1988

Drama and Theater

• David Henry Hwang: M. Butterfly. A French diplomat ruins his career because of his obsession with the actress Song Liling, who plays the part of Cio-Cio-San in Puccini's opera Madama Butterfly. She is his "feminine ideal." In fact, Song is a male and a spy. Hwang deftly explores the ambiguity of gender roles to reveal the unsatisfactory boundaries of societal conventions. It is the first play by an Asian American to win a Tony Award.
• Howard Korder (b. 1958): Boys' Life. Korder's first highly successful full-length play explores the lives of three men just out of college who spend much of their time carousing and chasing women. Yet Korder engages the audience's sympathies even as he exposes his characters and their milieu to biting social commentary. The New York-born playwright's works include Middle Kingdom (1985), Fun (1987), and Wonderful Party! (1989).
• Larry Kramer: Just Say No. Kramer calls this play the most controversial he has written, "a farce about sexual hypocrisy in high places--about people who make the rules that they insist the rest of us live by, and they don't live by these rules themselves." Two of the characters--First Lady and her gay son--show unmistakable resemblances to Nancy Reagan and Ronald Reagan Jr.
• David Mamet: Speed-the-Plow. Mamet's trenchant dissection of Hollywood concerns a producer who is having an affair with his secretary. She persuades him to back a film adaptation of a literary work instead of his usual big-budget action films. The work wins the Tony Award for best play.
• Neil Simon: Rumors. The playwright describes this play as an all-out farce that treats marriage in terms of the gossiping that goes on among friends who delight in rumors of marital discord. The exuberance and deliberate caricature of a society full of rumormongers receives admiring critical notices but fails with audiences.
• Wendy Wasserstein: The Heidi Chronicles. Wasserstein's drama concerning an educated young woman's attempt to reconcile career and family in the second half of the twentieth century is performed off-Broadway before transferring uptown in 1989. Attacked by some feminist critics as "antifemininist" in its portrayal of women and the feminist cause, it wins the Pulitzer Prize and the Tony Award for best play in 1989, making Wasserstein the first woman playwright to win the award in that category.
• Lanford Wilson: Burn This. Wilson's play concerns the accidental death of a dancer, which brings together his young brother and his male and female roommates. The drama's emotional intensity is praised by reviewer J. M. Ditsky, who states that "Nothing quite like it has been encountered since Tennessee Williams departed the American theatrical scene."

