Best of
Literary-Fiction

1989

A Prayer for Owen Meany


John Irving - 1989
    Owen doesn't believe in accidents; he believes he is God's instrument. What happens to Owen after that 1953 foul is both extraordinary and terrifying. At moments a comic, self-deluded victim, but in the end the principal, tragic actor in a divine plan, Owen Meany is the most heartbreaking hero John Irving has yet created.

Nostalgia


Mircea Cărtărescu - 1989
    This translation of his 1989 novel Nostalgia, writes Andrei Codrescu, "introduces to English a writer who has always had a place reserved for him in a constellation that includes the Brothers Grimm, Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, Bruno Schulz, Julio Cortazar, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Milan Kundera, and Milorad Pavic, to mention just a few." Like most of his literary contemporaries of the avant-garde Eighties Generation, his major work has been translated into several European languages, with the notable exception, until now, of English.Readers opening the pages of Nostalgia should brace themselves for a verbal tidal wave of the imagination that will wash away previous ideas of what a novel is or ought to be. Although each of its five chapters is separate and stands alone, a thematic, even mesmeric harmony finds itself in children's games, the music of the spheres, humankind's primordial myth-making, the origins of the universe, and in the dilapidated tenement blocks of an apocalyptic Bucharest during the years of communist dictatorship.

The Remains of the Day


Kazuo Ishiguro - 1989
    The six-day excursion becomes a journey into the past of Stevens and England, a past that takes in fascism, two world wars, and an unrealised love between the butler and his housekeeper.

The Melancholy of Resistance


László Krasznahorkai - 1989
    The Melancholy of Resistance, László Krasznahorkai's magisterial novel, depicts a chain of mysterious events in a small Hungarian town. A circus, promising to display the stuffed body of the largest whale in the world, arrives in the dead of winter, prompting bizarre rumours. Word spreads that the circus folk have a sinister purpose in mind, and the frightened citizens cling to any manifestation of order they can find - music, cosmology, fascism. The novel's characters are unforgettable: the evil Mrs. Eszter, plotting her takeover of the town; her weakling husband; and Valuska, our hapless hero with his head in the clouds, who is the tender center of the book, the only pure and noble soul to be found. Compact, powerful and intense, The Melancholy of Resistance, as its enormously gifted translator George Szirtes puts it, "is a slow lava flow of narrative, a vast black river of type." And yet, miraculously, the novel, in the words of The Guardian, "lifts the reader along in lunar leaps and bounds."

Dirty Work


Larry Brown - 1989
    Both were born and raised in Mississippi. Both fought in Vietnam. Both were gravely wounded. Now, twenty-two years later, the two men lie in adjacent beds in a VA hospital.Over the course of a day and a night, Walter James and Braiden Chaney talk of memories, of passions, of fate. With great vision, humor, and courage, Brown writes mostly about love in a story about the waste of war.

Geek Love


Katherine Dunn - 1989
    There’s Arturo the Aquaboy, who has flippers for limbs and a megalomaniac ambition worthy of Genghis Khan . . . Iphy and Elly, the lissome Siamese twins . . . albino hunchback Oly, and the outwardly normal Chick, whose mysterious gifts make him the family’s most precious—and dangerous—asset.As the Binewskis take their act across the backwaters of the U.S., inspiring fanatical devotion and murderous revulsion; as its members conduct their own Machiavellian version of sibling rivalry, Geek Love throws its sulfurous light on our notions of the freakish and the normal, the beautiful and the ugly, the holy and the obscene. Family values will never be the same.

Restoration


Rose Tremain - 1989
    Merivel slips easily into a life of luxury and idleness, enthusiastically enjoying the women and wine of the vibrant Restoration age. But when he’s called on to serve the king in an unusual role, he transgresses the one law that he is forbidden to break and is brutally cast out from his newfound paradise. Thus begins Merivel’s journey to self-knowledge, which will take him down into the lowest depths of seventeenth-century society.

Affliction


Russell Banks - 1989
    A well-digger and policeman in a bleak New Hampshire town, he is a former high-school star gone to beer fat, a loner with a mean streak. It is a mark of Russell Banks' artistry and understanding that Wade comes to loom in one's mind as a blue-collar American Everyman afflicted by the dark secret of the macho tradition. Told by his articulate, equally scarred younger brother, Wade's story becomes as spellbinding and inexorable as a fuse burning its way to the dynamite.

