The Last Thing He Wanted

by Joan Didion

  Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-75250-9

  SALVADOR

  “Terror is the given of the place.” The place is El Salvador in 1982, at the ghastly height of its civil war. The writer is Joan Didion, who delivers an anatomy of that country’s particular brand of terror—its mechanisms, rationales, and intimate relation to United States foreign policy. As she travels from battlefields to body dumps, interviews a puppet president, and considers the distinctly Salvadoran grammar of the verb “to disappear,” Didion gives us a book that is germane to any country in which bloodshed has become a standard tool of politics.

  Current Affairs/Literature/978-0-679-75183-0

  WHERE I WAS FROM

  In this moving and insightful book, Joan Didion reassesses parts of her life, her work, her history and ours. A native Californian, Didion applies her scalpel-like intelligence to the state’s ethic of ruthless self-sufficiency in order to examine that ethic’s often tenuous relationship to reality. Didion is an unparalleled observer, and her book is at once intellectually provocative and deeply personal.

  History/Memoir/978-0-679-75286-8

  THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING

  From one of America’s iconic writers, a stunning book of electric honesty and passion. Joan Didion explores an intensely personal yet universal experience: a portrait of marriage—and a life, in good times and bad—that will speak to anyone who has ever loved a husband or wife or child.

  Memoir/978-1-4000-7843-1

  VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL

  Available at your local bookstore, or visit

  www.randomhouse.com

  FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, SEPTEMBER 1997

  Copyright © 1996 by Joan Didion

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1996.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

  Liveright Publishing Corporation: Excerpts from “Voyages II” from Complete Poems of Hart Crane, edited by Marc Simon, copyright © 1933, 1958, 1966 by Liveright Publishing Corporation, copyright © 1986 by Marc Simon. Reprinted by permission of Liveright Publishing Corporation.

  MCA Music Publishing and Jay Livingston Music: Excerpt from “Bonanza,” words and music by Ray Evans and Jay Livingston, copyright ©1959 by St. Angelo Music and Jay Livingston Music, copyright renewed.

  All rights for St. Angelo Music controlled and administered by MCA Music Publishing, a division of MCA, Inc. International copyright secured.

  All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of MCA Music Publishing, a division of MCA, Inc., and Jay Livingston Music.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. edition as follows:

  Didion, Joan.

  The last thing he wanted / by Joan Didion.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-78733-0

  I. Title.

  PS3554.I33L37 1996

  813′.54—dc20 96-17084

  Author photograph © Quintana Roo Dunne

  Random House Web address: http://www.randomhouse.com/

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