Book recommendations based on data from real readers.
Books like Play It as It Lays
A ruthless dissection of American life in the late 1960s, Play It as It Lays captures the mood of an entire generation, the ennui of contemporary society reflected in spare prose that blisters and haunts the reader. Set in a place beyond good and evil - literally in Hollywood, Las Vegas, and the barren wastes of the Mojave Desert, but figuratively in the landscape of an arid soul - it remains more than three decades after its original publication a profoundly disturbing novel, riveting in its exploration of a woman and a society in crisis and stunning in the still-startling intensity of its prose.
Liked Play It as It Lays by Joan Didion? Here's what readers who loved it picked up next.
- White Noise by Don DeLillo (1985) · 3.86★
- What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver (1981) · 4.22★
- The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West (1939) · 3.78★
- Rabbit, Run by John Updike (1960) · 3.57★
- American Pastoral by Philip Roth (1997) · 3.91★
- The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosiński (1965) · 3.94★
- A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan (2010) · 3.64★
- Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace (1996) · 4.31★
- Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin (1956) · 4.21★
- Libra by Don DeLillo (1988) · 3.98★
- Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (1955) · 3.88★
- The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen (2001) · 3.78★