A History of the World in 10½ Chapters


Julian Barnes - 1989
    Noah disembarks from his ark but he and his Voyage are not forgotten: they are revisited in on other centuries and other climes - by a Victorian spinster mourning her father, by an American astronaut on an obsessive personal mission. We journey to the Titanic, to the Amazon, to the raft of the Medusa, and to an ecclesiastical court in medieval France where a bizarre case is about to begin...This is no ordinary history, but something stranger, a challenge and a delight for the reader's imagination. Ambitious yet accessible, witty and playfully serious, this is the work of a brilliant novelist.

Tours of the Black Clock


Steve Erickson - 1989
    In a Vienna window, he glimpses the face of a lost erotic dream, and from there travels to the Twentieth Century's darkest corner to confront its shocked and secret conscience. One of Steve Erickson's most acclaimed novels, Tours of the Black Clock crosses the intersections of passion and power and gazes into a clock with no face, where memory is the gravity of time and all the numbers fall like rain.

The Rainbow Stories


William T. Vollmann - 1989
    Burroughs comes thirteen unnerving and often breathtaking stories populated by punks and angels, skinheads and religious assassins, streetwalkers and fetishists--people who live outside the law and and the clear light of the every day. Set in landscapes as diverse as ancient Babylon, India, and the seamy underbelly of San Francisco, these daring and innovative tales are laced with Vollman's fertile imagination. The Rainbow Stories ushers us into a world that bears an awful yet hypnotic resemblance to that of our deepest nightmares, confirming Vollmann's reputation as a dark visionary of contemporary fiction.

The Shawl


Cynthia Ozick - 1989
    Depicting both the horrors of the Holocaust and the lifetime of emptiness that pursues a survivor, 'The Shawl' and 'Rosa' recall the psychological and emotional scars of those who suffered at the hands of the Nazis.

The King of Trees: Three Novellas: The King of Trees, The King of Chess, The King of Children


Ah Cheng - 1989
    Never before had a fiction writer dealt with the Cultural Revolution in such Daoist-Confucian terms, discarding Mao-speak, and mixing both traditional and vernacular elements with an aesthetic that emphasized not the hardships and miseries of those years, but the joys of close, meaningful friendships. In The King of Chess, a student’s obsession with finding worthy chess opponents symbolizes his pursuit of the dao; in The King of Children—made into an award-winning film by Chen Kaige, the director of Farewell My Concubine—an educated youth is sent to teach at an impoverished village school where one boy’s devotion to learning is so great he is ready to spend 500 days copying his teacher’s dictionary; and in the title novella a peasant’s innate connection to a giant primeval tree takes a tragic turn when a group of educated youth arrive to clear the mountain forest. The King of Trees is a masterpiece of world literature, full of passion and noble emotions that stir the inner chambers of the heart.

Have The Men Had Enough?


Margaret Forster - 1989
    That's women's work. This is a story of female courage, where black comedy turns to disturbing pathos revolving around the rights of an indomitable woman

Passing On


Penelope Lively - 1989
    In Passing On, she applies her distinctive insight and consummate artistry to the subtle story of a domineering and manipulative mother's legacy to her children. With their mother's death, Helen and Edward, both middle-aged and both unmarried, are left to face the ramifications of their mother's hold on their lives for all of these years. Helen and Edward slowly learn to accept what has been lost in their own lives and embrace what can yet be retrieved. "The richest and most rewarding of her novels." - The Washington Post Book World

Sexing the Cherry


Jeanette Winterson - 1989
    The child, Jordan, is rescued by Dog Woman and grows up to travel the world like Gulliver, though he finds that the world’s most curious oddities come from his own mind. Winterson leads the reader from discussions on the nature of time to Jordan’s fascination with journeys concealed within other journeys, all with a dizzying speed that shoots the reader from epiphany to shimmering epiphany.

