This is another one of those historical books that could have resulted from a Wikipedia dive, this one's arguably based on a real historical event but with a non-real non-historical protagonist .

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Did you know the towering career of Joan Didion included several novels, many of which were driven by the same acerbic wit and insight that helped to anoint her as an essential voice in the New Journalism movement? Her second novel, Play It As It Lays, traffics in much of the same Hollywood/Los Angeles social destruction that powered her essays, but instead focuses in on the maddening, maddened Maria Wyeth - an actress whose star is waning with the gravitational force of a black hole.

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Booth Tarkington is one of only four authors to have won a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction twice, and he’s the only one of those four authors who nobody has ever heard of. His aggressively old-fashioned views and his stories’ general fluffiness have helped keep him from enduring fame, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a spark of something here.

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Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.

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See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.