Best of
Literary-Fiction
1970
The Bluest Eye
Toni Morrison - 1970
Set in the author's girlhood hometown of Lorain, Ohio, it tells the story of black, eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove. Pecola prays for her eyes to turn blue so that she will be as beautiful and beloved as all the blond, blue-eyed children in America. In the autumn of 1941, the year the marigolds in the Breedloves' garden do not bloom. Pecola's life does change- in painful, devastating ways.What its vivid evocation of the fear and loneliness at the heart of a child's yearning, and the tragedy of its fulfillment. The Bluest Eye remains one of Toni Morrisons's most powerful, unforgettable novels- and a significant work of American fiction.
Fifth Business
Robertson Davies - 1970
As Ramsay tells his story, it begins to seem that from boyhood, he has exerted a perhaps mystical, perhaps pernicious, influence on those around him. His apparently innocent involvement in such innocuous events as the throwing of a snowball or the teaching of card tricks to a small boy in the end prove neither innocent nor innocuous. Fifth Business stands alone as a remarkable story told by a rational man who discovers that the marvelous is only another aspect of the real.
Daddy Was a Number Runner
Louise Meriwether - 1970
While 12-year-old Francie Coffin’s world and family threaten to fall apart, this remarkable young heroine must call upon her own wit and endurance to survive amidst the treacheries of racism and sexism, poverty and violence.
The Collected Works of Billy the Kid
Michael Ondaatje - 1970
The Collected Works of Billy the Kid is a virtuoso synthesis of storytelling, history, and myth by a writer who brings us back to our familiar legends with a renewed sense of wonder.
The Vivisector
Patrick White - 1970
His sister's deformity, a grocer's moonlight indiscretion, the passionate illusions of the women who love him - all are used as fodder for his art. It is only when Hurtle meets an egocentric adolescent whom he sees as his spiritual child does he experience a deeper, more treacherous emotion in this tour de force of sexual and psychological menace that sheds brutally honest light on the creative experience.
Play It As It Lays
Joan Didion - 1970
Set in a place beyond good and evil - literally in Hollywood, Las Vegas, and the barren wastes of the Mojave Desert, but figuratively in the landscape of an arid soul - it remains more than three decades after its original publication a profoundly disturbing novel, riveting in its exploration of a woman and a society in crisis and stunning in the still-startling intensity of its prose.
A Fairly Honourable Defeat
Iris Murdoch - 1970
As puppet master, Julius artfully plays on the human tendency to embrace drama and intrigue and to prefer the distraction of confrontations to the difficult effort of communicating openly and honestly.
Collected Stories
Willa Cather - 1970
These nineteen stories resonate with all the great themes that Cather staked out like tracts of fertile land: the plight of people hungry for beauty in a country that has no room for it; the mysterious arc of human lives; and the ways the American frontier transformed the strangers who came to it, turning them imperceptibly into Americans. In these fictions, Cather displays her vast moral vision, her unerring sense of place, and her ability to find the one detail or episode that makes a closed life open wide in a single exhilarating moment.
Julia and the Bazooka and Other Stories
Anna Kavan - 1970
Anna Kavan now stands alongside Virginia Woolf as one of Britain's great 20th-century modernists.narratives highlight the shadowed world of the incurable drug addict and probe the psychological aspects of addiction.
Moden pan vaknar nahi (मोडेन पण वाकणार नाही)
V.P. Kale - 1970
these are eight simple yet riveting stories of eight such people."जगाला विक्षिप्त वाटतील अशा स्वतःच्या एखाद्या मतप्रणालीच्या पूर्ततेसाठी, हट्टापुढे नामशेष होऊन जाणाऱ्या, पण माघार न घेणाऱ्या अशा विक्षिप्त व्यक्तींची एकेक तऱ्हा रंगविणाऱ्या आठ खाशा कथांचा संग्रह"
Greenvoe
George Mackay Brown - 1970
However, a sinister military/industrial project, Operation Black Star, requires the island for unspecified purposes and threatens the islanders' way of life. In this, his first novel (1972), George Mackay Brown recreates a week in the life of the island community as they come to terms with the destructiveness of Operation Black Star. A whole host of characters - The Skarf, failed fishermen and Marxist historian; Ivan Westray, boatman and dallier; pious creeler Samuel Whaness; drunken fishermen Bert Kerston; earth-mother Alice Voar, and meths-drinker Timmy Folster - are vividly brought to life in this sparkling mixture of prose and poetry.
