Best of
Adult-Fiction

1973

Moonraker's Bride


Madeleine Brent - 1973
    The way she tackles this task leads to her being thrown into the grim prison of Chengfu, where she meets Nicholas Sabine - a man about to die.He asks her a cryptic riddle, the mystery of which echoes through all that befalls her in the months that follow...She is brought to England and tries to make a new life with the Gresham family, but she is constantly in disgrace and is soon involved in the bitter feud between the Greshams and a neighbouring family.There is danger, romance and heartache for Lucy as strange events build to a point where she begins to doubt her own senses.How could she see a man, long dead, walking in the misty darkness of the valley? And who carried her, unconscious, into the labyrinth of Chiselhurst Caves and left her to die?It is not until she returns to China that Lucy finds, amid high adventure, the answer to all that has baffled her.

Black Girl Lost


Donald Goines - 1973
    The she met Chink and discovered love and affection...and rape and murder!

Beulah Land


Lonnie Coleman - 1973
    BEULAH LAND....where the old South as it really was is brought to intense life, in all its outward splendor and secret shame.

Sula


Toni Morrison - 1973
    Sula Peace has rejected the life Nel has embraced, escaping to college, and submerging herself in city life. When she returns to her roots, it is as a rebel and a wanton seductress. Eventually, both women must face the consequences of their choices. Together, they create an unforgettable portrait of what it means and costs to be a black woman in America.

State of Grace


Joy Williams - 1973
    It is the story of Kate, despised by her mother, bound to her father by ties stronger and darker than blood. It is the story of her attempted escapes−in detached sexual encounters, at a Southern college populated by spoiled and perverse beauties, and in a doomed marriage to a man who cannot understand what she is running from. Witty, erotic, searing acute, STATE OF GRACE bears the inimitable stamp of one of our fines and most provocative writers.

Forever Island


Patrick D. Smith - 1973
    Unlike the younger American Indians who have adopted white civilization, Charlie and his wife cling to the old ways, hunting and fishing in the great swamp and farming a tiny plot of higher ground. Charlie has been diligently teaching his grandson, Timmy, about the swamp and its creatures.But their simple existence is suddenly threatened when a large tract of swamp is bought by a corporation, and Charlie is told that he will have to leave. From his youth, Charlie remembers the slaughter of egrets and alligators by the white man and the logging of the giant cypress. Rather than surrender the land that is his life to this final indignity, Charlie decides to fight back.It is an uneven contest. First come the great machines that silt up the streams; then the workmen inadvertently poison the marsh; and, attempting to sabotage the construction equipment, Charlie’s best friend is killed. Realizing that there can be no compromise with the white man who destroys all he touches, Charlie leaves his family and feels into the swamp, seeking the lost island known in the Seminole legends as Forever Island.

Frankie


Kevin Lewis - 1973
    She tries to build a new life, but you can only stay anonymous when no one wants to find you. Hunted by both the police and shadowy assailants with powerful connections, the odds are stacked against a woman who will do whatever it takes to protect herself - and those who mean most to her ...

Everyday Use


Alice Walker - 1973
    Her use of quilting as a metaphor for the creative legacy that African Americans inherited from their maternal ancestors changed the way we define art, women's culture, and African American lives. By putting African American women's voices at the center of the narrative for the first time, "Everyday Use" anticipated the focus of an entire generation of black women writers. This casebook includes an introduction by the editor, a chronology of Walker's life, an authoritative text of "Everyday Use" and of "In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens," an interview with Walker, six critical essays, and a bibliography. The contributors are Charlotte Pierce-Baker, Houston A. Baker, Jr., Thadious M. Davis, Margot Anne Kelley, John O'Brien, Elaine Showalter, and Mary Helen Washington.

Forever Island and Allapattah


Patrick D. Smith - 1973
    Forever Island is widely recognized as the classic novel of the Everglades.Allapattah is the story of a young Seminole in despair in the white man's world.

The Revolt of the Cockroach People


Oscar Zeta Acosta - 1973
    Gonzo" as he defends the "cucarachas" -- the Chicanos of East Los Angeles.Before his mysterious disappearance and probable death in 1971, Oscar Zeta Acosta was famous as a Robin Hood Chicano lawyer and notorious as the real-life model for Hunter S. Thompson's "Dr. Gonzo" a fat, pugnacious attorney with a gargantuan appetite for food, drugs, and life on the edge.In this exhilarating sequel to The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo, Acosta takes us behind the front lines of the militant Chicano movement of the late sixties and early seventies, a movement he served both in the courtroom and on the barricades. Here are the brazen games of "chicken" Acosta played against the Anglo legal establishment; battles fought with bombs as well as writs; and a reluctant hero who faces danger not only from the police but from the vatos locos he champions. What emerges is at once an important political document of a genuine popular uprising and a revealing, hilarious, and moving personal saga.

The Burning Lamp


Frances Murray - 1973
    Perhaps in the unremarkable but self-possessed scrap of a girl from Glascow she recognized something of her own redoubtable spirit. At all events, she accepted Phemie's reasons for leaving home and enrolled her to train as a nurse - one of the new breed who were to convert a degrading job of hospital nursing into a vocation.

If You Can't Be Good


Ross Thomas - 1973
    Reprint. NYT.

The Eye of the Heart: Short Stories from Latin America


Barbara Howes - 1973
    / Pablo Neruda --As I am ... as I was / Lino Novás-Calvo --The drum dance / Arturo Uslar Pietri --The third bank of the river / João Guimarães Rosa --Jacob and the other / Juan Carlos Onetti --The beautiful soul of Don Damian / Juan Bosch --The tree / María-Luisa Bombal --Tarciso / Dinah Silveira de Queiroz --Warma Kuyay / José María Arguedas --How Porciúncula the Mulatto got the corpse off his back / Jorge Amado --End of the game / Julio Cortázar --My life with the wave / Octavio Paz --Miracles cannot be recovered / Adolfo Bioy-Casares --Encounter with the traitor / Augusto Roa Bastos --Marcario / Juan Rulfo --Madness / Armonía Somers --The switchman / Juan José Arreola --Concerning señor de la Peña / Eliseo Diego --The dogs / Abelardo Díaz Alfaro --The smallest woman in the world ; Marmosets / Clarice Lispector --In the beginning / Humberto Costantini --Paseo / JosACe Donoso --The handsomest drowned man in the world / Gabriel García Márquez --A nest of sparrows on the awning / Guillermo Cabrera Infante --The two Elenas / Carlos Fuentes --Weight-reducing diet / Jorge Edwards --Sunday, Sunday / Mario Vargas Llosa

The Best Dr. Thorndyke Detective Stories


R. Austin Freeman - 1973
    by Everett F. Bleiler