title: We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live: Collected Nonfiction (Everyman's Library)
author:  Joan Didion 
description: [Didions is] one of the most recognizableand brilliantliterary styles to emerge in America during the past four decades . . . [She is] a great American writer. <br /><i>New York Times Book Review</i><br /><br />One beautiful sentence follows another . . . Didion has remained a clearheaded and original writer all her long life. <br /><i>Newsweek</i><br /><br />Her intelligence is as honed as ever . . . Her vision is ice-water clear . . . Didion has captured the mood of America. <br /><i>New York Times</i><br /><br />Many of us have tried, and failed, to master [Didions] gift for the single ordinary deflating word, the word that spins an otherwise flat sentence through five degrees of irony. But her sentences could only be hers. <br /><i>Chicago Tribune</i><br /><br />I have been trying forever to figure out why [Didions] sentences are better than mine or yours . . . Something about [their] cadence. They come at you, if not from ambush, then in gnomic haikus, ice pick laser beams, or waves. Even the space on the page around these sentences is more interesting than it ought to be, as if to square a sandbox for a Sphinx.<br />from the Introduction by John Leonard
zlib_text: Acclaim for JOAN DIDION’s
  
  The Last Thing He Wanted
  
  > > “A moral thriller on the order of one of Graham Greene’s.”
  
  > > —Los Angeles Times
  
  > > “She is of that small group of great living writers whom readers can be
  > said to love.”
  
  > > —New York magazine
  
  > > “Stunning…. It is a meditation on power and memory, on truth and
  > consequences, and on the heartbreaking need for a magic equation that will
  > make sense of our confusing world.”
  
  > > —Seattle Post-Intelligencer
  
  > > “Even nonfans will have a hard time letting go of The Last Thing He Wanted
  > until they’ve raced through to the last page.”
  
  > > —Newsweek
  
  > > “She writes taut and sharp. Her disquieting novels are short but never
  > light. And they are all too few and far between.”
  
  > > —St. Louis Post-Dispatch
  
  > > “The marvelous gifts of observation and rendering that make her nonfiction
  > so telling and alive are working in this book.”
  
  > > —Minneapolis Star Tribune
  
  > > “Didion is one of our true stylists. Her sentences have 