Not to be confused with Legal fiction

Plato

More

Kochanowski

Cervantes

Swift

Voltaire

Niemcewicz

Dickens

Turgenev

Tolstoy

Bellamy

Prus

Political fiction is a subgenre of fiction that deals with political affairs. Political fiction has often used narrative to provide commentary on political events, systems and theories. Works of political fiction often "directly criticize an existing society or... present an alternative, sometimes fantastic, reality."^[1]

Prominent pieces of political fiction have included the totalitarian dystopias of the early 20th century such as Jack London's The Iron Heel and Sinclair Lewis's It Can't Happen Here. Equally influential, if not more so, however, have been earlier pieces of political fiction such as Gulliver's Travels (1726), Candide (1759) and Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852). Political fiction frequently employs the literary modes of satire, often in the genres of Utopian and dystopian fiction or social science fiction.

Notable Examples[link]

This is a list of a few of the early or notable examples; others belong on the main list

• The Republic (ca. 360 BCE) by Plato
• Panchatantra (ca. 200 BCE) by Vishnu Sarma
• Utopia (1516) by Thomas More
• The Dismissal of the Greek Envoys (1578) by Jan Kochanowski
• Don Quixote (1605) by Miguel de Cervantes
• Simplicius Simplicissimus (1668) by Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen
• The Pilgrim's Progress (1678) by John Bunyan
• Persian Letters (1721) by Montesquieu
• Gulliver's Travels (1726) by Jonathan Swift
• Candide (1759) by Voltaire
• The History and Adventures of an Atom (1769) by Tobias Smollett
• Fables and Parables (1779) by Ignacy Krasicki
• The Return of the Deputy (1790) by Julian Ursyn Niemcewicz
• The Partisan Leader (1836) by Nathaniel Beverley Tucker
• Barnaby Rudge (1841) by Charles Dickens
• The Betrothed (1842) by Alessandro Manzoni
• Coningsby (novel) (1844) by Benjamin Disraeli
• Sybil, or The Two Nations (1845) by Benjamin Disraeli
• Tancred (1847) by Benjamin Disraeli
• Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) by Harriet Beecher Stowe
• A Tale of Two Cities (1859) by Charles Dickens
• Fathers and Sons (1862) by Ivan Turgenev
• The Palliser novels (1864–1879) by Anthony Trollope
• War and Peace (1869) by Leo Tolstoy
• Demons, also known as The Possessed or The Devils (1872), by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
• The Gilded Age (1876) by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner
• Democracy: An American Novel (1880) by Henry Adams
• The Princess Casamassima (1886) by Henry James
• The Bostonians (1886) by Henry James
• Looking Backward (1888) by Edward Bellamy
• Pharaoh (1895) by Bolesław Prus
• Nostromo (1904) by Joseph Conrad
• The Jungle (1906) by Upton Sinclair
• The Iron Heel (1908) by Jack London
• Under Western Eyes (1911) by Joseph Conrad
• The Trial (1925) by Franz Kafka
• The Castle (1926) by Franz Kafka
• Brave New World (1932) by Aldous Huxley
• Animal Farm: A Fairy Story (1945) by George Orwell
• Walden Two (1948) by B. F. Skinner
• Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) by George Orwell
• Dark Green, Bright Red (1950) by Gore Vidal
• The Quiet American (1955) by Graham Greene
• Atlas Shrugged (1957) by Ayn Rand
• The Manchurian Candidate (1959) by Richard Condon
• The Comedians (1966) by Graham Greene
• Cancer Ward (1967) by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
• Washington, D.C. (1967) by Gore Vidal
• Burr (1973) by Gore Vidal
• The Chocolate War (1974) by Robert Cormier
• Guerrillas (1975) by V. S. Naipaul
• 1876 (1976) by Gore Vidal
• Vineland (1990) by Thomas Pynchon

Science fiction[link]

• Starship Troopers (1959) by Robert A. Heinlein
• The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia (1974) by Ursula K. Le Guin
• The Mars trilogy (1990s) by Kim Stanley Robinson

See also[link]

• Politics in fiction

Notes[link]

http://map2487.blogspot.com/2010/09/political-novel.html

Half-Pint stands for:

Measurement[link]

• half-pint, a unit of measure of volume, specifically a part of a pint.