Fiction

• Paul Auster: In the Country of Last Things. Set in a devastated apocalyptic future, the novel depicts Anna Blume's search for her brother in a vast city. As details accumulate, it becomes clear that what seems at first to be a foreign setting in the future is actually the urban present, intensified and piercingly examined. Critics praise Auster for his melding of philosophical and aesthetic concerns with the creation of vivid settings and characters.
• Frederick Barthelme: Two Against One. Barthelme's novel presents Edward Lasko's meditations on his failed marriage and his life on his fortieth birthday. Francine Prose calls the novel "by far the most powerful, disturbing, and interior of [his] fictions, inviting us to be flies on the wall of a particularly shadowy and unwelcoming corner of its hero's psyche."
• Elizabeth Benedict (b. 1954): The Beginner's Book of Dreams. Benedict's second novel (following Slow Dancing, 1985) concerns an eight-year-old girl who has to contend with divorced parents (an alcoholic mother and an irresponsible father). Ann Tyler calls the book complex and "morbidly funny," adding that it is surprising that such a sad story is so pleasurable to read. The Hartford-born writer's subsequent books would include The Joy of Writing Sex (1996) and Almost (2001).
• Thomas Berger: The Houseguest. Berger's black comedy concerns the perfect visitor to a summer house who gradually becomes sinister and violent. Reviewer Paul Gray observes, "At his best, as he is here, Thomas Berger can command attention solely as a lonely, insidious voice insisting in a stage whisper, that fiction can be stranger than truth."
• Ethan Canin (b. 1960): Emperor of the Air. Canin's first book, a collection of short stories, becomes a surprising bestseller. It is commended for its craft and for dealing with major themes of aging, growing up, family relationships, and inner conflicts. Canin's first novel, Blue River, followed in 1991 and a second collection, The Palace Thief, in 1994. Canin began publishing stories at age nineteen and would become a practicing physician after graduating from Harvard Medical School in 1992.
• Raymond Carver: Where I'm Calling From. Carver's final major story collection is released shortly before his death. Dealing with characteristic subjects of alienation and failed relationships, the stories continue to show the more affirming tone of Cathedral (1984). It was nominated for both a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Critics Circle Award.
• Frank Chin: The Chinaman Pacific and Frisco R.R. Co. Critics regard Chin as in the vanguard of Asian American literature, and many stories in this collection had received awards. They are set in San Francisco's Chinatown where Chin's characters lead isolated lives--not only from whites but from the different generations of Chinese as well. It evokes themes of death and decay, for Chin's characters fail to break through to a larger society, which views them as stereotypes.
• Don De Lillo: Libra. De Lillo's novel connects Lee Harvey Oswald with characters from De Lillo's earlier work to form a national allegory. The novel, despite its complexity, is a popular success and transforms the writer from a cult figure to a mainstream author with a considerable literary reputation.
• Pete Dexter (b. 1943): Paris Trout. A hardware store owner and loan shark to the black community in Cotton Point, Georgia, goes to prison after he kills two people in an effort to collect an outstanding debt. He bribes his way out of prison and goes crazy, becoming, in reviewer Richard Eder's words, "primal evil, all will and no humanity." The novel wins the National Book Award. Dexter is known for his expert blend of violence and humor, evocative dialogue, and shrewd use of local color.
• Louise Erdrich: Tracks. As in Erdrich's other novels, in this book Native Americans strive to nurture traditions that erode in the confrontation with majority white culture. Catholicism represents a countertradition--and in this novel it captures the imagination of Pauline, a young Native American torn between loyalty to her people's beliefs and Catholic views.
• Thomas Harris (b. 1940): The Silence of the Lambs. Harris's thriller about the FBI's hunt for a serial killer features the diabolical Hannibal Lecter, who has been described as the "best literary villain since Iago." After a popular and critically acclaimed 1991 film adaptation, Harris would produce the sequel, Hannibal, in 1999. The Mississippi-born writer worked as a police reporter in Waco, Texas.
• John Hawkes: Whistlejacket. Hawkes's novel alternates between scenes from the life of nineteenth-century artist George Stubbs and the modern Van Fleet family, owners of Stubbs's portrait of the title figure. Patrick McGrath calls it an "interesting and tantalizing book" that is "quite strong enough to maintain John Hawkes's position as the most consistently interesting writer, in terms of formal inventiveness, intelligence, and the sheer grace of the prose, at work in the United States today."
• William Kennedy: Quinn's Book. Kennedy widens and deepens his exploration of Albany, New York, by chronicling the career of Irishman Daniel Quinn, who arrives in 1849. The novel is praised by critic J. K. Van Dover for adding a "crucial new dimension to Kennedy's portrayal of the paradigmatic Irish-American experience of America."
• Barbara Kingsolver (b. 1955): The Bean Trees. Kingsolver's impressive debut concentrates on the plight of women in contemporary society. The novel is narrated by Taylor Greer, a Kentucky native, who leaves homes to seek her fortune in the West, adopting along the way a Cherokee child, Turtle. Kingsolver, born in Annapolis, Maryland, and educated at DePauw University and the University of Arizona, is a master of describing places, both Kentucky and Arizona, and her novel grows in strength as her characters get to know one another.
• Joseph McElroy: The Letter Left to Me. The letter in question is from a father, recently deceased, to his son. It makes a profound impression--so much so that it eventually is distributed far and wide, including to the boy's New England college, where the freshman class is given it for analysis. Responding enthusiastically to McElroy's profound meditation on the significance of writing, critics place him in the tradition of great novelists who have critiqued the nature of their own work.
• Larry McMurtry: Anything for Billy. This novel, set on the nineteenth-century frontier, satirizes legends about Billy the Kid. His story is related by an easterner whose imagination has been distorted by dime novels about the Old West. Critics praise McMurtry's powerful evocation of violence laced with manic, surrealistic humor.
• Bharati Mukherjee (b. 1940): The Middleman and Other Stories. Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, this collection of stories treats immigrants from various lands who embrace their new lives in America with gusto. Born in Calcutta, Mukherjee came to the United States to study at the Iowa Writer's Workshop in 1963.
• Gloria Naylor: Mama Day. Naylor's novel, set in an all-black island community founded by a slave off the coast of South Carolina and Georgia, is one of the writer's most ambitious works, evoking comparisons with Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987) for likewise showing the haunted past of a family and community.
• Reynolds Price: Good Hearts. The book revisits the characters Rosacoke Mustian and Wesley Beavers from Price's first novel, A Long and Happy Life (1962). After twenty-eight years of marriage, Wesley abandons Rosacoke, whose rape becomes a catalyst in reuniting her extended family. According to reviewer Jay Tolson, "Using the still powerful idiom of the rural South, Price has brilliantly inscribed the story of the modern-day Pilgrim's Progress. He is our age's Bunyan."
• E. Annie Proulx (b. 1935): Heart Songs and Other Stories. Proulx's first book, a collection of stories dealing with backwoods communities in northern New England, receives little attention until reissued in 1994, when it would gain widespread critical acclaim for its power and stylistic mastery. Of French-Canadian descent, Proulx was born in Connecticut and did doctoral work in history at Concordia University in Montreal.
• James Salter: Dusk and Other Stories. This collection of stories is populated by upper-middle-class characters in New York City, Long Island, and Europe who are coping with divorce, alcoholism, and career frustrations. The book wins the PEN/Faulkner Award and prompts several reviewers to proclaim Salter the most underrated of underrated writers.
• Thomas Savage: The Corner of Rife and Pacific. This novel is set in the West, one of Savage's favorite locations, and deals with a family struggling to overcome one disaster after another. Critics note his poignant and compassionate treatment of these characters and the graceful, tightly constructed plot.
• Isaac Bashevis Singer: The Death of Methuselah, and Other Stories. The last of Singer's story collections published during his lifetime deals with the danger of desire in stories set in eastern Europe, New York City, Florida, and ancient Babylon. Singer also publishes The King of the Fields, a novel set in prehistoric Poland, which deals with the conflict between farmers and hunter-gatherers in a parable of modern civilization.
• Jane Smiley: The Greenlanders. Smiley has called this massive historical novel, chronicling the destruction of the Norse settlements in Greenland in the tenth century, "the true masterpiece" among her works.
• Anne Tyler: Breathing Lessons. Tyler's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel relates the story of a marriage of twenty-eight years. Some critics complain that it is "formula" Tyler, filled with her customary parade of eccentric characters and odd events. Others, however, hail her treatment of marriage and middle age in a work that interweaves memory and nostalgia.
• John Updike: S. Like his previous novel, Roger's Version (1986), S. continues Updike's exploration of the adulterous triangle--in the spiritual and sexual terms set out by The Scarlet Letter. Critics call this novel the capstone of Updike's brilliant trilogy of novels about modern marriage, sexuality, and spiritual striving, initiated by A Month of Sundays (1975).
• Edmund White: The Beautiful Room Is Empty. In the sequel to A Boy's Own Story, White portrays his hero's college years and builds toward the climax of the novel--the Stonewall riots (1969), which initiated the gay rights movement and the development of gay literature as a separate area of study. White himself had been radicalized by this event (he was there when police raided the Stonewall Inn and brutally arrested homosexuals), and the novel reflects much of his own experience.
• Hisaye Yamamoto (b. 1921): Seventeen Syllables and Other Stories. This work collects four decades of writing by this much-admired Japanese American author. Including essays as well as stories, it begins with her first major publication, an essay on sexual harassment that had appeared in Partisan Review in 1948. Yamamoto, who claims "my output is minimal," took twenty years to write "Educational Opportunities."

