage Didion. . . . Remind[s] us of her brilliance as a stylist, social commentator and observer.” —The Washington Post

“Elegant, eerily prescient. . . .  At once informal and immediate, magisterial and indelible.” —Elle

“Fascinating. . . . Shine[s] with her trademark ability to capture mood and place.” —The New York Times
 
“In these two pieces, Didion isn’t so much seeing the country as she is x-raying it, cataloging the presenting symptoms of the ailing republic. . . . [This] volume will persist in the memory.” —The Village Voice 

“Reveals the author at her most fascinatingly unfiltered. . . . Captl³-