Persons[link]

• Half Pint, the stage name of the Jamaican reggae singer Lindon Roberts.
• "Half-Pint", the affectionate nickname of the character Le Van Hawke, age 12, portrayed by the American (U.S.A.) boy actor Roland Harrah III in 2 episodes of the television series Airwolf.
• "Half-Pint", the affectionate nickname of the character Laura Ingalls Wilder, portrayed by the American (U.S.A.) girl actor Melissa Gilbert in the television series Little House on the Prairie.
• Half-Pint, the stage name of Cassandra Jackson, female rapper in the hip-hop band Son of Bazerk.

Slang[link]

• "half-pint" or "half pint", a small or short person; usually referring to a child. I.e. runt, squirt, pewee.

Most commonly used in an endearing/ familiar sense.

This disambiguation page lists articles associated with the same title. If an internal link led you here, you may wish to change the link to point directly to the intended article.

Edwina Currie
Currie in 2009
Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Health
In office 18 September 1986 – 20 December 1988
Prime Minister	Margaret Thatcher
Member of Parliament for South Derbyshire
In office 9 June 1983 – 1 May 1997
Preceded by	Constituency Created
Succeeded by	Mark Todd
Personal details
Born	(1946-10-13) 13 October 1946 (age 65) Liverpool, Lancashire, England
Political party	Conservative
Spouse(s)	Ray Currie (div. 1997) John Jones (m. 2001)
Children	2
Residence	Chinley, Derbyshire
Religion	Judaism

Edwina Jones (born 13 October 1946), born Edwina Cohen and commonly known by her first married name, Edwina Currie, is a former British Member of Parliament. First elected as a Conservative Party MP in 1983, she was a Junior Health Minister for two years, before resigning in 1988 over the controversy over salmonella in eggs. By the time Currie lost her seat in 1997, she had begun a new career as a novelist and broadcaster.

Early life[link]

Currie was born in South Liverpool, England to an Orthodox Jewish family and has identified herself as Jewish, although she has stated: "I find religious mumbo jumbo hard to swallow in any faith."^[1] A pupil at Liverpool Institute High School for Girls, Liverpool's Historic Canning area, she studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics at St Anne's College, Oxford University where she was taught by Gabriele Taylor; subsequently, she gained a MA in economic history from the London School of Economics.

Member of Parliament[link]

From 1975 until 1986, she was a Birmingham City Councillor for Northfield. In 1983, she stood for parliament as a Conservative Party candidate, and was elected as the member for South Derbyshire. Frequently outspoken, she was described as "a virtually permanent fixture on the nation's TV screen saying something outrageous about just about anything" and "the most outspoken and sexually interested woman of her political generation."^[2]

In September 1986, she became a Junior Health Minister. Among her comments over the next two years were - despite not being religious - that "good Christian people" don't get AIDS,^[3] that old people who couldn't afford their heating bills should wrap up warm in winter, and that northerners die of "ignorance and chips".^[4]

Currie was forced to resign in December 1988 after she issued a warning about salmonella in British eggs. The statement that "most of the egg production in this country, sadly, is now affected with salmonella"^[5] sparked outrage among farmers and egg producers, and caused egg sales in the country to rapidly decline.^[6] Although the statement was widely interpreted as referring to "most eggs produced", in fact it related to the egg production flock; there was indeed evidence that a mid-1980s regulation change had allowed salmonella to get a hold in flocks.^[7] There was particular anger in Northern Ireland where egg production is a significant part of the economy. At the Christmas party of the Industrial Development Board for Northern Ireland that year the featured dish was curried eggs. To make amends, in 1990, she began the National Egg Awareness Campaign. The controversy gained her the nickname 'Eggwina'. Long after the furore died down, in 2001, it was revealed that a covered up Whitehall report produced months after Currie's resignation found that there had been a "salmonella epidemic of considerable proportions".^[8]

In 1991, she was the first Conservative MP to appear on the BBC topical panel show Have I Got News For You. Currie appeared again two years later, in a special episode commemorating the release of Margaret Thatcher's memoirs, opposite fellow Liverpudlian (and Liverpool Institute alumnus) Derek Hatton.

