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Jamaica Kincaid’s debut book, At the Bottom of the River, is published to immediate acclaim in December of 1983. The thin volume weaves surreal narratives of post-colonial island life, complicated female relationships, and the pervasive longing for self-actualization.
October 17, 1975. Salem’s Lot, King’s second novel is published. The story chronicles what happens in the titular, fictional hamlet in Maine when a centuries-old incubus named Kurt Barlow moves into a long-vacant mansion that the locals consider haunted.
On September 28, 1972, Bambara publishes her first collection of short stories, Gorilla, My Love, chronicling the lives and perspectives of African American characters in both urban and rural settings. A New York Times reviewer praises the stories in the debut collection as “tough, violent, funny, and frantically relevant.”
In September of 1954, two hundred and fifty years after castaway Alexander Selkirk gazed upon his own desert island, William Golding publishes Lord of the Flies about a group of British schoolboys stranded on a tropical island.
Arthur Clarke’s Childhood’s End establishes the amateur astronomer as a major name in the last days of the golden age of science fiction. Clarke is “equally at home in the outer galaxies and the troubled psyche of modern man,” states a review in the New York Times.
James Baldwin’s short story, “Sonny’s Blues,” is published in the summer 1957 edition of the New York City literature magazine, Partisan Review. The story’s narrator is a high school teacher from Harlem struggling to reconcile his relationship with his younger brother, Sonny, a jazz pianist hooked on heroin.
In June of 1939, William Faulkner’s short story “Barn Burning” is published in Harper’s Magazine, marking the first appearance of the fictional Snopes family of Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi. Eleven years later, Faulkner accepts the Nobel Prize in Literature.
These narratives depict a South struggling for identity in the middle years of the twentieth century, peopled with crooked Bible salesmen, earnest preachers, escaped convicts, one-armed grifters, and wayward souls seeking salvation, or at least satisfaction.
Alexie’s short story is first published in the New Yorker on April 21. The story’s protagonist is Jackson Jackson, a member of the Spokane tribe and a homeless alcoholic, who tracks his twenty-four-hour mission to redeem his grandmother’s stolen powwow regalia from a Seattle pawn shop.
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