conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the first five paragraphs for a story with the title 'A Book of Common Prayer'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: A Book of Common Prayer
  The girl from Tupelo had finished reciting. The room was silent. Warren Bogart was fingering his cigar and watching me warily.
  Warren Bogart looked at me and then away. "You're in over your head," he said finally, and that was all he said.
  Trout was served in the dining room. Lemon mousse was served in the dining room. Coffee and praline cookies and pear brandy were served in the dining room. The dining room was hot and we could not seem to leave it. Lucy and Adele Fayard described their most recent Junior League project in compulsive detail. Lucy and Adele Fayard described dinner as we ate it. Lucy and Adele Fayard described a pet cobra they had seen drink Wild Turkey-and-water at a party the night before.
  Morgan Fayard sulked. Warren Bogart remained in the living room with the girl from Tupelo. We could hear them at the piano. Warren Bogart seemed to be making the girl play, over and over again, the song that was always played in New Orleans at Mardi Gras. She played it badly.
  Lucy Fayard raised her voice. "You're forgetting your duties, Morgan. Grace's glass is empty? You ever get ground artichokes down there, Grace? To put around game?"
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me two more paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: After the cholera epidemic she appeared for a while that May and June to retreat into unspecified gastrointestinal infection less often, and she perfected that frenetic public energy which made many people, particularly Elena, suspect her of a reliance on major amphetamines. Even after she had moved most of her things into the apartment on the Avenida del Mar, even after she had with her own hands whitewashed all the walls and filled the empty rooms with flowers and begun to have what she called her "evenings" there, she kept her room at the Caribe, and she would go there every day for breakfast and to spend most of the day.
  She remembered her "film festival," and she drew up endless lists of names: actors, directors, agents, former agents who were then studio executives, former studio executives who were then independent producers, and what I once heard her call "other movers and shakers." She had met many of these people with Leonard and she was certain that they would be delighted to lend their names and films, once she put it to them.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Delete the first sentence.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Even after she had moved most of her things into the apartment on the Avenida del Mar, even after she had with her own hands whitewashed all the walls and filled the empty rooms with flowers and begun to have what she called her "evenings" there, she kept her room at the Caribe, and she would go there every day for breakfast and to spend most of the day.
  She remembered her "film festival," and she drew up endless lists of names: actors, directors, agents, former agents who were then studio executives, former studio executives who were then independent producers, and what I once heard her call "other movers and shakers." She had met many of these people with Leonard and she was certain that they would be delighted to lend their names and films, once she put it to them.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the last five paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Today we are clearing some coastal groves by slash-and-burn and a pall of smoke hangs over Boca Grande. The smoke colors everything. The smoke obscures the light. You will notice my use of the colonial pronoun, the overseer's "we." I mean it. I see now that I have no business in this place but I have been here too long to change. I mean "we." I wish that I could see the light today but I recognize the necessity for clearing groves. I also recognize the equivocal nature of even the most empirical evidence. Some evidence I did not know about until quite recently, when crates of mail uncollected during the October Violence that year were located and distributed. This evidence came to me long after I had talked to Leonard Douglas and been put in touch with Marin Bogart in Buffalo. This evidence came to me long after I had seen Marin Bogart in Buffalo. Here it is. Early on the evening of her arrest, from a box between the Caribe and the Capilla del Mar, Charlotte Douglas mailed me Marin's address. She also mailed me the big square emerald she wore in place of a wedding ring. I wrote to Marin and told her I have the emerald but have received no reply. I did not mention to Marin that the emerald was a memento from the man who financed the Tupamaros.
  All I know now is that when I think of Charlotte Douglas walking in the hot night wind toward the lights at the Capilla del Mar I am less and less certain that this story has been one of delusion.
  Joan Didion trains her eye on the far frontiers of the Monroe Doctrine, where history dissolves into conspiracy (Dallas in 1963, Iran Contra in 1984), and fashions a moral thriller as hypnotic and provocative as any by Joseph Conrad or Graham Greene. In that latter year Elena McMahon walks off the presidential campaign she has been covering for a major newspaper to do a favor for her father. Elena's father does deals. And it is while acting as his agent in one such deal—a deal that shortly goes spectacularly wrong—that she finds herself on an island where tourism has been superseded by arms dealing, covert action, and assassination.
  In these coolly observant essays, Joan Didion looks at the American political process and at "that handful of insiders who invent, year in and year out, the narrative of public life." Through the deconstruction of the sound bites and photo ops of three presidential campaigns, one presidential impeachment, and an unforgettable sex scandal, Didion reveals the mechanics of American politics. She tells us the uncomfortable truth about the way we vote, the candidates we vote for, and the people who tell us to vote for them. These pieces build, one on the other, into a disturbing portrait of the American political landscape, providing essential reading on our democracy.
  Joan Didion's electrifying first novel is a haunting portrait of a marriage whose wrong turns and betrayals are at once absolutely idiosyncratic and a razor-sharp commentary on the history of California. Everett McClellan and his wife, Lily, are the great-grandchildren of pioneers, and what happens to them is a tragic epilogue to the pioneer experience, a story of murder and betrayal that only Didion could tell with such nuance, sympathy, and suspense.