River Song


Craig Lesley - 1989
    Danny is determined to get closer to his son, Jack, to teach him traditional ways to steer him away from rodeoing. Danny and Jack survive a forest fire, make a go of it as migrant workers, then finally settle down to salmon fishing on the Columbia River. There they join forces with Willis Salwish, a mysterious old Yakima Indian who clings to traditional fishing sites despite opposition from white fisherman. Danny's friendship with Willis draws him into the dispute over fishing rights, and it's Willis who brings him face to face with ghosts from his past, and leads him to his lost heritage.

Soulstorm


Clarice Lispector - 1989
    Both are remarkable, both are unmistakably Lispector.

The Trick is to Keep Breathing


Janice Galloway - 1989
    The problems of everyday living accumulate and begin to torture Joy, who blames her problems not on her work or on the accidental drowning of her illicit lover, but on herself. While painful and deeply serious, this is a novel of great warmth and energy: it's the wit and irony found in moments of despair that prove to be Joy's salvation. First published by Polygon in 1989 and Dalkey Archive Press in 1994, now available again.

The Great World


David Malouf - 1989
    Nowhere are these more eloquent than in Australia, generations of whose young men have enlisted to fight other people's battles - from Gallipoli and the Somme to Malaya and Vietnam. In THE GREAT WORLD, his finest novel yet, David Malouf gives a voice to that experience. But THE GREAT WORLD is more than a novel of war. Ranging over seventy years of Australian life, from Sydney's teeming King's Cross to the tranquil backwaters of the Hawkesbury River, it is a remarkable novel of self-knowledge and lost innocence, of survival and witness.

Dialogues in Paradise


Can Xue - 1989
    The work of Can Xue (a pseudonym of Changsa writer Deng Xiao-hua) renews our consciousness of the long tradition of the irrational in our literature, where dreams and reality constitute one territory, its borders open, the passage back and forth barely discernible. She fuses lyrical purity with the darkest visions of the grotesque and the result is a unique literary experience.

The History Of Luminous Motion


Scott Bradfield - 1989
    He experiences material reality as a hindrance, so he tries to stay in an inner realm composed only of abstract concepts like gravity, motion, sound and light. He lives with Mom, who stays alone in her bedroom. Once he killed a man with gleaming tools from a hardware store. He has a friend with whom he does burglary and drugs and seances. Then Dad comes to stay, and Phillip descends to a subterranean otherworld where he makes contact with "dead black things, obloid and featureless, like faintly disembodied laundry hampers." A sad, beautiful book.

Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry by Midred D. Taylor


Holt Publishers - 1989
    This special 25th anniversary edition celebrates the timelessness of this beloved classic -- and introduces it to a new audience. Set in a small town in Mississippi at the height of the Depression, this powerful, moving novel deals with issues of prejudice, courage, and self-respect. It is the story of one family's struggle to maintain their integrity, pride, and independence in the face of racism and social injustice. It is also the story of Cassie Logan, an independent girl who discovers over the course of an important year why having land of their own is so crucial to her family. The racial tension and harrowing events experienced by young Cassie, her family, and her neighbors cause Cassie to grow up and discover the reality of her environment.

Billy Bathgate


E.L. Doctorow - 1989
    The product of an East Bronx upbringing by his half-crazy Irish Catholic mother, after his Jewish father left them long ago, Billy is captivated by the world of money, sex, and high society the charismatic Schultz has to offer. But it is also a world of extortion, brutality, and murder, where Billy finds himself involved in a dangerous affair with Schultz's girlfriend.Relive this story through the title character's driving narrative, a child's thoughts and feelings filtered through the sensibilities of an adult, and the result is E.L. Doctorow's most convincing and appealing portrayal of a young boy's life. Converging mythology and history, one of America's most admired authors has captured the romance of gangsters and criminal enterprise that continues to fascinate the American psyche today.

A Question of Loyalties


Allan Massie - 1989
    Etienne de Balafre, half French, half English and raised in South Africa, returns to post-war France to unravel the tangled history of his own father Lucien - was he a patriot who may have served his country as best he could in difficult times, or a treacherous collaborator in the Vichy government? This subtle and moving novel, rife with the anguish of hindsight and the irony of circumstance, explores the ties between fathers and sons and the pains of love and duty in a period in European history that is still characterised by wilful denial and hatred.

