1988 Archives - The Vintage Contemporaries Bibliography

James Crumley – The Last Good Kiss (1988)

Bibliographical Description

88.11.W056: Crumley – The Last Good Kiss: A Novel

128 leaves, pp. [8] 1 2-14 15 16-26 27 28-34 35 36-46 47 48-55 56 57-68 69 70-82 83 84-99 100 101-117 118 119-130 131 132-139 140 141-148 149 150-160 161 162-181 182 183-199 200 201-216 217 218-226 227 228-238 239 240-244 [4]

First Vintage Contemporaries Edition, November 1988

Contents: π1a author photo with blurbs, π1b ‘ALSO BY JAMES CRUMLEY’, π2a title, π2b imprint, π3a dedication ‘for Dick Hugo, | good old detective of the heart’, π3b blank, π4a epigraph, π4b blank, 1-244 The Last Good Kiss, χ1a about the author, χ1b- χ2b ‘Also available from Vintage Contemporaries” blurbs

Cover design by Lorraine Louie; cover illustration by Rick Lovell; display typography by Anne Scatto; interior author photo by Lee Nye.

Copies: JDP 1.6

Blurbs

(front cover) The last good mystery. – Rolling Stone
Tough, hard-boiled, and brilliantly suspenseful, The Last Good Kiss is an unforgettable detective story starring C. W. Sughrue, a Montana investigator who kills time by working at a topless bar. Hired to track down a derelict author, he ends up on the trail of a girl missing in Haight-Ashbury for a decade. The tense hunt becomes obsessive as Sughrue takes a haunting journey through the underbelly of America’s sleaziest nightmares.
For fans of private eye novels, this is right up there with the best! – People
What Raymond Chandler did for the Los Angeles of the Thirties, James Crumley does for the roadside west of today. – Harper’s
Potent…utterly right! – Wall Street Journal
The Last Good Kiss carries more weight than any private-eye story since Ross Macdonald’s The Chill. – Rolling Stone
One of the sternest voices in narrative fiction today. – Detroit News

Paul Hoover – Saigon, Illinois (1988)

Bibliographical Description

88.09.W055: Hoover – Saigon, Illinois

120 leaves, pp. [8] 1 2-5, 6 7-21 22 23-31 32 33-38 39 40-55 56 57-69 70 71-80 81 82-87 88 89-96 97 98-108 109 110-119 120 121-139 140 141-153 154 155-167 168 169-182 183 184-198 199 200-211 212 213-229 [3]

A Vintage Original, September 1988

Contents: π1a blurbs, π1b blank, π2a title, π2b imprint, π3a dedication ‘IN MEMORY OF OPAL CATHERINE HOOVER | AND FOR | MAXINE, KOREN, JULIAN, AND PHILIP’, π3b blank, π4a acknowledgments ‘ACKNOWLEDGMENTS | I AM INDEBTED TO | PAT MULCAHY FOR HER ENCOURAGEMENT | AND ASTUTE EDITING; LIKEWISE TO | VERONICA GENG OF THE NEW YORKER. | I WOULD ALSO LIKE TO THANK | MAXINE CHERNOFF FOR | HER EARLY READINGS OF THE NOVEL.’, π4b blank, 1-229 Saigon, Illinois, χ1b about the author, χ2a Vintage Contemporaries list and order form, χ2b Vintage Contemporaries list, continued, with order form.

Cover design by Lorraine Louie; cover illustration by Rick Lovell; designed by Barbara M. Bachman.

