num_pages: 168
description: A ruthless dissection of American life in the late 1960s, Joan Didion's Play It as It Lays captures the mood of an entire generation, the ennui of contemporary society reflected in spare prose that blisters and haunts the reader. 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.
language: English
title: Play It As It Lays
titlecomplete: Play It As It Lays
characters: BZ, Maria Wyeth, Carter Lang
genres: Feminism, Literature, 20th Century, Literary Fiction, Womens, Contemporary, American, Novels, Fiction, Classics
ratings_count: 60304
places: Mojave Desert, Las Vegas, Nevada, Los Angeles, California
publisher: Penguin Books