A relentless analysis of American life in the late 1960s, Joan Didion's "Play It as It Lays" captures the mood of an entire generation. The sense of boredom in contemporary society is reflected in a spare prose that burns and haunts the reader.

Set in a place beyond good and evil – literally in Hollywood, Las Vegas, and the desolate expanses of the Mojave Desert, but also metaphorically in the landscape of a dry soul – it remains a profoundly disturbing novel more than three decades after its original publication, captivating in its exploration of a woman and a society in crisis and striking in the still-shocking intensity of its prose.