During the 1992 General Election campaign, Currie poured a glass of orange juice over Labour's Peter Snape shortly after an edition of the Midlands based television debate show Central Weekend had finished airing.^[9] Speaking about the incident later, Currie said "I just looked at my orange juice, and looked at this man from which this stream of abuse was emanating, and thought 'I know how to shut you up.' "^[9] Snape subsequently won £15,000 after Currie "falsely suggested in her memoirs that it happened after Snape had been 'drinking vodka in a club with cronies'."^[10]

After the 1992 General Election, she declined a request from prime minister John Major to take up a position as Minister of State for the Home Office.^[11]

In February 1994, she tabled an amendment to the Criminal Justice and Public Order Bill to lower the age of consent for male homosexual sexual acts to 16. This amendment was defeated by 307 votes to 280, although a subsequent amendment resulted in the reduction of the homosexual age of consent from 21 to 18; final equalisation was achieved in 2000. Currie voted in favour of the Death penalty for murder in 1983, but against it in 1994.

In June 1994, she contested the European Parliament seat of Bedfordshire and Milton Keynes, but lost the seat to Labour's Eryl McNally by 94,837 votes to 61,628 votes.

Currie lost her parliamentary seat in the 1997 General Election. For five years (1998–2003), she hosted a late-evening talk show on BBC Radio Five Live, Late Night Currie.

In October 2011, Currie took part in EurVoice, an event supported by the European Youth Parliament United Kingdom.^[12]

Other works[link]

Author[link]

Currie is the author of six novels: A Parliamentary Affair (1994), A Woman's Place (1996) She's Leaving Home (1997), The Ambassador (1999), Chasing Men (2000) and This Honourable House (2001). She has also written four works of non-fiction: Life Lines (1989), What Women Want (1990), Three Line Quips (1992) and Diaries 1987–92 (2002). She remains an outspoken public figure, with a reputation for being "highly opinionated",^[6] and currently earns her living as an author and media personality.

Media[link]

From the time she lost her seat in 1997, Currie has maintained a presence in the media. For five years an eponymous phone-in programme ran on BBC Radio Five Live, Late Night Currie.^[13] In 2002 she moved to HTV, presenting the television programme Currie Night until 2003. Since then, she has appeared in a string of reality television programmes, such as Wife Swap in which she and her second husband John swapped places with John McCririck and his wife, Jenny. She has also appeared in the reality cooking show Hell's Kitchen with celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay, and Celebrity Stars in Their Eyes, both in 2006.^[14] Currie was interviewed about the rise of Thatcherism for the 2006 BBC TV documentary series Tory! Tory! Tory!. She won Celebrity Mastermind on 23 June 2004, specialising in the life of Marie Curie. She also won All Star Family Fortunes on 3 January 2009. She appeared in Channel 4's Come Dine With Me in February 2009 where she finished third. She made a second appearance on the show during Channel 4's "Alternative Election Night" coverage, with Rod Liddle, Brian Paddick and Derek Hatton as her competitors. She also appeared in James May's Show James May's Toy Stories where she helped him build a bridge made entirely out of Meccano in Liverpool.

[edit] Strictly Come Dancing

On 6 September 2011 it was announced that Currie would take part in the 2011 series of Strictly Come Dancing.^[15] On 10 September 2011 it was announced she would be dancing with Vincent Simone. She was the first dancer to be eliminated from the competition on 9 October 2011.

Personal life[link]

In 1972, Edwina Cohen married accountant Ray Currie in Barnstaple; they had two children and divorced in 1997. During this marriage Edwina Currie had the four-year affair with John Major, later Prime Minister, which she revealed in 2002. On 24 May 2001, in Southwark, she married retired detective John Jones whom she had met when he was a guest on her radio programme in 1999.^[16] Currie currently lives in Whaley Bridge, Derbyshire.^{[citation needed]}

Affair with John Major[link]

Currie's Diaries (1987–92), published in 2002, caused a sensation, as they revealed a four-year affair with John Major between 1984 and 1988 while both were married to other people. The affair started while she was a backbencher and Major was the government whip in Margaret Thatcher's government. After Major's promotion to Chief Secretary to the Treasury, the relationship ended, but the two remained friends. Currie apparently ceased the affair when it became dangerous and impractical owing to the presence of bodyguards who had to be avoided.^[11]