Crossing the Mangrove


Maryse Condé - 1989
    In the lush and vivid prose for which she has become famous, Condé has constructed a Guadeloupean wake for Francis Sancher.

Spartina


John Casey - 1989
    A kind, sensitive, family man, he is also prone to irascible outbursts against the people he must work for, now that he can no longer make his living from the sea.Pierce's one great passion, a fifty-foot fishing boat called Spartina, lies unfinished in his back yard. Determined to get the funds he needs to buy her engine, he finds himself taking a foolish, dangerous risk. But his real test comes when he must weather a storm at sea in order to keep his dream alive. Moving and poetic, Spartina is a masterly story of one man's ongoing struggle to find his place in the world.

The Chymical Wedding


Lindsay Clarke - 1989
    Alex Darken, devastated by a broken marriage, has retreated to a remote village in the bleak flatlands of eastern England. On the Easterness Estate he meets the volatile, aging poet Edward Nesbit and his vibrant, psychic, young American lover, Laura. Slowly, he is drawn into a strange relationship with them as they piece together the lost studies of two of the present lord's ancestors.In 1849, Sir Henry Agnew and his elegant, brilliant daughter Louisa, were about to penetrate the last secrets of the mystical art of alchemy. They, like the researches a century and a half later, see in the "chemical wedding" of opposites -- sulphur and quicksilver, spirit and matter, male and female, reality and imagination -- a key to spiritual rebirth. As Edward, Laura, and Alex mirror the Agnew story, dreams and symbols, erotic ecstasy and philosophical argument, climax in a vision which, like those before them, they can grasp only as they skirt insanity and tragedy . . . ."Engrossing . . . By the time we start wanting to resist, it is too late. The book already has drawn us too deeply into its six intriguing main characters and its rich gothic folds of plot." -- Chicago Tribune

Dreams of Distant Lives


Lee K. Abbott - 1989
    “This is a writer whose language explores the range of life.”—Bette Peretsky“Large in scope and meaning and unforgettable.”—William Harrison

The Americans Are Coming


Herb Curtis - 1989
    Among the Brennen Siding folk who help them grow up (sometimes none too gently) are Shirley Ramsey, the homely, destitute mother of Dry and his 10 brothers and sisters; Nutbeam, a floppy-eared hermit who falls in love with Shirley; the American salmon anglers buying up the riverfront just as fast as they can; and the local men who guide them in their pursuit of the legendary Atlantic salmon.

The Expendables: Stories


Antonya Nelson - 1989
     Most of the stories in The Expendables are about marriage -- marriage in process, about to be, about not to be anymore, possibly transgressed, and decidedly not transgressed. In the title story, a teenage boy participates in the spectacle of his sister's second marriage. In "Dog Problems," a husband muses about his wife's attachment to her dog, a bond that predates their marriage and will -- he fears -- outlast it. There is the woman in "Affair Life," happily encircled by her husband and child, who still must choose between her marriage and what is not quite yet an infidelity. Ranging in setting from Atlanta to Chicago and Kansas City, from the arid Southwest to the course of a river running through Colorado canyon walls, the stories in The Expendables show our relationship with destiny, whether resisted, invented, obeyed, or forced.

Walking Wounded


William McIlvanney - 1989
    The walking wounded. These are the stories of ordinary people.

War of the Raven


Andrew Kaplan - 1989
    He darts into a steamy tango hall and begs one of the dancers for refuge, but his pursuer is unshakable. The German leaves with the scrap of information that had been destined for the Americans. The playboy was a spy for the Allies, known as Raven.   American polo player Charles Stewart is sent to discover who the Raven’s source was. A secret agent in a time before the CIA, he wants to be on the front lines in Europe, not in the back alleys of Buenos Aires. But the Nazis have engineered a plot to turn Argentina toward their cause—and with it, all of South America. The world’s destiny will be decided in the land of tango, and Stewart, mingling with Argentine high society, will be the one leading the dance.  War of the Raven was selected by the American Library Association as one of the 100 Best Books ever written about World War II.

The Bailey Chronicles


Catherine Cookson - 1989
    No ISBN. Catherine Cookson (The Silent Lady: A Novel). A not so typical family and their charming way of life.