Gulmohar
V.P. Kale - 1970
This is an exclusive collection of only 8 stories based on some whimsical characters. Every main character in all these stories has one thing in common. In a true sense, they are not whimsical; actually they have set their own doctrines and have stuck to them, no matter whatever happens. In one of the stories, the hero dies just because of his doctrines. The other story is based on the mentality of being lame; it proves that many a times those who are physically disabled are more firm than those who are physically capable of doing everything but have a lame and limp mind. One story is based on the insecurity; here the heroine who had refused someone whom she loved so much comes into contact with him again. She feels that he will blackmail her but fails to understand him, at the end, though very beautiful, her insecure mind shows its ugliness. Each and every story has some splendid felling or other to share with us, to reveal the vastness and the insularity of the mind.
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.'s Welcome To the Monkey House
Christopher Sergel - 1970
Includes the stories "Where I Live," "Harrison Bergeron," "Who Am I This Time?," "Welcome to the Monkey House," "Long Walk to Forever," "The Foster Portfolio," "Miss Temptation," "All the King's Horses," "Tom Edison's Shaggy Dog," "New Dictionary," "Next Door," "More Stately Mansions," "The Hyannis Port Story," and "D.P."
City Life
Donald Barthelme - 1970
Barthelme's third collection of short stories, including:Views of my father weeping.--Paraguay.--The falling dog.--At the Tolstoy Museum.--The policemen's ball.--The glass mountain.--The explanation.--Kierkegaard unfair to Schlegel.--The phantom of the opera's friend.--Sentence.--Bone bubbles.--On angels.--Brain damage.--City life.
A Book that Was Lost: and Other Stories
S.Y. Agnon - 1970
Stories depict the culture of traditional Jewish life in Poland, the lost world of Eastern European Jewry, and the emerging society of modern Israel.
The Bay of Noon
Shirley Hazzard - 1970
Alone in the fabulously ruined city, she idly follows up a letter of introduction from an acquaintance and so changes her life forever. Through the letter, she meets Giocanda, a beautiful and gifted writer, and Gianni, a famous Roman film director and Giocanda’s lover. At work she encounters Justin, a Scotsman whose inscrutability Jenny finds mysteriously attractive. As she becomes increasingly involved in the lives of these three, she discovers that the past--and the patterns of a lifetime--are not easily discarded.
A Journey to Mount Athos
François Augiéras - 1970
His spiritual and erotic wanderings in the picturesque surroundings of the Holy Mountain take both the author and the reader on a journey of self-discovery. Augiéras described Athos as a place where you find everything within yourself, and the experiences in this book as a sojourn in the Land of the Spirits according to the strictest Buddhist or Pythagorean Orthodoxy. Depicted variously as an anti-Christian nomad, a barbarian in the West and a madman, Augiéras is one of France's greatest underground writers.Pushkin Collection editions feature a spare, elegant series style and superior, durable components. The Collection is typeset in Monotype Baskerville, litho-printed on Munken Premium White Paper and notch-bound by the independently owned printer TJ International in Padstow. The covers, with French flaps, are printed on Colorplan Pristine White Paper. Both paper and cover board are acid-free and Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certified.
Long Time Coming and a Long Time Gone
Richard Fariña - 1970
Thus, he never knew of the success of the book, or his recognition as one of the most original and authentic voices of his generation. Long Time Coming And A Long Time Gone goes beyond that first novel in range and savage candor. It is a multi-track recording in prose and poetry of highs and lows, bum trips and mind-blasts, and of an odyssey that made the revolutionary scene in Cuba n Ireland, the expatriate scene in London and Paris, the big time folk scene in the U.S., and the human scene every inch of the way. It's all here. All very choice. And all very alive. Now and forever.