{"product_id":"blue-nights-isbn-9780307267672","title":"Blue Nights","description":"\u003cb\u003eA \u003ci\u003eKirkus Reviews \u003c\/i\u003eBest Nonfiction Book of the Century\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFrom one of our most powerful writers, a work of stunning frankness about losing a daughter. Richly textured with bits of her own childhood and married life with her husband, John Gregory Dunne, and daughter, Quintana Roo, this new book by Joan Didion examines her thoughts, fears, and doubts regarding having children, illness, and growing old.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eBlue Nights\u003c\/i\u003e opens on July 26, 2010, as Didion thinks back to Quintana’s wedding in New York seven years before. \u003ci\u003eToday would be her wedding anniversary.\u003c\/i\u003e This fact triggers vivid snapshots of Quintana’s childhood—in Malibu, in Brentwood, at school in Holmby Hills. Reflecting on her daughter but also on her role as a parent, Didion asks the candid questions any parent might about how she feels she failed either because cues were not taken or perhaps displaced. “How could I have missed what was clearly there to be seen?” Finally, perhaps we all remain unknown to each other. Seamlessly woven in are incidents Didion sees as underscoring her own age, something she finds hard to acknowledge, much less accept.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eBlue Nights\u003c\/i\u003e—the long, light evening hours that signal the summer solstice, “the opposite of the dying of the brightness, but also its warning”—like \u003ci\u003eThe Year of Magical Thinking\u003c\/i\u003e before it, is an iconic book of incisive and electric honesty, haunting and profoundly moving.“A haunting memoir . . . Didion is, to my mind, the best living essayist in America . . . What appears on the surface to be an elegantly, intelligently, deeply felt, precisely written story of the loss of a beloved child is actually an elegantly, intelligently, deeply felt, precisely written glimpse into the abyss, a book that forces us to understand, to admit, that there can be no preparation for tragedy, no protection from it, and so, finally, no consolation . . . The book has . . . an incantatory quality: it is a beautiful, soaring, polyphonic eulogy, a beseeching prayer the is sung even as one knows the answer to one’s plea, and that answer is: No.”\u003cbr\u003e—Cathleen Schine, \u003ci\u003eThe New York Review of Books\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e“\u003ci\u003eBlue Nights\u003c\/i\u003e, though as\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003eelegantly written as one would expect, is rawer than its predecessor, the ‘impenetrable polish’ of former, better days now\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003echipped and scratched. The author as she presents herself here, aging and baffled, is defenseless against the pain of loss, not only the loss of loved ones but the loss that is yet to come: the loss, that is, of selfhood. The book will be another huge success . . . Certainly as a testament of suffering nobly borne, which is what it will be generally taken for, it is exemplary. However, it is most profound, and most provocative, at another level, the level at which\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003ethe author comes fully to realize, and to face squarely, the dismaying fact that against life’s worst onslaughts nothing avails, not even art; especially not art.”\u003cbr\u003e—John Banville, \u003ci\u003eThe New York Times Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\"The marvel of Blue Nights is that its 76-year-old, matchstick-frail author has found the strength to articulate her deepest fears—which are fears we can all relate to.\"\u003cbr\u003e—Heller McAlpin, \u003ci\u003eThe Wasthington Post\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe Week\u003c\/i\u003e magazine's 5 Best Non-Fiction Books of 2011\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“The master of American prose turns her sharp eye on her own family once again in this breathtaking follow-up to \u003ci\u003eThe Year of Magical Thinking\u003c\/i\u003e. With harrowing honesty and mesmerizing style, Didion chronicles the tragic death of her daughter, Quintana, interwoven with memories of their happier days together and Didion’s own meditations on aging.”\u003cbr\u003e—Malcolm Jones and Lucas Wittmann, \u003ci\u003eNewsweek\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e“A searing memoir”\u003cbr\u003e—\u003ci\u003ePeople\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e“Darkly riveting . . . The cumulative effect of watching her finger her recollections like beads on a rosary is unexpectedly instructive. None of us can escape death, but \u003ci\u003eBlue Nights \u003c\/i\u003eshows how Didion has, with the devastating force of her penetrating mind, learned to simply abide.”\u003cbr\u003e—Louisa Kamps,\u003ci\u003e Elle\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A scalpel-sharp memoir of motherhood and loss . . . Now coping with not only grief and regret but also illness and age, Didion is courageous in both her candor and artistry, ensuring that this infinitely sad yet beguiling book of distilled reflections and remembrance is graceful and illuminating in its blue musings.”\u003cbr\u003e—Donna Seaman, \u003ci\u003eBooklist\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Brilliant...Nothing Didion has written since \u003ci\u003ePlay It As It Lays\u003c\/i\u003e seems to me as right and true as \u003ci\u003eBlue Nights\u003c\/i\u003e. Nothing she has written seems as purposeful and urgent to be told.\"\u003cbr\u003e—Joe Woodward, \u003ci\u003eHuffington Post\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“[Didion] often finds captivating, unparalleled grooves. Her expansive thinking…is particularly striking.”\u003cbr\u003e            —\u003ci\u003eThe A. V. Club\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“The reader only senses how intimately she understands her instrument. Her sentences are unquestionably taut, rhythmic and precise.”\u003cbr\u003e                —\u003ci\u003eTime Out NY\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"A searing, incisive look at grief and loss by one of the most celebrated memoirists of our time.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e—Relevant Magazine\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\"Both Fascinating and heartbreaking.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e—Marie Claire\u003c\/i\u003eJOAN DIDION is the author of five novels and ten books of nonfiction, including \u003ci\u003eThe Year of Magical Thinking\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eBlue Nights\u003c\/i\u003e. Her collected nonfiction, \u003ci\u003eWe Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live\u003c\/i\u003e, was published by Everyman's Library in 2006. Born in Sacramento, California, Didion lived in New York City. She died in 2021.\u003ci\u003eIn certain latitudes there comes a span of time approaching and following the summer solstice, some weeks in all, when the twilights turn long and blue. This period of the blue nights does not occur in subtropical California, where I lived for much of the time I will be talking about here and where the end of daylight is fast and lost in the blaze of the dropping sun, but it does occur in New York, where I now live. You notice it first as April ends and May begins, a change in the season, not exactly a warming—in fact not at all a warming—yet suddenly summer seems near, a possibility, even a promise. You pass a window, you walk to Central Park, you find yourself swimming in the color blue: the actual light is blue, and over the course of an hour or so this blue deepens, becomes more intense even as it darkens and fades, approximates finally the blue of the glass on a clear day at Chartres, or that of the Cerenkov radiation thrown off by the fuel rods in the pools of nuclear reactors. The French called this time of day “l’heure bleue.” To the English it was “the gloaming.” The very word “gloaming” reverberates, echoes— the gloaming, the glimmer, the glitter, the glisten, the glamour—carrying in its consonants the images of houses shuttering, gardens darkening, grass-lined rivers slipping through the shadows. During the blue nights you think the end of day will never come. As the blue nights draw to a close (and they will, and they do) you experience an actual chill, an apprehension of illness, at the moment you first notice: the blue light is going, the days are already shortening, the summer is gone. This book is called “Blue Nights” because at the time I began it I found my mind turning increasingly to illness, to the end of promise, the dwindling of the days, the inevitability of the fading, the dying of the brightness.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBlue nights are the opposite of the dying of the brightness, but they are also its warning.\u003c\/i\u003e","brand":"Knopf","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":48232992112869,"sku":"NP9780307267672","price":30.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780307267672.jpg?v=1767722846","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/blue-nights-isbn-9780307267672","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}