Best of
Roman

1989

Rain Man


Leonore Fleischer - 1989
    However the money goes to someone he doesn't know - a man who lives in hospital and is the brother Charlie never knew he had. The two meet and so starts a surprising new life for both of them. A deeply emotional story and also a major film starring Tom Cruise and Dustin Hoffman.

Virgins of Paradise


Barbara Wood - 1989
    A fascinating portrait of an ancient nation mired in superstition, magic, and mythology as it emerges into the modern era.

28 Barbary Lane: The Tales of the City Omnibus


Armistead Maupin - 1989
    The reader starts playing the old childhood game of 'Just one more chapter and I'll turn out the lights,' only to look up and discover it's after midnight.”—Los Angeles Times Book Review Originally serialized in the San Francisco Chronicle, Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City (1978), More Tales of the City (1980), and Further Tales of the City (1982) afforded a mainstream audience of millions its first exposure to straight and gay characters experiencing on equal terms the follies of urban life.Among the cast of this groundbreaking saga are the lovelorn residents of 28 Barbary Lane: the bewildered but aspiring Mary Ann Singleton, the libidinous Brian Hawkins; Mona Ramsey, still in a sixties trance, Michael "Mouse" Tolliver, forever in bright-eyed pursuit of Mr. Right; and their marijuana-growing landlady, the indefatigable Mrs. Madrigal.Hurdling barriers both social and sexual, Maupin leads them through heartbreak and triumph, through nail-biting terrors and gleeful coincidences. The result is a glittering and addictive comedy of manners that continues to beguile new generations of readers.

Dina's Book


Herbjørg Wassmo - 1989
    Beautiful, eccentric, and tempestuous, Dina carries a terrible burden: at the age of five she accidentally causes her mother's death. Blamed by her father and banished to a farm, she grows up untamed and untaught. Nobody leads the child through her grief, and the accident remains a gruesome riddle of death. Her guilt becomes her obsession: her unforgiving mother haunts her every day.After several years of exile, and at the insistence of the local pastor, her father takes Dina back. By now she has become like a wolf cub. Her father has remarried, to a younger woman whom she detests, and a strict discipline begins. A tutor is brought in; coarse language is replaced by polite conversation, climbing to the top of the trees by music. But the efforts have little effect. Private and closely guarded, Dina nonetheless is able to manipulate those around her, while her unconventional behavior and erotic power both enchant and ensnare.At sixteen Dina is married off to wealthy fifty-year-old landowner Jacob, a friend of her father who has fallen completely under her spell. Jacob dies under mysterious circumstances, and Dina becomes mute. When finally she emerges from her trauma, she runs Jacob's estate with an iron hand. But still Dina wrestles with her two unappeased ghosts: Jacob and her mother. Until one day a mysterious stranger, the Russian wanderer Leo, enters her life and changes it forever.

Ay Sarayı


Paul Auster - 1989
    Against the mythical dreamscape of America, Auster brilliantly weaves the bizarre narrative of Marco Stanley Fogg, an orphan searching for love, his father, and the key to the riddle of his origin and fate.

Moon Palace


Paul Auster - 1989
    As Marco sets out on a journey from the canyons of Manhattan to the deserts of Utah, he encounters a gallery of characters and a series of events as rich and surprising as any in modern fiction.Beginning during the summer that men first walked on the moon, and moving backward and forward in time to span three generations, Moon Palace is propelled by coincidence and memory, and illuminated by marvelous flights of lyricism and wit. Here is the most entertaining and moving novel yet from an author well known for his breathtaking imagination.

The Silver Pigs


Lindsey Davis - 1989
    She confesses to him that she is fleeing for her life, and Falco makes the rash decision to rescue her—a decision he will come to regret. For Sosia bears a heavy burden: as heavy as a pile of stolen Imperial ingots, in fact. Matters just get more complicated when Falco meets Helena Justina, a Senator's daughter who is connected to the very same traitors he has sworn to expose. Soon Falco finds himself swept from the perilous back alleys of Ancient Rome to the silver mines of distant Britain—and up against a cabal of traitors with blood on their hands and no compunction whatsoever to do away with a snooping plebe like Falco….The Silver Pigs is Lindsey Davis' classic novel which introduced readers around the world to Marcus Didius Falco, a private informer with a knack for trouble, a tendency for bad luck, and a frequently inconvenient drive for justice.

Bone


George C. Chesbro - 1989
    Mute and without memory, he nonetheless stands out from the drifting crowd, perhaps because of the ancient human femur he carries everywhere. But when a series of gruesome murders strikes the homeless, the police are convinced Bone is involved, and Bone must desperately piece together his lost past.

The Phantom of the Movies' VIDEOSCOPE: The Ultimate Guide to the Latest, Greatest, and Weirdest Genre Videos


Joe Kane - 1989
    Now he shares his vast knowledge of genre-film culture in this fascinating collection. Kane has compiled more than twenty-five hundred reviews of horror, camp, sexploitation, sci-fi, thriller, and action films, along with exclusive interviews with some of the industry's giants -- Jackie Chan, Pam Grier, Wes Craven, John Waters, and John Carpenter, to name just a few.Kane's writing is irreverent, informative, incisive, and entertaining. Not only is The Phantom of the Movies'® VideoScope chock-full of reviews and interviews, it also includes insightful sidebars covering video trends, complete ordering information, DVD availability, and Internet resources. This is the ultimate video guide that all movie buffs must have in their collections.

Roman Aqueducts and Water Supply (Duckworth Archaeology)


A. Trevor Hodge - 1989
    Trevor Hodge introduces us to these often neglected aspects of what the Romans themselves regarded as one of the greatest glories of their civilisation. Roman Aqueducts is now available for the first time in paperback, brought completely up-to-date with a new Preface and additional Bibliography.

