Best of
American-Fiction

1968

On Self-Respect


Joan Didion - 1968
    She wrote it not to a word count or a line count, but to an exact character count.

Tales of the North


Jack London - 1968
    This wonderful compilation includes, in facsimile of the original turn of the century magazines, the complete novels of White Fang, The Sea-Wolf, The Call of the Wild and Cruise of the Dazzler, plus 15 short stories -- all with original illustrations This is an adventure you won't want to miss

Outer Dark


Cormac McCarthy - 1968
    Discovering her brother's lie, she sets forth alone to find her son. Both brother and sister wander through a countryside being scourged by three terrifying strangers, toward an apocalyptic resolution.

Bloodline: Five Stories


Ernest J. Gaines - 1968
    As rendered by Gaines, this country becomes as familiar, and as haunted by cruelty, suffering, and courage, as Ralph Ellison's Harlem or Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County.STORIES INCLUDE:A Long Day in NovemberThe Sky Is GrayThree MenBloodlineJust Like a Tree

The Novellas of John O'Hara


John O'Hara - 1968
    They are marked by the meticulous attention to detail and veracious dialogue that are habitual to O'Hara. His style of fiction, which often follows one individual or relationship through an unpredictable and unstable course, is frequently better served by the shorter form.The ten stories presented here were written in the sixties, the last decade of O'Hara's life, when he was as prolific as ever and concerned to record as much of what he had seen in his lifetime as possible. They are set during his adulthood and in the places that he knew, lived in, and always wrote about: Gibbsville (the fictionalized Pottsville, where he had grown up), Philadelphia, New York, and Hollywood. The characters are also familiar: O'Hara's alter ego, the writer Jim Malloy, the mismatched couples and disappointed lovers, the rising and fading stars of Hollywood, the socially aspiring, and the criminal fringe of the Prohibition era.As O'Hara's biographer Frank MacShane notes, the stories are "still extraordinarily alive." O'Hara effortlessly crafts stories that are propelled by his beautifully observed dialogue and studded with his placement of people by what they drink and the way they drink it, their cars, and their clothes. The life in the stories is in this detail, and in the universal applicability that his themes have for the latetwentieth century.