1979 in literature
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| List of years in literature |
|---|
| (table) |
This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1979.
- May – The Merchant Ivory Productions film The Europeans is released. Its screenplay by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala draws on the 1878 Henry James novel of the same name.[1]
- October 25 – The London Review of Books is first issued, its founding editors being Karl Miller, Mary-Kay Wilmers and Susannah Clapp. For its first six months it appears as an insert to The New York Review of Books.[2]
- November – Dambudzo Marechera's The House of Hunger wins the Guardian Fiction Prize.[3]
- unknown dates
- K. W. Jeter's novel Morlock Night pioneers full-length fiction in the genre he later calls steampunk.[4]
- August Wilson's Jitney is first produced; it becomes the eighth in his "Pittsburgh Cycle".[5]
New books
Fiction
- Douglas Adams – The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
- V. C. Andrews – Flowers in the Attic
- Jeffrey Archer – Kane and Abel
- Barbara Taylor Bradford – A Woman of Substance
- Octavia Butler – Kindred
- Italo Calvino — If on a winter's night a traveler
- Orson Scott Card – A Planet Called Treason
- Angela Carter – The Bloody Chamber
- Eileen Chang – Lust, Caution
- Agatha Christie – Miss Marple's Final Cases and Two Other Stories
- L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter – Conan the Liberator
- Michael Ende – The Neverending Story (Die unendliche Geschichte)
- José Pablo Feinmann – Últimos días de la víctima
- Thomas Flanagan — Year of the French
- Alan Dean Foster – Alien (movie novelization)
- Carlo Fruttero and Franco Lucentini — A che punto è la notte
- Brian Garfield – The Paladin
- William Golding – Darkness Visible
- William Goldman – Tinsel
- Nadine Gordimer – Burger's Daughter
- Arthur Hailey – Overload
- Stratis Haviaras – When the Tree Sings
- Douglas Hill – Galactic Warlord
- Stephen King – The Dead Zone
- Russell Kirk – The Princess of All Lands
- Milan Kundera – The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (first published in French as Le Livre du rire et de l'oubli)
- John le Carré – Smiley's People
- Morgan Llywelyn – Lion of Ireland: The Legend of Brian Boru
- Robert Ludlum – The Matarese Circle
- Norman Mailer – The Executioner's Song
- Cormac McCarthy – Suttree
- Roger McDonald – 1915: a novel
- Haruki Murakami – Hear the Wind Sing (風の歌を聴け, Kaze no uta o kike)
- Ellis Peters – One Corpse Too Many
- Jerry Pournelle – Janissaries
- Satyajit Ray – Hatyapuri
- Harold Robbins – Memories of Another Day
- Philip Roth – The Ghost Writer
- Scott Spencer – Endless Love
- Mary Stewart – The Last Enchantment
- Peter Straub – Ghost Story
- William Styron – Sophie's Choice
- Trevanian – Shibumi
- Kaari Utrio – Rautalilja
- Jack Vance – The Face
- Kurt Vonnegut – Jailbird
- Elizabeth Walter – In the Mist and Other Uncanny Encounters
- William Wharton – Birdy
- Kit Williams – Masquerade
- Raymond Williams – The Fight for Manod
- Robert Anton Wilson – Schrodinger's Cat
- Tom Wolfe – The Right Stuff
- Roger Zelazny – Roadmarks
Children and young people
- Chris Van Allsburg – The Garden of Abdul Gasazi
- Katharine Mary Briggs (with Anne Yvonne Gilbert) – Abbey Lubbers, Banshees, & Boggarts: An Illustrated Encyclopedia of Fairies
- Raymond Briggs – Fungus the Bogeyman
- Roald Dahl – The Twits
- Colin Dann – The Animals of Farthing Wood
- Peter Dickinson (with Wayne Anderson) – The Flight of Dragons
- Gordon Korman – Go Jump in the Pool
- Elizabeth Laird – Rosy's Garden
- Robie Macauley – A Secret History of Time to Come
- Robert Munsch – Mud Puddle
- Bill Peet – Cowardly Clyde
- Daniel Pinkwater
- Ellen Raskin – The Westing Game
- Jane Severance (with Tea Schook) – When Megan Went Away
- Barbara Sleigh – Carbonel and Calidor
- Angela Sommer-Bodenburg – Der kleine Vampir
- Rosemary Wells – Max & Ruby
Drama
- Bahram Beyzai – Death of Yazdgerd (مرگ یزدگرد)
- Caryl Churchill – Cloud Nine
- David Fennario – Balconville
- Richard Harris – Outside Edge
- Elfriede Jelinek – Was geschah, nachdem Nora ihren Mann verlassen hatte; oder Stützen der Gesellschaften (What Occurred after Nora Left her Husband, or Supports of Society)
- Heiner Müller – Hamletmachine (first performance)
- Mark Medoff – Children of a Lesser God
- Neil Oram – The Warp
- Peter Shaffer – Amadeus
- Sam Shepard – Buried Child
- Martin Sherman – Bent
- Tom Stoppard – Undiscovered Country[6]
Poetry
- Kingsley Amis – Collected Poems
Non-fiction
- Alison Adburgham – Shopping in Style: London from the Restoration to Edwardian Elegance
- David Attenborough – Life on Earth
- Harold Walter Bailey – Dictionary of Khotan Saka
- Ion Biberi – Lumea de azi (World of Today)
- Jerome Bruner – On Knowing: Essays for the Left Hand
- L. Sprague de Camp (editor) – The Blade of Conan
- Joan Didion – The White Album
- Elizabeth Eisenstein – The Printing Press as an Agent of Change
- Peter Evans – The Music of Benjamin Britten
- John Fowles – The Tree
- Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar – The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination
- Eloise Greenfield, Lessie Jones Little, Pattie Ridley Jones – Childtimes: A Three-Generation Memoir
- Douglas Hofstadter – Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
- Henry Kissinger – The White House Years
- Leon Litwack – Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery
- Jean-François Lyotard – The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (La Condition postmoderne: rapport sur le savoir)
- Jessica Mitford – Poison Penmanship: the Gentle Art of Muckraking
- Stephen Pile – The Book of Heroic Failures
- Clark Ashton Smith – The Black Book of Clark Ashton Smith
- Margaret Trudeau – Beyond Reason
- Tom Wolfe – The Right Stuff
Births
- February 4 – Ben Lerner, American poet, novelist and critic
- February 10 – Johan Harstad, Norwegian novelist[7]
- February 27 - Alexander Gordon Smith, British children's and young-adult author
- March 28 – Benjamin Percy, American short story writer
- April 14 – Patrick Somerville, American novelist and short story writer
- May 21 - James Clancy Phelan, American young-adult and thriller writer
- June 28 – Florian Zeller, French novelist and dramatist
- July 14 – Yukiko Motoya, Japanese fiction writer, playwright, theatre director and voice actress
- August 14 - Sayaka Murata, Japanese novelist
- unknown dates
- D.D. Johnston, Scottish political novelist and university lecturer
- Emily St. John Mandel, Canadian-born novelist[8]