Family Sins and Other Stories


William Trevor - 1989
    

Higher Ground


Caryl Phillips - 1989
    Higher Ground tells multiple stories, set generations and continents apart but unified by their ambitious exploration of themes of race, power, captivity, and abuse.In a slave garrison in Africa, a native collaborator betrays his people and humiliates himself in order to win the favor of white men. From an American prison cell in the 1960s, a black convict tries to impart his vision of race and justice to his indifferent family. And in a dreary city in postwar England, a displaced Jewish refugee watches her youth and sanity slip down the drain of history.Combined and in the skilled hands of Phillips, these narratives take on a devastating power.

Mississippi Burning


Kirk Mitchell - 1989
    A pair of F.B.I. agents came to find out what happened to them. One agent played by the rules. The other made his own. But it wasn't going to be easy for the law to beat the odds in a seething Southern town where old ways died hard and hate killed savagely...

Dream Baby


Bruce McAllister - 1989
    Only when she is recruited for a secret unit of other ESP "talents"—one run by a rogue CIA psychiatrist who may be a "talent" himself—can she become the psychic warrior she needs to be to stop the insanity and save those she loves.DREAM BABY is based on fifteen years of research, interviews with two hundred veterans of three American wars who reported paranormal experiences that kept them alive, and on actual classified contingency plans to end the war in Vietnam that have still not been made public. Winner of a National Endowment for the Arts writing award and finalist for the Hugo and Nebula awards as science fiction.

Homesick


Guy Vanderhaeghe - 1989
    But this is an uneasy reunion. Fiercely independent, Vera has been on her own since running away at nineteen – first to the army, and then to Toronto. Now, for the sake of her young son, she must swallow her pride and return home after seventeen years. As the story gradually unfolds, the past confronts the present in unexpected ways as the silence surrounding Vera’s brother is finally shattered and the truth behind Vera’s long absence revealed. With its tenderness, humour, and vivid evocation of character and place, Homesick confirms Guy Vanderhaeghe’s reputation as one of Canada’s most engaging and accomplished storytellers.From the Hardcover edition.

The Death of Balzac


Octave Mirbeau - 1989
    Many of his anecdotal short stories make the customary tokenistic pretences to be “true,” and there is a considerable gray area between his explicit works of fiction, and articles that represent themselves falsely as reportage. None of his other impostures of that ¬ambiguous kind, however, are quite as brazen or as seductively ¬persuasive in their deception as the triptych making up The Death of Balzac, which, seen purely as a literary exercise, is a masterpiece of sorts, in terms of the persuasiveness of its mendacious execution and the elegance of its narration. It is a gripping and affectively powerful story, artful in its very atrocity; a prime specimen of the work of an exceptional writer.

