Joan Didion's 'Play It as It Lays' is the third most popular L.A. book among writers surveyed by The Times. David L. Ulin explains why her fiction matters.
L.A.'s 16 essential works of literary fiction, from 'The Day of the Locust' to 'If He Hollers Let Him Go,' 'Play it as it Lays' to 'Interior Chinatown.'
Babitz was Los Angeles’s defiant booster, while Didion gave fodder to naysayers’ suspicion but the two late writers’ bodies of work beg to be taken in tandem
Joan Didion, who died Thursday at 87, produced decades’ worth of memorable work across genres and subjects: personal essays, reporting and criticism on pop culture, political dispatches from at home