Literary Criticism and Scholarship

• Wayne C. Booth: The Company We Keep: An Ethics for Fiction. Booth calls for an ethical engagement with fiction in which criticism should be a conversation about "kinds of personal and social goods that fiction can serve or destroy."
• Henry Louis Gates Jr. (b. 1950): The Signifying Monkey: Toward a Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism. Gates, professor of English and African American studies at Cornell, argues that more critical attention should be paid to black writers' use of language rather than just their evocation of the black experience. Gates demonstrates his point by analyzing the linguistic patterns of African American texts, finding a form of signification--wordplay--that is unique in American writing, relying on the black vernacular as well as on traditional figures of speech such as metaphor, irony, understatement, and exaggeration.
• Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar: No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century - Volume I: The War of the Words. The authors publish the first volume of a trilogy exploring "the interactions in the twentieth century between male and female literary traditions and figures." It would be followed by Sexchanges (1989) and Letters from the Front (1994).
• Alfred Kazin: A Writer's America: Landscape in Literature. Kazin organizes an approach to American literature through the impact of place on the literary imagination of writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Henry James, Robert Frost, and Ernest Hemingway.
• Robert Pinsky: Poetry and the World. Pinsky's second collection of criticism explores the impact of words on his life and the importance of the literary tradition. Reviewer Amy Edith Johnson praises its "jargon-free analyses" and commitment to larger issues, which confirm "the dignity and creative dimensions of... the function of criticism at the present time."