The Forbidden Stitch: An Asian American Women's Anthology


Shirley Geok-Lin Lim - 1989
    We are Americans now, we live in the tundra / Marilyn Chin --Into such assembly ; A Rose of Sharon / Myung Mi Kim --Excerpts from Proud upon an alien shore / Rose Furuya Hawkins --Go to Ahmedabad ; Muliebrity / Sujata Bhatt --At Muktinath / Chitra Divakaruni --Family photos : black and white : 1960 / Virginia R. Cerenio --The handbook of sex of the plain girl ; Wintermelons / Marian Yee --Heat in October / Kyoko Mori --The club / Mitsuye Yamada --For an Asian woman who says my poetry gives her a stomachache / Nellie Wong --Legacy / Stephanie Sugioka --Father's belt / Shalin Hai-Jew --After delivering your lunch ; Higashiyama crematorium, November 16, 1983 ; The way April leads to autumn / Lynne Yamaguchi Fletcher --On being in the Midwest ; On the fly / Diana Chang --Zhoukoudian bride's harvest / Carolyn Lau --Currents ; Downtown Seattle in the fog / Tina Koyama --On such a day / Song-jook Park ; translated by Hyun-jae Yee Sallee --untitled ; Whenever you're cornered, the only way out is to fight / Merle Woo --San Juan ; Toads mate and father cleans the pool / Myrna Peña Reyes --The song of bullets / Jessica Hagedorn --Duration of water ; Chronicle / Mei-mei Berssenbrugge --Children are color-blind / Genny Lim --Standing in the doorway, I watch the young child sleep ; Eleven a.m. on my day off, my sister phones desperate for a babysitter / Sharon Hashimoto --Learning to swim / Arlene Naganawa --Red / Jean Yamasaki Toyama --Letter from Turtle Beach / Susan K.C. Lee --Sewing woman / Alison Kim --Pantoun for Chinese women ; Visiting Malacca / Shirley Geok-lin Lim. Prose. Yellow mittens and early violets / Kyoko Mori --Tears of autumn / Yoshiko Uchida --Two deserts / Valerie Matsumoto --Autumn gardening / Siu Wai Anderson --A letter for Dar / Susan K.C. Lee --Siko / Marianne Villanueva --Native daughter / Shirley Geok-lin Lim --Gussuk / Mei Mei Evans --Last night / Fae Myenne Ng --The Oriental contingent / Diana Chang --Miné Okubo : an American experience / Betty LaDuke --Paths upon water / Tahira Naqvi --Sari petticoats / Talat Abbasi --To rise above ; My only gods / Anjana Appachana. Art. Obachan Hatta, Kailua-Kona fields ; Obachan Hatta, Kaimalino housing ; Obachan Matano, Honolulu / Lori Kayo Hatta --Self portrait ; Portrait of a Japanese girl ; Rice eaters ; Garden ; Chinese family / Tomie Arai --Back of the bus, 1953 ; American friend ; Echoes of Gold Mountain ; Whirl war / Yong Soon Min --All Orientals look alike ; All Orientals look alike (detail) ; The last supper / Roberta May Wong --Manning the shroud ; A procession / Patti Warashina --Cactus heart ; Fool's play ; Desert ; Piano solo / Judy Hiramoto --Fish jumping / Carol Matsuyoshi --Ring of forgotten knowledge / Elaine S. Yoneoka --Mamala the surf rider ; Samansabadra / Mayumi Oda --Kite ; Baek-do / Myung Kim Oh --untitled / Alison Kim --To Winnie Mandela / Betty Nobue Kano --Carry me back to Old Virginny ; Tatooed geta with two states / Masako Miyata --Girl with vase of flowers ; Cat with flags ; Drawings from Citizen 13660 / Miné Okubo. Reviews. Picture bride / Cathy Song, [reviewed by] Shirley Geok-lin Lim --Asian-American literature : an introduction to the writings & their social context / Elaine H. Kim, [reviewed by] Shirley Geok-lin Lim --Obasan / Joy Kogawa, [reviewed by] Shirley Geok-lin Lim --Dangerous music / Jessica Hagedorn, [reviewed by] Jessica Saiki --What Matisse is after / Diana Chang, [reviewed by] Janice Bishop --In the city of contradictions / Fay Chiang, [reviewed by] Marian Yee --Dreams in Harrison Railroad Park / Nellie Wong, [reviewed by] Marian Yee --Camp notes and other poems / Mitsuye Yamada, [reviewed by] Marian Yee --Thousand pieces of gold / Ruthanne Lum McCunn, [reviewed by] Margo P. Harder --Wings of stone / Linda Ty-Casper, [reviewed by] Marianne Villanueva --Beyond Manzanar : views of Asian American womanhood / Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, [reviewed by] Amy Ling --With silk wings : Asian American women at work / Elaine H. Kim, Janice Otani, [reviewed by] Kit Quan --This bridge called my back : writings by radical women of color / edited by Cherríe Moraga, Gloria Anzaldua, [reviewed by] Julia Watson --Crossing the peninsula and other poems ; No man's grove; Another country and other stories / Shirley Lim, [reviewed by] Phyllis Edelson --Summits move with the tide ; The heat bird / Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, [reviewed by] Shalin Hai-Jew --Cruelty ; Killing floor ; Sin / t Ai, [reviewed by] Shalin Hai-Jew --Dwarf bamboo / Marilyn Chin, [reviewed by] Shalin Hai-Jew --Angel Island prisoner 1922 / Helen Chetin, [reviewed by] Michelle Yokoyama