After publication, John Major made a statement saying that he was ashamed of the affair and had privately revealed the matter to his wife. Currie admitted to having been in love with him for years after the end of the affair,^[17] and that he had been "the love of her life".^[18] However, only weeks after revealing the affair, she publicly criticised Major, accusing him of sexism and racism and of being "one of the less competent prime ministers".^[19]

The admission came after years of denial of any affair while in office and a successful libel action against playwright David Hare, who had said a sexually voracious murderer played by Charlotte Rampling in his film Paris by Night (1988) was an "Edwina Currie-like" figure. Currie had also produced several novels with explicitly erotic content - and political background - such as A Parliamentary Affair.^[6] Following publication of her diaries, Express Newspapers lawyers re-examined documents in a libel case to see if there was anything in the diaries which would allow them to reopen the case and recoup damages.^[20] In March 2000, Currie had been awarded £30,000 against them following a 1997 article entitled "How Edwina is now the vilest lady in Britain".^[20][21]

In October 1985, Currie had spoken harshly of Sara Keays, who had had an affair with Cecil Parkinson, calling her a "right cow"^[22] for writing about the affair and her consequent pregnancy and, she claimed, ruining Parkinson's career. She had gone on to say, "I feel very, very sorry for Cecil and his family. Most of my thoughts on Sara Keays are unprintable."^[23] In 1993, one of the key campaign slogans of John Major's time as Prime Minister, 'Back to Basics', had been widely seen as a call for a return to traditional values in sexual morality as well as in education, law and order.

Charity[link]

In 2004 she took part in a sponsored cycle ride across Poland, near to the area where ancestors of hers lived, for Marie Curie Cancer Care.^[24]

In 2005 in her role as a patron of the British Heart Foundation she championed a campaign to raise awareness of the effect of heart disease on women.^[25]

In May 2007 the patient charity MRSA Action UK announced Currie as their patron.^[26] Edwina Currie was quoted by the media championing the campaign against hospital superbugs.^[27]

In November 2011 she accepted the position of President of the Tideswell Male voice Choir.^[28]

Discography[link]

As part of the 2009 TV Show Ant & Dec's Saturday Night Takeaway, Currie teamed up with Declan Donnelly and two other celebrities to release a cover version of the Wham hit song, "Wake Me Up (Before You Go Go)". Her daughter, Debbie, had previously released a single.

References[link]

External links[link]

• Official website
• Hansard 1803–2005: contributions in Parliament by Edwina Currie
• Extracts from her diaries
• Centre for Advancement of Women in Politics: biography
• Major and Currie had four-year affair, BBC News Online, 28 September 2002
• Edwina Currie at the Internet Movie Database

Joan Didion
Didion at the 2008 Brooklyn Book Festival
Born	(1934-12-05) December 5, 1934 (age 77) Sacramento, California
Occupation	Novelist, Memoirist, Essayist
Nationality	American
Period	1963–present
Subjects	Memoir, Drama
Notable work(s)	Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968) The Year of Magical Thinking (2005)
Spouse(s)	John Gregory Dunne (m.1964-2003; his death)

Joan Didion (born December 5, 1934) is an American author best known for her novels and her literary journalism. Her novels and essays explore the disintegration of American morals and cultural chaos, where the overriding theme is individual and social fragmentation. A sense of anxiety or dread permeates much of her work.^[1]

Childhood and education[link]

Joan Didion was born in Sacramento, to parents Frank Reese and Eduene (née Jerrett) Didion. Didion recalls writing things down as early as age five, though she claims that she never saw herself as a writer until after being published. She read everything she could get her hands on after learning how to read and even needed written permission from her mother to borrow adult books, biographies especially, from the library at a young age. With this, she identified herself as being a "shy, bookish child", who pushed herself to overcome these personal obstacles through acting and public speaking.^[2]

As a child, Didion attended kindergarten and first grade. Because her father was in the Army Air Corps during World War II, her family was constantly relocated and she did not attend school on a regular basis. Then, at the age of nine or ten,^{[Which one?]} in 1943 or early 1944, her family settled back in Sacramento, and her father went to Detroit to settle defense contracts for World War I and II. Didion wrote, in her 2003 memoir Where I Was From,^[2] that moving as often as her family did made her feel like a perpetual outsider.

In 1956, Didion graduated from the University of California, Berkeley with a Bachelor of Arts in English. During her senior year, she won first place in an essay contest sponsored by Vogue, with the prize of a job at the magazine.