Nonfiction

• Taylor Branch (b. 1947): Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-1963. Branch, a journalist for Harper's and Esquire, wins the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for his biographical social history, which reviewer Jim Miller calls "a landmark achievement and a paradigm of the new American history at its best." Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years, 1963-1965 would follow in 1997.
• James M. McPherson (b. 1936): Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era. Critics describe this Pulitzer Prize-winning sixth volume in The Oxford History of the United States as the best single-volume treatment of the Civil War available. McPherson is a professor of history at Princeton.
• Paul Monette (1945-1999): Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memory. The first volume of Monette's acclaimed memoirs describes his relationship with a longtime lover who died of AIDS. Monette's account of growing up gay, Becoming a Man, would follow in 1992.
• Arnold Rampersad: The Life of Langston Hughes: I Dream a World, 1941-1967. The second volume and conclusion of an authoritative biography of the great African American writer. Poet Rita Dove speaks for many reviewers when she calls Rampersad's book a "superlative study of... the most prominent Afro-American poet of our century."
• Philip Roth: The Facts. While many of Roth's novels seem transparently autobiographical, with his writer/hero Zuckerman a stand-in for Roth himself, this book purports--as its title suggests--to provide a straightforward, no-frills account of the author's life. But Roth is cleverly selective, implying with his assessment of his character Zuckerman that fact and fiction are inextricably connected. Indeed, critics view the work as a brilliant logical extension of his mature exploration of storytelling and history.
• Neil Sheehan (b. 1936): A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam. Sheehan spent nearly sixteen years researching this study of the Vietnam War, prompting his friends to call him the war's last casualty. The book looks at events from the perspective of a lieutenant colonel and top military adviser whose contradictions become representative of American involvement.
• Susan Sontag: AIDS and Its Metaphors. The book serves as a kind of coda to her earlier work, Illness as Metaphor (1978), showing Sontag's attempt to demystify--or, as she says, "dedramatize"--an apparently incurable disease. The work is criticized by AIDS activists, who decry Sontag's cool, reserved tone.

Poetry

• Jimmy Santiago Baca (1952-): Martin and Meditations on the South Valley. The winner of the American Book Award follows the adventures of an Apache man who travels across the United States. Baca began writing poetry after teaching himself to read while incarcerated in an Arizona prison on drug charges. His work is remarkable for its lack of bitterness, since, unlike many other prison poets, he does not write so much about human suffering as about joy and triumph.
• Judith Baumel (b. 1956): The Weight of Numbers. Winner of the Walt Whitman Award, Baumel's collection is noteworthy for its impressive shifts between different kinds of diction and rhythm. "Speaking in Blizzards" begins with a matter-of-fact tone, then switches to a kind of grand formality associated with the early verse of Robert Lowell. Critics admire the New York-born poet's rigorous sense of composition and her "athletic intellect."
• Donald Hall: The One Day. Critics note the careful structure of this volume, which is built on a dialogue of male and female voices, mediated at times by an omniscient narrator--as in "Shrubs Burnt Away." Hall explores what a house means to a man and a woman in terms of the history of their relationship, with each room signifying an aspect of their personal history.
• Garrett Hongo (b. 1951): The River of Heaven. Hongo's second collection, following Yellow Light (1982), wins the Lamont Poetry Prize and receives a Pulitzer Prize nomination. The poems address the experiences of Asian Americans, mixing personal memory, cultural history, and narrative elements. Born in Hawaii of Japanese heritage, Hongo was the founder and director of the Seattle theater group Asian Exclusion Act (1975-1977).
• Richard Wilbur: New and Collected Poems. Wilbur earns his second Pulitzer Prize for this collection, which includes a tribute to W. H. Auden and "On Freedom's Ground," the lyrics for a cantata by William Schuman to commemorate the refurbishing of the Statue of Liberty.
• Charles Wright: Zone Journals. Continuing his exploration of the poetic journal begun in Five Journals (1986), Wright, in the words of reviewer Helen Vendler, weaves "diverse thematic threads into a single autobiographical fabric."