Copies: JDP 1.1

Blurbs

(front cover) A superb premier novel, a story brimming with life’s wonder and chance. Filled with sharp and canny, kindly wit. – Larry Heinemann, author of Paco’s Story
Classified as a conscientious objector by his draft board in Malta, Indiana, Jim Holder sets out for Chicago to perform alternative service to his country at a large municipal hospital. The time: 1969. The backdrop: a city where daily life swerves wildly back and forth between lazy days and baseball games to violent demonstrations in the streets. The cast of characters: Holder’s roommates, and their pals (poets manqué, revolutionary hustlers, rich boys turned Trotskyite), and his motley crew of co-workers at the hospital. How many lives can holder touch and still keep his pacifist center in its place? How many bodies can he count—on TV, in the morgue, in the cemeteries of the small towns that surround his own—and still stay clean? In this funny, moving, richly populated novel, Paul Hoover recaptures an era and raises issues still unanswered in our national awareness.
You can call me Holder. It’s one of your basic names like Gold, Paper, and Anxious. Most of us belong to the Church of Peace, which is German Protestant—Midwestern and rural. We refuse to kill anyone with a gun, or with anything else except good intentions [excerpt].

Richard Ford – Rock Springs (1988)

Bibliographical Description

88.09.W054: Ford – Rock Springs: Stories

128 leaves, pp. i-viii ix-x xi-xii 1-27 28 29-49 50 51-191 192 193-235 [9]

First Vintage Contemporaries Edition, September 1988

Contents: i blurbs, ii ‘_{OTHER BOOKS BY} Richard Ford’, iii half-title, iv-v title-page spread, vi imprint, vii dedication ‘Kristina’, viii blank, ix-x table of contents, xi fly-title, xii blank, 1-235 Rock Springs: 1-27 ‘ROCK SPRINGS’, 28 blank, 29-49 ‘GREAT FALLS’, 50 blank, 51-68 ‘SWEETHEARTS’, 69-98 ‘CHILDREN’, 99-108 ‘GOING TO THE DOGS’, 109-148 ‘EMPIRE’, 149-170 ‘WINTERKILL’, 171-191 ‘OPTIMISTS’, 192 blank, 193-214 ‘FIREWORKS’, 215-235 ‘COMMUNIST’; χ1b blank, χ2a about the author, χ2b blank, χ3a Vintage Contemporaries list and order form, χ3b Vintage Contemporaries list, continued, with order form, χ4a- χ5b blank.

Cover design by Lorraine Louie; cover illustration by Robert Crawford; display typography by Chip Kidd; exterior rear author photo by Lee Crum.

Copies: JDP 1.1 (two copies)

Blurbs

(front cover) Stunning….This volume should confirm Ford’s emergence as one of the most compelling and eloquent storytellers of his generation. – Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
Beautifully imagined and crafted stories, by turns heartrending and wickedly funny; and just plain wicked. Richard Ford is a born storyteller with an inimitable lyric voice, and Rock Springs is the very poetry of realism. – Joyce Carol Oates
An enormously versatile writer, a perfect ventriloquist who achieves his end in voices that vary from swamp-deep to mirror flat….Rock Springs is cause for celebration. – Geoffrey Stokes, Village Voice Literary Supplement
The most beautiful book of fiction I’ve read this year…The narrative power, the intelligence behind these stories, is formidable. – Carolyn See, Los Angeles Times Book Review
Few writers have captured the inner emotional reflection of the great Western emptiness, the ringing of desire against outsized requirement as well…This is not just another book of fiction. This is literature. – Roy Pattishall, Atlanta Journal-Constitution
With a single collection Richard Ford has established himself as the leading short story writer in the United States today. – Alberto Manguel, Toronto Globe and Mail

Frederick Exley – Pages from a Cold Island (1988)

Bibliographical Description

88.09.W053: Exley – Pages from a Cold Island

144 leaves, pp. [10] 1–2 3-274 [4]

First Vintage Contemporaries Edition, September 1988

Contents: π1a blurbs, π1b “ALSO BY FREDERICK EXLEY”, π2a title, π2b imprint, π3a dedications, π3b blank, π4a epigraphs, π4b blank, π5a note to the reader, π5b blank, 1 fly-title, 2 blank, 3-274 Pages from a Cold Island, χ1a about the author, χ1b blank, χ2a Vintage Contemporaries list, χ2b Vintage Contemporaries list, continued, with order form.

