Best of
American-Fiction

1980

Trail of the Spanish Bit


Don Coldsmith - 1980
    One day, on a lone patrol, he was injured and lost. He knew he had little chance of surviving or of ever returning to his homeland. But what happened from that day forward made a different man of Juan Garcia. He embarked upon a greater adventure than any he could have imagined. For instead of hostility, he discovered a people who showed him a new way of life. And he, in turn, brought them a talisman, the Spanish Bit, that forever transformed their society.With well over four million copies of his critically-acclaimed frontier novels in print, Don Coldsmith is one of the bestselling novelists of the Native American experience.

Ray


Barry Hannah - 1980
    Dr. Ray--a womanizer, small-town drunk, vigilante, poet, adoring husband--is a man trying to make sense of life in the twentieth century. In flight from the death he dealt flying over Vietnam, Dr. Ray struggles with those bound to him by need, sickness, lunacy, by blood and by love.

The White Lantern


Evan S. Connell - 1980
    With his customary droll humor, Connell brings to life in these seven essays advances made in cartography, anthropology, astronomy, linguistics, and archaeology by showing the enormous lengths to which outstanding individuals have driven themselves in passionate pursuit of knowledge.

The Four Winds of Heaven


Monique Raphel High - 1980
    The foremost Jewish family of Russia, the single voice of their people to the Tsar, the Gunzburgs stand on the threshold of cataclysmic change as their proud by fragile world is threatened, then crushed by the surging forces of the Great War and the Revolution.

Horn of Africa


Philip Caputo - 1980
    Once he realizes he’s a mercenary, however, he is not at all concerned. Ever since his young secretary was killed by a grenade at their bureau office in Beirut a couple of years before, he has lost all volition. Which is why he so readily capitulates not only to Colfax, but also, and more dangerously so, to every command of Jeremy Nordstrand, the mystical megalomaniac determined to achieve greatness on their seemingly suicidal mission. Set in the forsaken yet exotic deserts of Ethiopia, Horn of Africa is a vividly detailed and masterfully plotted novel chronicling a broken man’s struggle for salvation and inner freedom in the midst of a broken nation’s fight for stability and peace.

The Devil's Race-Track: Mark Twain's Great Dark Writings


Mark Twain - 1980
    He views his own situation as that of a ship trapped in a fearsome Bermuda Triangle-like region, the Devil's Race-Track. He sees history as a treadmill of endlessly and monotonously repeated events. And he conceives of a universal food chain, a vast round of devourers who in their turn become victims, humankind and God included. The tone of these writings is lightened considerably by Mark Twain's sagely ironic humor and his warmth, which together balance his tough-mindedness. And even when he shows the human race caught in some vicious circle, he may be seen courageously seeking a way out and at times believing he has found it.

The Very Rich Hours of Count von Stauffenberg


Paul West - 1980
    With these reissues, Overlook and Tusk continue its program of publishing the brilliantly lyrical fiction of Paul West.In The Universe, and Other Fictions, Paul West embraces galaxies and molecular events, creating singular fiction as combustible and astonishing as Creation itself. In The Very Rich Hours of Count von Stauffenberg, West weaves a brilliant tapestry of fact and imagination about the ill-fated attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler. In the dark literary thriller, The Women of Whitechapel and Jack the Ripper, West brilliantly recasts the Jack the Ripper story, drawing on up-to-date research and his own dazzling imagination to plumb the lower depths of Victorian England.