The year in prizes
1989 Book Award Winners
19 prize categories represented, and 2 notable books from our curated collection
Kazuo Ishiguro won the Booker for The Remains of the Day and Anne Tyler took the Pulitzer for Breathing Lessons. James M. McPherson won for Battle Cry of Freedom and Taylor Branch for Parting the Waters, his account of the King years.
Winners
In prize order. The prize name opens its full list.
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Breathing Lessons
Maggie and Ira Moran drive from Baltimore to Deer Lick, Pennsylvania, for the funeral of the husband of Maggie's oldest friend, and then drive...
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The Remains of the Day
Stevens has been butler at Darlington Hall for thirty years. In 1956, with the house sold to an American and the staff reduced to four, he takes...
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Spartina
Dick Pierce fishes pots and runs charters out of the salt ponds of South County, Rhode Island, a waterman from a family that once owned land the...
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Billy Bathgate
Billy Behan is fifteen, poor, and fatherless in the Bronx of 1935 when the gangster Dutch Schultz, come to inspect a shipment of illegal beer,...
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Dusk
Dusk and Other Stories was James Salter's first collection of short fiction, eleven stories published by North Point Press in 1988, most of them...
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A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam
Neil Sheehan opens the book at John Paul Vann's funeral in June 1972, then spends the rest of it working back through Vann's career to explain how...
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Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era
Battle Cry of Freedom, the sixth volume of the Oxford History of the United States, covers two decades from the Mexican American War through the...
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Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-1963
Parting the Waters, the first volume of Taylor Branch's trilogy America in the King Years, covers the decade from 1954 to 1963, following Martin...
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Oscar Wilde
Richard Ellmann's biography follows Oscar Wilde from his Dublin childhood, the son of a prominent eye surgeon and a poet mother who wrote under the...
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From Beirut to Jerusalem
From Beirut to Jerusalem is Thomas Friedman's account of the decade he spent covering the Middle East, first in Beirut for UPI and then the New...
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Bones of Contention
Paleoanthropology has produced two kinds of famous stories: the fossils, and the fights, and Lewin's book is the classic account of the fights. His...
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New and Collected Poems
New and Collected Poems brings together four decades of Richard Wilbur's work, from his earliest published poems through new material written in...
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Cyteen
Union is a human civilization built on azi: people grown in vats and educated by deep tape, psychologically conditioned rather than raised, legally...
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The Healer's War
Lieutenant Kitty McCulley is an army nurse in a Vietnamese hospital ward on a rotation that alternates between American casualties and Vietnamese...
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Carrion Comfort
Some people are born with the Ability: push into a human mind, wear the body like a glove, and walk it into anything, including murder, and the...
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Koko
Koko begins with a string of killings across Southeast Asia in the early 1980s. The victims have had their eyes and ears cut away, and each has a...
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A Cold Red Sunrise
In the Siberian settlement of Tumsk, population a few dozen souls and one weather station, a government commissar named Rutkin is murdered on the...
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Joyful Noise: Poems for Two Voices
Paul Fleischman builds this collection around a genuinely unusual form: fourteen poems about insects, meant to be read aloud by two voices at once,...
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Song and Dance Man
Three grandchildren follow their grandfather up to the attic, where he digs out an old bowler hat, a gold tipped cane, and a pair of tap shoes and...
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The Family of Pascual Duarte
Pascual Duarte writes his own life story from a condemned cell in rural Extremadura, working backward through a childhood and adulthood marked by...
What Shaped 1989
1989 changed the map. The Berlin Wall opened in November, the Soviet grip on eastern Europe dissolved within weeks, and in June the Chinese government cleared Tiananmen Square with tanks. In February Iran issued a fatwa calling for Salman Rushdie's death over The Satanic Verses and he went into hiding for nearly a decade. Ishiguro's butler, meanwhile, narrates his own life in a voice that cannot admit what it has given up, and the novel has become the standard against which unreliable narration is measured.
Published in 1989, never won a Pulitzer or Booker
These come from our Never Won a Pulitzer or Booker collection, which explains which prizes we count and the retrospective exception for Fahrenheit 451.
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Curated selectionA Prayer for Owen Meany
John Wheelwright narrates from Toronto in the late 1980s, working backward into his childhood in Gravesend, New Hampshire, where his best friend...
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Curated selectionThe Joy Luck Club
Four Chinese immigrant mothers and their American born daughters in San Francisco narrate sixteen interlocking stories arranged in four sections....