Adult life[link]

Professional life[link]

For two years at Vogue, Didion worked her way up from promotional copywriter to associate feature editor. While there, she wrote her first novel, Run, River, which was published in 1963. She returned to California with her new husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, and in 1968, published Slouching Towards Bethlehem, her first work of non-fiction, a collection of magazine pieces about her experiences in California.^[3]

In 1979, she published The White Album, another collection of magazine pieces from Life, Esquire, The Saturday Evening Post, The New York Times, and The New York Review of Books.

Play It As It Lays, set in Hollywood, was published in 1970 and A Book of Common Prayer was published in 1977. Her 1983 essay, Salvador, was written after a two-week long trip to El Salvador with her husband. She also wrote Democracy in 1984 which deals with her concern for the loss of society's traditional values. Her 1987 nonfiction book, Miami, looked at the Cuban expatriate community in Miami. In 1992, she published After Henry, a collection of twelve geographical essays. In 1996, she published The Last Thing He Wanted, a romantic thriller.

Dunne and Didion worked closely together for most of their careers, and indeed much of their writing is intertwined. With Dunne, Didion co-wrote a number of screenplays, including an adaptation of her novel Play It As It Lays. She and Dunne also spent eight years adapting the biography of journalist Jessica Savitch into the film Up Close & Personal.

Didion began writing The Year of Magical Thinking, a narrative of her response to the death of her husband and severe illness of their daughter, Quintana, on October 4, 2004, and finished the manuscript 88 days later on New Year's Eve.^[4] She went on a book tour following the release of this memoir, doing many readings and interviews to promote it. She has said that she found the process very "therapeutic" during her period of mourning.^[5]

In 2006, Everyman's Library published We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live, a compendium of much of Didion's writing, including the full content of her first seven published nonfiction books Slouching Towards Bethlehem, The White Album, Salvador, Miami, After Henry, Political Fictions, and Where I Was From, with an introduction by her contemporary, the noted critic John Leonard.

In 2007, she began working on a one-woman adaptation of The Year of Magical Thinking. Produced by Scott Rudin, this Broadway play featured Vanessa Redgrave. Although at first she was hesitant about the idea of writing a play, she has since found this new genre to be quite exciting.^[5]

Didion wrote early drafts of the screen play for an HBO biopic directed by Robert Benton on the famous newspaper dame Katharine Graham. It currently remains untitled. Sources say it may trace Graham's paper, The Washington Post, in its dogged reportage on the Watergate scandal which led to President Richard Nixon's resignation.^[6] However, Didion is no longer working on that project.^[7]

In 2011, Knopf published Blue Nights, a memoir about aging.^[8] The book focuses on Didion's daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne, who died just before her previous memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking, was published. It addresses their relationship with “stunning frankness.” More generally, the book speaks to the anxieties Didion experienced about having and raising a child, and also about the aging process.^[9][10]

Personal life[link]

While in New York and working at Vogue, Didion met her future husband of almost forty years, John Gregory Dunne, who at the time was writing for Time Magazine. The couple married in 1964 and moved to Los Angeles, California, soon after, with intentions of staying only temporarily. California ultimately became their home for the next twenty years.

In the title essay of The White Album, Didion documents a nervous breakdown she experienced in the summer of 1968. After undergoing a psychiatric evaluation, she is diagnosed as having had an attack of vertigo and nausea.

In 1979, Didion was living in Brentwood Park, California, a quiet, residential suburb of Los Angeles. Before her move to Brentwood she lived in the Hollywood/Los Feliz area on Franklin Ave, one block north of Hollywood Blvd. ^[11]

Two tragedies struck Didion in less than two years' time. On December 30, 2003, while their daughter Quintana Roo Dunne lay comatose in the ICU with septic shock resulting from pneumonia, her husband suffered a fatal heart attack while at the dinner table. Didion put off his funeral arrangements for approximately a month until Quintana was well enough to attend the service. Visiting Los Angeles after her father's funeral, Quintana suffered a massive hematoma. She required six hours of brain surgery at UCLA Medical Center.^[4] Quintana died of acute pancreatitis on August 26, 2005, during Didion's New York promotion for The Year of Magical Thinking. She was thirty-nine.^[5]

As of 2005, Didion was living in an apartment on East 71st Street in New York City.^[4]

