Maya Hawke is lending her voice to a new audiobook edition of Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Macmillan Audio announced in a news release.
Didion’s essay collection, first published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1968, was the late author’s first nonfiction book; she had published a novel, Run River, five years before. Slouching Towards Bethlehem collected Didion’s thoughts on a variety of subjects, many focusing on her home state of California. The book was praised by critics and is now considered one of the seminal works of the New Journalism movement of the 1960s and 1970s.
Actor and singer-songwriter Hawke is known for her roles in the television series Stranger Things and in films including Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Asteroid City, and Maestro. She starred as author Flannery O’Connor in Wildcat, the 2023 biopic directed by her father, Ethan Hawke.
“I have always been a huge fan of Joan Didion’s writing,” Hawke said in a statement. “Many of the essays in Slouching Towards Bethlehem were written when she was in her 20s, and it’s been an incredible experience to get to spend so much time with her words and feel a sense of camaraderie almost sixty years later. It’s an honor to have the opportunity to narrate her brilliant work and introduce her iconic prose to a new generation.”
The audiobook edition of Slouching Towards Bethlehem is slated for publication on Nov. 5.
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
