After Henry

"We tell ourselves stories in order to live" was the opening line of Joan Didion's celebrated The White Album. In After Henry, her new collection of pieces, most of them reported and written for The New York Review of Books and The New Yorker, she examines, precisely and suggestively, the stories people tell themselves - about murders and earthquakes and wildfires, about presidential politics and Patricia Hearst and Central Park "wilding, " about boom years passing and hard times coming down - in Washington and in California and in New York. Joan Didion's two previous collections, Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album, are now established as classics. Salvador and Miami stand as hallmarks of political reporting. After Henry is a major literary event.