Didion as a writer[link]

New Journalism[link]

New Journalism seeks to communicate facts through narrative storytelling and literary techniques. This style is also described as creative nonfiction, intimate journalism, or literary nonfiction. Tom Wolfe, author of The New Journalism (1974), popularized this style and pointed to the fact that "it is possible to write journalism that would ... read like a novel."^[12] New Journalist writers tend to turn away from “just the facts” and focus more upon the dialogue of the situation and the scenarios that the author may have experienced. The style gives the author more creative freedom and blends elements of fiction, opinion, and fact. This can help to represent the truth and reality through the author's eyes. Exhibiting subjectivity is a major theme in New Journalism. Here, the author’s voice is critical to a reader forming opinions and thoughts concerning the work.^[13]

Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem exemplifies much of what New Journalism represents as it explores the cultural values and experiences of American life in the 1960s. Didion includes her personal feelings and memories in this first person narrative, describing the chaos of individuals and the way in which they perceive the world. Here Didion rejects conventional journalism, and instead prefers to create a subjective approach to essays, a style that is her own.

Writing style and themes[link]

Didion views the structure of the sentence as essential to what she is conveying in her work. In the New York Times article, Why I Write (1976)^[14] Didion remarks, "To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object photographed...The arrangement of the words matters, and the arrangement you want can be found in the picture in your mind...The picture tells you how to arrange the words and the arrangement of the words tells you, or tells me, what's going on in the picture."^[14]

Didion is heavily influenced by Ernest Hemingway, whose writing taught Didion the importance of the way sentences worked within a text. Other influences include writer Henry James, who wrote "perfect, indirect, complicated sentences" and George Eliot.^[15]

Because of her belief that it is the media that tells us how to live, Joan Didion has become an observer of journalists themselves.^[13] She believes that the difference between the process of fiction and nonfiction is the element of discovery that takes place in nonfiction. This happens not during the writing, but rather during the research.^[15]

There are rituals that are a part of Didion's creative thought process. At the end of the day, Didion must take a break from writing to remove herself from the "pages."^[15] She feels closeness to her work; without a necessary break, she cannot make proper adjustments. Didion spends a great deal of time cutting out and editing her prose before concluding her evening. The next day, Didion begins by looking over her work from the previous evening, making further adjustments as she sees fit. As this process culminates, Didion feels that it is necessary to sleep in the same room as her book. In Didion's own words, "That's one reason I go home to Sacramento to finish things. Somehow the book doesn't leave you when you're right next to it."^[15]

Awards and recognitions[link]

Didion has received a great deal of recognition for one of her more recent books, The Year of Magical Thinking, which was awarded the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2005.^[16] Documenting the grief she experienced following the sudden death of her husband, the book has been said to be a "masterpiece of two genres: memoir and investigative journalism."^[5]

In 2007, Didion received the National Book Foundation's annual Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. From the citation: "An incisive observer of American politics and culture for more than forty-five years, her distinctive blend of spare, elegant prose and fierce intelligence has earned her books a place in the canon of American literature as well as the admiration of generations of writers and journalists."^[17] This same year, Didion also won the Evelyn F. Burkey Award from the Writers Guild of America.^[18]

In 2009, Didion was awarded an honorary Doctor of Letters degree by Harvard University.^[19] Yale University conferred another honorary Doctor of Letters degree on the writer in 2011.^[20]

Published works[link]

Fiction[link]

• Run, River (1963)
• Play It as It Lays (1970)
• A Book of Common Prayer (1977)
• Democracy (1984)
• The Last Thing He Wanted (1996)

Nonfiction[link]

• Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968)
• The White Album (1979)
• Salvador (1983)
• Miami (1987)
• After Henry (1992)
• Political Fictions (2001)
• Where I Was From (2003)
• Fixed Ideas: America Since 9.11 (2003, preface by Frank Rich)
• Vintage Didion (2004, selected excerpts of previous works)
• The Year of Magical Thinking (2005)
• We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live: Collected Nonfiction (2006, includes her first seven volumes of nonfiction)
• The Year of Magical Thinking (2006)
• Blue Nights (2011) ISBN 978-0-307-26767-2

Plays[link]

• The Year of Magical Thinking (2006)

Screenplays[link]

