Prof's Choice
• Sydney Lea, A Place in Mind (MacMillan, 1989). Lea taught at Dartmouth for many years, is a fine poet, and is the founder of New England Review and Breadloaf Quarterly. APlace in Mind is a meditative work centering around a river, memory, desire, and man's search for home.
• Howard Mosher, A Stranger in theKingdom (Doubleday, 1989). A tale of crime and racial conflict revolving around a black minister who moves to a small town in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont. Mosher is the inventor of a fascinating literary form, the Eastern. His stories and characters have the mythic qualities of the Old West, but the setting is Vermont.
• Don Metz, Catamount Bridge (Harper & Row, 1988). Metz, an architect turned novelist, has a superb ear for northern New England native speech patterns. This is a book about brothers, land, and work.
• John Irving, Cider House Rules (Morrow, 1988). Set in Maine, this powerful story covers orphanages and abortion. Irving's more well-known TheWorld According to Garp and The HotelNew Hampshire also have strong New England background music.
• Russell Banks, Continental Drift (Harper & Row, 1985). A modern American tragedy. In separate plot lines, a Franco-American furnace repairman in New Hampshire and a young Haitian woman head for Florida to start a new life. When they meet ... well, read the book. It's dynamite.
• Stephen King, Different Seasons (Viking, 1982). The modern master of horror is also very much a New Englander. This book contains four long stories, high in literary quality and away from the horror genre. One, "The Body," is about growing up in small-town Maine. The story eventually made its way into the movies as "Stand by Me"—with the setting moved from Maine to the West Coast.
• E. Annie Proulx, Heart Songs (Scriliner's, 1988). Proulx's debut book of fiction is brilliant, detailing the lives of modern Vermonters living in an uneasy alliance with the land. Proulx is one of those rare authors who write well about either gender.
• Tabitha King, Pearl (MacMillan, 1989). In the tradition of Peyton Place, Pearl runs a diner in a northern New England town. Desire and power emerge as the themes. A good read, steamy in places.
• Robert Olmstead, Soft Water (Vintage, 1988). Hemingwayesque characters in the North Country.
• Carolyn Chute, The Beans of Egypt,Maine (Ticknor & Fields, 1985). "This book was involuntarily researched," Chute says. The theme in this novel is economic, cultural, and spiritual poverty in rural America.
• Mary McGarry Morris, Vanished (Viking, 1988). Nominated in 1988 for a National Book Award, this book has a couple of things in common with Continental Drift: flight from a suffocating North Country atmosphere and a destiny with tragedy.