Athenian Red Figure Vases: The Classical Period (World of Art)


John Boardman - 1989
    Discusses the historical and artistic aspects of Athenian red figure vases of the classical period through the fourth century.

The Centurion


Jan de Hartog - 1989
    Martin Harinxma brings a new level of understanding to his research on the Roman Empire in Britain when he discovers that his hobby of divining water also allows him to travel back in time.

Argonautica, Book 3


Apollonius of Rhodes - 1989
    It tells of Jason's successful expedition with the Argonauts to recover the Golden Fleece from Colchis on the Black Sea. Medea, a young Colchian princess, falls in love with Jason and helps him survive the ordeals imposed by her father. The description of Medea's emotional suffering exercised a profound influence on subsequent writers and especially on Virgil in his account of Dido and Aeneas. Dr. Hunter's edition provides a comprehensive introduction to the poem and its poet, an up-to-date text of Book III and a full commentary that discusses the problems of language and translation. He also delves into the poetic meaning of the work and Apollonius' creative use of the Homeric heritage.

Byzantium


Michael Ennis - 1989
    It features Haraldr Sigurdarson, a Viking prince, who gradually learns the ways of the cosmopolitan court, and rises to heights he never dreamed of.

The Woman and the Lyre: Women Writers in Classical Greece and Rome


Jane McIntosh Snyder - 1989
    and ending with Hypatia and Egeria in the fifth century A.D., Jane McIntosh Snyder listens carefully to the major women writers of classical Greece and Rome, piecing together the surviving fragments of their works into a coherent analysis that places them in their literary, historical, and intellectual contexts.While relying heavily on modern classical scholarship, Snyder refutes some of the arguments that implicitly deny the power of women’s written words—the idea that women’s experience is narrow or trivial and therefore automatically inferior as subject matter for literature, the notion that intensity in a woman is a sign of neurotic imbalance, and the assumption that women’s work should be judged according to some externally imposed standard.The author studies the available fragments of Sappho, ranging from poems on mythological themes to traditional wedding songs and love poems, and demonstrates her considerable influence on Western thought and literature.An overview of all of the authors Snyder discusses shows that ancient women writers focused on such things as emotions, lovers, friendship, folk motifs, various aspects of daily living, children, and pets, in distinct contrast to their male contemporaries’ concern with wars and politics.Straightforwardness and simplicity are common characteristics of the writers Snyder examines. These women did not display allusion, indirection, punning and elaborate rhetorical figures to the extent that many male writers of the ancient world did.Working with the sparse records available, Snyder strives to place these female writers in their proper place in our heritage.

Sunday's Child


Ingmar Bergman - 1989
    The protagonist of this touching and deeply affecting novel is a young boy named Pu, a Sunday's child. Pu is eight and his brother Dag ten when their mother rents Pastor Dahlberg's ramshackle house for the summer. It is the first summer the family has not stayed with their grandmother in her comfortable home a few miles away, but Pu's father has let it be known that if he is to join them for vacation, it will have to be in a house of their own. Sunday's Children is the story of that summer, of the magical landscape and the people who pass through it: Pu's overbearing grandmother, his drunken uncle, the beautiful tutor, his terrorizing brother, and his feuding parents. Pu hates his brother's endless teasing, enjoys holding his baby sister and playing with trains, adores his mother, worships yet fears his father. But Pu also thinks about death, dwells on the strange stories of ghosts the servant girls tell, and broods about the painful arguments between his parents. As the novel opens, Pu, his heart full of high expectations, is on his way to the railroad station to meet his father. But much to Pu's chagrin, when his father arrives, he is restless, absent-minded, and melancholy. They take a trip together, a journey that at times brings them closer but ultimately deepens the growing darkness between them. The author enriches the reader's sense of that relationship through a series of "flashbacks to the future, " in which the protagonist visits his ill and dying father in later years. As a child Pu approached his father with completeadoration. As an adult, with distance, he brought anger. But in the end he brings understanding. In his review of the film adapted from Bergman's novel, Vincent Canby called it "a gorgeous, richly poignant memoir, so full of mirrors, so magically placed, that [it] manages to reflect the f

Cottage on a Cliff


Derek Tangye - 1989
    

Who's Who in Roman Britain and Anglo-Saxon England (Who's Who in British History)


Richard Fletcher - 1989
    are succinctly described; Boudicca, the Iceni queen whose rebellion nearly ended the Roman occupation only seventeen years after the Emperor Claudius's conquest. Later figures are Bede, "the earliest and most influential of all English historians"; and King Canute, the Danish monarch famed for his failure to hold back the sea actually a demonstration to his sycophantic courtiers of the weakness of his powers compared to God's.

The Suspended Passion: Interviews


Marguerite Duras - 1989
    This volume of interviews—hailed on its French publication as Duras’s “secret confession”—offers readers a rich vein of new insight into her work, opinions, life, and relationships. The interviews that make up the book were conducted in 1987, when Italian journalist Leopoldina Pallotta della Torre met the seventy-three-year-old Duras at her Paris flat and convinced her to sit for a series of conversations. The resulting book was published in Italian in 1989, but it somehow failed to attract a French publisher, and it was quickly forgotten. Nearly a quarter of a century later, however, the book was rediscovered and translated into French, and, it has now become a sensation. In its revealing pages, Duras speaks with extraordinary freedom about her life as a writer, her relationship to cinema, her friendship with Mitterand , her love of Chekhov and football, and, perhaps most significantly, her childhood in pre-war Vietnam, the experiences that propelled her most famous novel, The Lover. A true literary event, finally available in English, The Suspended Passion is a remarkable document of an extraordinary literary life.

O Sorriso do Lagarto


João Ubaldo Ribeiro - 1989
    By the author of An Invincible Memory.