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"Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world." These lines and the William Butler Yeats poem from which they come hold a special fascination for Joan Didion which is reflected in her fictional work. Her protagonists...

Ever since she first appeared on the literary scene in the early 1960s, Joan Didion has been identified as a California writer. Although her heart belongs to the provincial Sacramento of her girlhood, her best-known essays and novels are set in the conte...

Joan Didion told an interviewer in 1992 that she "started out thinking things were pretty coherent. Then I was surprised when they weren't. I decided I better tell people." Didion tells stories of disorder in minimalist novels, lyrical reportage, and per...

Slouching Towards Bethlehem was Joan Didion's second book (following the novel Run River), and immediately established the young writer as one of the finest reporter/essayists of a stellar generation. Only Tom Wolfe and Hunter Thompson could rival her as a prose stylist or a...

The secretary of state's mission to the Middle East is a last-ditch attempt at American engagement in the region. And if it fails? COLIN POWELL'S slow journey eastwards is becoming an exercise in damage limitation. The secretary of state's mission is an...

Vanessa Redgrave is intense _ on stage, screen or living room sofa.It can be intimidating in an interview, but it's the quality Joan Didion sought for the starring role in the Broadway adaptation of "The Year of Magical Thinking," her best-selling memoir of the aftermath...