Play It As It Lays A Novel

<p><b>A ruthless dissection of American life in the late 1960s, Joan Didion's <i>Play It as It Lays</i> captures the mood of an entire generation, the ennui of contemporary society reflected in spare prose that blisters and haunts the reader. </b><br><br>Set in a place beyond good and evil---literally in Hollywood, Las Vegas, and the barren wastes of the Mojave Desert, but figuratively in the landscape of an arid soul---it remains more than three decades after its original publication a profoundly disturbing novel, riveting in its exploration of a woman and a society in crisis and stunning in the still-startling intensity of its prose.</p>