Tag: 1980s Literature

Author: Eudora Welty
Date: 1984
Genre: Essays
Country: USA

In the essays, Ms. Welty explains the inescapable bond between her childhood in Mississippi and her later career as a writer. She shares details from her childhood and her relationship with her parents, Christian Welty and Chestina Andrews Welty. She discusses how these two critical relationships, and other relationships from her childhood, contributed to her literary voice. The book has been praised as revealing “the confluence of past and present as the design of Welty’s life and art by making such intersection the structural principle behind her life story as an artist.”

Author: Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Date: 1981
Genre: Poetry
Country: USA

Showcases the poet’s commitment to political and social activism through his work. Ferlinghetti, who embodies the spirit of the Beat generation, emphasizes the importance of artistic integrity and the avoidance of complicity with government influences. The collection highlights his vision of a collective consciousness aimed at challenging societal norms and advocating for change through accessible, public poetry.

Author: Jeanette Winterson
Date: 1987
Genre: 
Country: UK

The novel depicts a young French soldier in the Napoleonic army during 1805 as he takes charge of Napoleon’s personal larder.

Author: Doris Lessing
Date: 1988
Genre: Short Novel
Country: UK

It describes the changes in the happy life of a married couple, Harriet and David Lovatt, as a consequence of the birth of Ben, their fifth child.

Author: Graham Swift
Date: 1983
Genre: Postmodern
Country: UK

The plot of the novel revolves around loosely interwoven themes and narrative, including the attraction of the narrator’s brother to his girlfriend/wife, a resulting murder, a girl having an abortion that leaves her sterile, and her later struggle with depression. As an adult woman, she kidnaps a baby.

Author: Umberto Eco
Date: 1988
Genre: Postmodern, Encyclopedic Novel
Country: Italy

Bored with their work, three Milanese book editors cook up an elaborate hoax that connects the medieval Knights Templar with occult groups across the centuries. Becoming obsessed with their own creation, they produce a map indicating the geographical point from which all the powers of the earth can be controlled—a point located in Paris, France, at Foucault’s Pendulum.

But in a fateful turn the joke becomes all too real. When occult groups, including Satanists, get wind of the Plan, they go so far as to kill one of the editors in their quest to gain control of the earth. Orchestrating these and other diverse characters into his multilayered semiotic adventure, Umberto Eco has created a superb cerebral entertainment.

Author: Julian Barnes
Date: 1984
Genre: Postmodern
Country: UK

The novel follows Geoffrey Braithwaite, a widowed, retired English doctor, visiting France. While visiting sites related to Flaubert, Geoffrey discovers two museums claiming to display the stuffed parrot which sat atop Flaubert’s writing desk for a brief period while he wrote “Un Cœur Simple“. While trying to identify which is authentic, Braithwaite learns that Flaubert’s parrot could be any one of fifty (“Une cinquantaine de perroquets!”, p. 187) that had been held in the collection of the municipal museum.

Author: Jeanette Winterson
Date: 1989
Genre: Postmodern, Historical Fiction, Fantasy Fiction
Country: UK

Set in 17th century London, Sexing the Cherry is about the journeys of a mother, known as The Dog Woman, and her protégé, Jordan. They journey in a space-time flux: across the seas to find exotic fruits such as bananas and pineapples; and across time, with glimpses of “the present” and references to Charles I of England and Oliver Cromwell. The mother’s physical appearance is somewhat “grotesque”. She is a giant, wrapped in a skirt big enough to serve as a ship’s sail and strong enough to fling an elephant. She is also hideous, with smallpox scars in which fleas live, a flat nose and foul teeth. Her son, however, is proud of her, as no other mother can hold a good dozen oranges in her mouth all at once. Ultimately, their journey is a journey in search of The Self.

Author: Ian McEwan
Date: 1987
Genre:
Country: UK

The story concerns Stephen, an author of children’s books, and his wife, two years after the kidnapping of their three-year-old daughter Kate.

Author: Milan Kundera
Date: 1988
Genre:
Country: Czech Republic

The story springs from a casual gesture of a woman, seemingly to her swimming instructor.

Author: Toni Morrison
Date: 1987
Genre: African American
Country: USA

Set in the period after the American Civil War, the novel tells the story of formerly enslaved people whose Cincinnati home is haunted by a malevolent spirit.

Author: Paul Auster
Date: 1987
Genre: Postmodern, Mystery
Country: USA

The New York Trilogy is a series of novels by American writer Paul Auster. Originally published sequentially as City of Glass (1985), Ghosts (1986) and The Locked Room (1986), it has since been collected into a single volume. The Trilogy is a postmodern interpretation of detective and mystery fiction, exploring various philosophical themes.

Author: Michael Chabon
Date: 1988
Genre: Coming of Age
Country: USA

A college graduate’s defining summer crossing his gangster dad and exploring love, sexuality, and the enigmas surrounding his life and his city.

Author: Nicholson Baker
Date: 1988
Genre: 
Country: USA

It narrates what goes through a man’s mind during a modern lunch break.

Author: Kazuo Ishiguro
Date: 1982
Genre: 
Country: UK

The story of Etsuko, a middle-aged Japanese woman living alone in England, and opens with discussion between Etsuko and her younger daughter, Niki, about the recent suicide of Etsuko’s older daughter, Keiko.

Author: Salman Rushdie
Date: 1988
Genre: Magical Realism
Country: UK

Just before dawn one winter’s morning, a hijacked jetliner explodes above the English Channel. Through the falling debris, two figures, Gibreel Farishta, the biggest star in India, and Saladin Chamcha, an expatriate returning from his first visit to Bombay in fifteen years, plummet from the sky, washing up on the snow-covered sands of an English beach, and proceed through a series of metamorphoses, dreams, and revelations.

Author: Gabriel García Márquez
Date: 1985
Genre: Romance Novel
Country: Colombia

Florentino Ariza has never forgotten his first love. He has waited nearly a lifetime in silence since his beloved Fermina married another man. No woman can replace her in his heart. But now her husband is dead. Finally – after fifty-one years, nine months and four days – Florentino has another chance to declare his eternal passion and win her back. Will love that has survived half a century remain unrequited?

Author: Kōbō Abe
Date: 1984
Genre: Science Fiction
Country: Japan

A recluse known as ‘Mole’ retreats to a vast underground bunker, only to find that strange guests, booby traps and a giant toilet may prove even greater obstacles than nuclear disaster. A science-fiction classic from acclaimed Japanese novelist Kobo Abe, The Ark Sakura‘s Kafkaesque embrace of nuclear disaster and ecological catastrophe is at turns both hilarious and desperate.

Author: David Markson
Date: 1988
Genre: Postmodern, Experimental, Philosophical
Country: USA

A highly stylized, experimental novel in the tradition of Samuel Beckett. The novel is mainly a series of statements made in the first person; the protagonist is a woman named Kate who believes herself to be the last human on earth. Though her statements shift quickly from topic to topic, the topics often recur, and often refer to Western cultural icons, ranging from Zeno to Beethoven to Willem de Kooning. Readers familiar with Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus will recognize stylistic similarities to that work.

Author: Salman Rushdie
Date: 1981
Genre: Magical Realism, Historical
Country: UK

The novel tells the story of Saleem Sinai, who was born at the exact moment when India gained its independence. As a result, he shares a mystical connection with other children born at the same time, all of whom possess unique, magical abilities. As Saleem grows up, his life mirrors the political and cultural changes happening in his country, from the partition of India and Pakistan, to the Bangladesh War of Independence. The story is a blend of historical fiction and magical realism, exploring themes of identity, fate, and the power of storytelling.