1990 in literature
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This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1990.
- March – Anton Chekhov's play Three Sisters opens at the Gate Theatre in Dublin with locally born Sinéad, Sorcha and Niamh Cusack in the title rôles and their father Cyril Cusack as Dr. Chebutykin.[1]
- March 20 – Stephen Blumberg is arrested for stealing more than 23,600 books in North America.
- May 24 – Alicia Girón García is the first woman to become director of the Biblioteca Nacional de España.
- c. June – J. K. Rowling has the idea for Harry Potter while on a train from Manchester to London: "I was staring out the window, and the idea for Harry just came. He appeared in my mind's eye, very fully formed. The basic idea was for a boy who didn't know what he was." She begins writing Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, which will be completed in 1995 and published in 1997.
- October – Nicci Gerrard marries Sean French in the London Borough of Hackney, to make up a writing team known as Nicci French.
- Uncertain date – Austrian writer Ernest Bornemann is awarded the first Magnus Hirschfeld Medal for sexual research.
New books
Fiction
- Felipe Alfau – Chromos (completed 1948)
- Iain M. Banks – Use of Weapons
- Greg Bear – Heads and Queen of Angels
- Thomas Berger – Orrie's Story
- Louis de Bernières – The War of Don Emmanuel's Nether Parts
- William Boyd – Brazzaville Beach
- Ray Bradbury – A Graveyard for Lunatics
- John Bradshaw – Homecoming
- A.S. Byatt – Possession (1990 Booker Prize winner)
- Tom Clancy – Clear and Present Danger
- Hugh Cook – The Wazir and the Witch and The Wishstone and the Wonderworkers
- Bernard Cornwell – Sharpe's Waterloo and Crackdown
- Michael Crichton – Jurassic Park
- Jim Dodge – Stone Junction
- Roddy Doyle – The Snapper
- Dominick Dunne – An Inconvenient Woman
- James Ellroy – L.A. Confidential
- Neil Gaiman – The Sandman: The Doll's House (graphic novel; volume 2 of The Sandman series)
- Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett – Good Omens
- John Kenneth Galbraith – A Tenured Professor
- John Gardner – Brokenclaw
- Elizabeth George – Well-Schooled in Murder
- Andrew Greeley – The Cardinal Virtues
- Peter Høeg – Tales of the Night (Fortællinger om Natten)
- Elizabeth Jane Howard – The Light Years (first of the Cazalet series)
- Robert E. Howard, L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter – The Conan Chronicles 2
- Marsha Hunt – Joy
- Monica Hughes – Invitation to the Game
- P. D. James – Devices and Desires
- Charles Johnson – Middle Passage (1990 National Book Award for Fiction)
- Robert Jordan – The Eye of the World
- Jamaica Kincaid – Lucy
- Stephen King – Four Past Midnight and The Stand ("The Complete & Uncut Edition")
- Hanif Kureishi – The Buddha of Suburbia
- Joe R Lansdale – Savage Season
- Elmore Leonard – Get Shorty
- Robert Ludlum – The Bourne Ultimatum
- Ian McEwan – The Innocent
- Patrick McGrath – Spider
- Alan Moore and David Lloyd – V for Vendetta (graphic novel)
- Brian Moore – Lies of Silence
- Alice Munro – Friend of My Youth (short stories)
- Tim O'Brien – The Things They Carried
- Orhan Pamuk – The Black Book
- Robert B. Parker – Stardust
- Rosamund Pilcher – September
- Belva Plain – Harvest
- Terry Pratchett – Eric and Moving Pictures
- Thomas Pynchon – Vineland
- W. G. Sebald – Vertigo (Schwindel. Gefühle)
- Lucius Shepard – The Ends of the Earth
- Danielle Steel – Message From Nam
- James Tiptree, Jr. – Her Smoke Rose Up Forever
- Christopher Tolkien (with J. R. R. Tolkien (d. 1973) and Alan Lee (illustrator)) – The War of the Ring (The History of The Lord of the Rings vol. 3; The History of Middle-earth vol. 8)
- Scott Turow – The Burden of Proof
- John Updike – Rabbit at Rest (1990 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction; 1991 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction)
- Andrew Vachss – Blossom
- Kurt Vonnegut – Hocus Pocus
- Harry L. Watson – Liberty and Power
- John Edgar Wideman – Philadelphia Fire (1991 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction)
- Banana Yoshimoto – Amrita
Children and young people
- Chris Van Allsburg – Just a Dream
- Avi – The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle
- Lucy Cousins – Maisy Goes for a Swim (first in the Maisy Mouse series)
- Gillian Cross – Wolf
- Lynley Dodd – Slinky Malinki
- Rumer Godden – Fu-Dog
- Ken Kesey – Little Tricker the Squirrel Meets Big Double the Bear
- Jean Marzollo – Pretend You're a Cat
- Terenci Moix – Los Grandes Mitos del Cine (The Greatest Stories of Hollywood Cinema)
- Inga Moore – Six-dinner Sid
- Jim Murphy – The Boys' War: Confederate and Union soldiers talk about the Civil War
- Bill Peet – Cock-a-doodle Dudley
- Daniel Pinkwater – Borgel
- Salman Rushdie – Haroun and the Sea of Stories
- Dr. Seuss – Oh, the Places You'll Go
- Diane Stanley – Good Queen Bess: The Story of Elizabeth I of England
- William Steig – Shrek!
- Jacqueline Wilson – Glubbslyme (fantasy novel)
Drama
- Brian Friel – Dancing at Lughnasa
- Declan Hughes – I Can't Get Started
- John Guare – Six Degrees of Separation
- Girish Karnad – Taledanda (Kannada: ತಲೆದಂಡ, Death by Beheading)
- Peter Shaffer – Lettice and Lovage
Poetry
Non-fiction
- Douglas Adams and Mark Carwardine – Last Chance to See
- Bill Bryson – The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way
- Judith Butler – Gender Trouble
- Cheikh Anta Diop – Alerte sous les tropiques: articles 1946–1960: culture et développement en Afrique noire (translated as Towards the African Renaissance: essays in African culture & development, 1946–1960)
- Dougal Dixon – Man After Man: An Anthropology of the Future
- Lawrence Durrell – Caesar's Vast Ghost: Aspects of Provence
- Ryszard Kapuscinski – The Soccer War
- Pierre Lévêque – The Birth of Greece
- Michael Lynch – Scotland: A New History
- Susan Mayse – Ginger: The Life and Death of Albert Goodwin
- James A. Michener – Pilgrimage
- Raphael Patai – The Hebrew Goddess
- Ronald Reagan – An American Life
- Arun Shourie and Sita Ram Goel – Hindu Temples: What Happened to Them
- Barry Siegel – A Death in White Bear Lake
- Gary Snyder – The Practice of the Wild
- Hans-Jürgen Syberberg – On the Fortunes and Misfortunes of Art in Post-War Germany (Vom Unglück und Glück der Kunst in Deutschland nach dem letzten Kriege)
Births
- March 29 – Kiran Millwood Hargrave, English poet, playwright and novelist
- June 20 – Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, Senegalese francophone fiction writer
- July 27 – Victoria Aveyard, American young-adult novelist