1980s Literature (English-Language Division)

I didn't participate in the "Worst book you've read to completion" thread, but _Blood_and_Guts_in_High_School_ would probably be it for me. That was horrible book.

(where are all the women?)

(That said, if you want to reframe the literary history of the 80s on this thread, by all means go ahead, cause it looks sort of, umm, necessary.)

Now that I look, though, Lorrie Moore's first books were 85 and 86, and her style is certainly applicable, so:

Lorrie Moore, Self-Help (1985)

Russell Hoban Riddley Walker
Keri Hulme - the bone people
Janet Framer - The Carpathians
Patricia Grace - Potiki
Maxine Hong-Kingston - China Men

maybe :
Iain Banks - The Wasp Factory

(haha curse yr english-language requirement! & my books are in Rotorua/Dunedin/back at the flat so I'll have to THINK)
(& that's a pretty great list)

Why is the Barnes crossed off your list?

If you're reading Auster's New York trilogy, do yourself a favor & read Samuel Beckett's _Molloy_/_Malone Dies_/_The Unnameable_ instead--the same books, basically, but better...

Donald Barthelme's late essay "Not-Knowing" is very much worth reading, even if it's about a sort of petering-out aesthetic.

That Vikram Seth book is AWFUL.

Also big thumbs up on Neuromancer, which was a HUGELY influential book esp. later on. And Iain Banks' _The Wasp Factory_ ditto too.

How about David Foster Wallace's _The Broom of the System_, which was 1987, I think? (And when was "Little Expressionless Animals" originally published? I kind of think of that as a great & vicious parody of "K-Mart realism.")

Any trends missing? I've got: New York celebrity flashes (Ellis, McInerney, Janowitz); the East Anglia British-novels crew (Ishiguro, Tremain, McEwan); the florid Americans (Johnson, McCarthy); the new short story favorites (Dubus, Maupin); the emerging gay lit (Leavitt, White); the Yuppie bestsellers (Updike, Wolfe, Theroux); the post-experimental and Magic Realist novels (Rushdie, Auster, DeLillo); ... I guess more of the K-Mart realism and more on the Jamaica Kincaid line?

Coupland's Gen X is two years too late, otherwise . . .

that's a nexus of something but i don't know what

Then there's my favorite Republican writer, Mark Helprin. Winter's Tale came out in '83. It kind of falls apart at the end, a little bit of transcendence ex machina, but it's a lot of fun up to then. I think I first fell in love with New York City (from a distance) through that book.

And on the Kmart realism tip, you can do no better than Richard Ford's Rock Springs. The title story is one of my favorite pieces of fiction, period. (I very much prefer Ford's short stories to his novels. I think that's true of "Kmart realism" in general.)

Monkeys (1986); Lust and Other Stories (1989)

How would these lists look like for the 90's, 00's, 10's?

I think about this thread a lot because it was the first time I ever considered the idea of a "literary canon" for something then as recent as the 1980's.

One thing that strikes me is the contrast between a past where you had Movements (the romantics, the realists, the decadentists, dada, modernism, Harlem renaissance, all the way up to I guess the beats?) and a present where at most we have Trends. Of course you can easily deconstruct a lot of movements as having been hyped into existence when in reality they were only trends, but whether it was purely marketing or not, the fact remains you used to have groups that hung out and created manifestos and etc. and I think at some point that stopped?

I think it natural for the book canon to take more time to take shape, between the language barrier, the intense marketing, the "trends" themselves, and reading not being the center of conversations. It also goes together with our historical, socio-economic, political understanding. For the 80s and 90s we should be almost there. Names for schools and movements would come afterwards.

For the 80s, and not respecting "English language", I would add:
- Marilynne Robinson - Housekeeping
- Probably something by Thomas Bernhard
- Pierre Michon - Vies Minuscules
- Margaret Atwood - The Handmaid's Tale
- Gabriel García Márquez - El amor en los tiempos del cólera
- Cormac McCarthy - Blood Meridian
- Patrick Süskind - Das Parfum
- Agota Kristof - Le Grand Cahier
- David Markson – Wittgenstein’s Mistress
- Tsitsi Dangarembga - Nervous Conditions

For the 90s
- Ben Okri - The Famished Road
- Patrick Chamoiseau - Texaco
- Haruki Murakami - The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
- W.G. Sebald – The Rings of Saturn
- J. Nozipo Maraire – Zenzele: A letter for my daughter
- David Foster Wallace - Infinite Jest
- Anne Carson – Autobiography of Red
- Ahmadou Kourouma – En attendant le vote des bêtes sauvages
- Roberto Bolaño - Los Detectives Salvajes
- Jumpha Lahiri - Interpreter of Maladies

Is Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried the most canonized novel from this era, as in most taught in schools? Published in 1990 in book form, but the stories within it being published in the mid/late 80s make it fully 80s, with Gordon Lish having his hand on a few of them.

I'd Toni Morrison to the '80s list. Raymond Carver's stories too.

I had to check whether Sandra Cisneros's The House on Mango Street was 80s or 90s (1983!), but it's another one that seems to be a fixture in English classes.