• The Panic in Needle Park (1971)
• Play It as It Lays (1972) (based on her novel)
• A Star Is Born (1976)
• True Confessions (1981)
• Up Close & Personal (1996)

References[link]

External links[link]

This article's use of external links may not follow Wikipedia's policies or guidelines. Please improve this article by removing excessive or inappropriate external links, and converting useful links where appropriate into footnote references. (August 2010)

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Joan Didion

• Joan-Didion.info: Joan Didion Fan Site
• Joan Didion on The California Museum's California Legacy Trails
• 2005 audio interview of Joan Didion by Susan Stamberg of National Public Radio - RealAudio
• Didion and Vanessa Redgrave on NPR's Morning Edition
• Didion on NPR's Fresh Air discusses The Year of Magical Thinking
• Author interview in Guernica Magazine (Guernicamag.com)
• CBC: Didion wins U.S. National Book Award
• The New York Review of Books: Joan Didion
• Linda Kuehl (Fall-Winter 1978). "Joan Didion, The Art of Fiction No. 71". The Paris Review. http://www.parisreview.org/viewinterview.php/prmMID/3439. 
• Hilton Als (Spring 2006). "Joan Didion, The Art of Nonfiction No. 1". The Paris Review. http://www.parisreview.org/viewinterview.php/prmMID/5601. 
• "The Zen of Joan Didion" in Shambhala Sun Magazine
• Joan Didion at the Internet Movie Database
• In Depth interview with Didion, May 7, 2000

General Trees (born Amos Edwards, Drews Land, Kingston, Jamaica, c.1960)^[1][2][3][4] was one of the most popular jamaican dancehall deejay of the 1980s, best known for his hits in the latter half of the decade.

Biography[link]

General Trees is widely regarded as the best Jamaican speed rapper of his era, the "fast style" of delivery commonly accepted as arriving in Jamaica from the UK, through London-born Phillip Papa Levi.^[5] He first found fame as a sound system star, working on Maurice Johnson's Black Scorpio system, which he had followed since the 1970s, his brother having preceded him as a deejay on the system.^[1][2] His name was given to him by Barry G, who thought he sounded like "a General with three voices in one".^[6] When Johnson opened his own studio, also named Black Scorpio, he began producing recordings, including those by artists that had performed with his sound system, including Trees and Lord Sassafrass.^[1] His debut single, "Mi God Mi King", topped the Jamaican singles chart, and a string of hits followed, including "Heel And Toe", "Monkey And Ape", "Ghost Rider", and "Crucifixion", although his best-remembered song is "Mini Bus", which lamented the demise of the "jolly bus",^[7] and which was awarded the title "Song Of The Year" in 1986 from the Jamaica Broadcasting Corporation.^[5] The award raised his profile and he went on to record for a variety of producers in Jamaica. Further hits followed with "Gone A Negril" (#2 in 1986)^[8] and "Calling All Higglers", and he contributed to a "clash" album, Battle Of The Generals, that featured versions of "Lambada" and "Think Twice".^[5] Trees also recorded combination hits including "Coke Pipe" with Fancy Black, and "Nightmare" with Little John. In the early 1990s he again worked with Johnson, who also acted as his manager,^[5] but a falling-out between the two led Trees to work for other producers.^[2] Although he never repeated his earlier popularity, he had some success with "Eye Nah See", "Great Jamaican Jockeys" and "Goodie Goodie".^[5] He was less active during the late 1990s, although he recorded "Lik Him But Nuh Kill Him" for Linval Edwards in 1999.^[2] After that he was largely silent until he reunited again with Johnson in 2005, recording new songs including "Run di Place Again", "Mother of the Land", and "She Says She Loves Me".^[2] A tour of Europe with the Black Scorpio sound system followed in December 2005.^[2] He then began working with the Stur-Gav sound system.^[6]

During breaks in his career, Edwards fell back on his other trade of shoe-making.^[2]

Discography[link]

• Heart, Mind & Soul (1985)
• Ghost Rider (1985) Sunset
• The Younger Horseman (1985) Sunset
• Nuff Respect (1987) Shanachie
• Battle Of The Generals (1987) King Dragon
• A Reggae Calypso Encounter (1987) Rohit
• Ragga Ragga Raggamuffin (1988) JA
• Everything So So (1990) World
• Reggae Calypso Encounter (1990) Rohit (Yellowman & General Trees)

References[link]