Cover design by Lorraine Louie; cover illustration by Dave Monteil; exterior rear author photo by Mark Jury.

Copies: JDP1.1

Blurbs

(front cover) Like A Fan’s Notes, this is a glory of a book, a heart’s needle under your skin. – Boston Globe
The second volume in Frederick Exley’s trilogy of autobiographical novels is in every way a worthy sequel to the much-acclaimed A Fan’s Notes. Pages from a Cold Island begins with the death of Edmund Wilson, a devastating event that sends Exley on an obsessive personal odyssey from Alexandria Bay on the St. Lawrence River to a resort island off the coast of Florida to the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. Our hero lurches from one outrageous encounter to another in a chronicle full of irrepressible energy and no-holds-barred confession.
Lunatic, funny, sad, and infuriating. A work of art. – Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, The New York Times
Even better than A Fan’s Notes…marvelously funny. One of the truly remarkable personal chronicles of our time. – William Styron
Exley matters because beneath the surface of a life seemingly given over to too much booze and random sex and aimlessness, there is a true writer, an artist unseduced by fad and fashion. – Jonathan Yardley, New Republic

Harold Brodkey – First Love and Other Sorrows (1988)

Bibliographical Description

88.09.W018: Brodkey – First Love and Other Sorrows

112 leaves, pp. 3–12 13-31 32–34 35-84 85–86 87-114 115–116 117-156 157–158 159-166 167–168 169-177 178–180 181-192 193–194 195-207 208–210 211-223 [3] [The first page with pagination marked on it is page 13; however, the table of contents indicates that the first story, “State of Grace”, begins on page 11. The page numbers listed on the table of contents point to the section title for each story, pages that are unnumbered with a blank unnumbered page on the verso before the story proper begins. Thus we should expect 10 pages / 5 leaves to precede this page 11, when there are in fact only 8 pages / 4 leaves. There are 2 pages missing from the expected 10 at some point in the sequence; to preserve an unbroken pagination sequence, I have treated pages “1” and “2” as missing]

Vintage Contemporaries Edition, September 1988 [i.e. second Vintage Contemporaries edition]

Contents: 3 blurbs, 4 “OTHER BOOKS BY HAROLD BRODKEY”, 5 title, 6 imprint, 7 dedication, 8 blank, 9 contents, 10 blank, 11-223 First Love and Other Sorrows: 11-31 “THE STATE | OF GRACE”, 32 blank, 33-84 “FIRST LOVE | AND OTHER | SORROWS”, 85-114 “THE QUARREL”, 115-156 “SENTIMENTAL | EDUCATION”, 157-166 “LAURIE DRESSING”, 167-177 “LAURA”, 178 blank, 179-192 “TRIO FOR THREE | GENTLE VOICES”, 193-207 “PIPING DOWN | THE VALLEYS WILD”, 208 blank, 209-223 “THE DARK | WOMAN OF | THE SONNETS”; χ1b about the author, χ2a Vintage Contemporaries list, χ2b Vintage Contemporaries list, continued, with order form.

Cover design by Lorraine Louie; cover illustration by Patty Dryden; exterior rear author photo by Jerry Bauer.

Copies: JDP2.1 and JDP 2.2

Blurbs

(front cover) For some years now, Harold Brodkey has been making one of the great brave journeys of American literature. – Don DeLillo
When First Love and Other Sorrows was first published in 1958, Harold Brodkey was greeted as a major presence on the literary landscape of America. Now reissued to coincide with the hardcover publication of a major new collection, Stories in an Almost Classical Mode, these funny, tender, sympathetic stories showcase the unique talents of a modern master.
Brodkey’s literature matters a great deal, for literature it surely is. – The New Republic
A volume marked by quiet immediacy. Some of the stories…have the effect of quiet confidences, highly personal yet carefully contrived. – Chicago Tribune
An unusually gifted writer with an attractive freshness of perception, a fine command of language, and an individual vein of humor. – The Atlantic