Maus
1991 · 300 pages
Spiegelman drew his father's survival of Auschwitz as a comic, Jews as mice and Nazis as cats, and drew himself failing to get along with the old man telling it.
★ 8.3
Browse by time · decade
1990s
1990 – 1999
Showing 83 books from the 1990s
The Things They Carried
1990 · 256 pages
O'Brien lists what a platoon in Vietnam hauled around, down to the ounce, then tells war stories and takes them back. The invented ones carry the war more exactly than facts could.
★ 7.8
Selected Stories
1996 · 412 pages
Munro set her stories in Ontario towns where a woman's life can turn on something said at a kitchen table. She fits more into forty pages than most novelists get into a novel.
★ 7.7
American Pastoral
1997 · 423 pages
Seymour Levov has a glove factory, a beauty queen wife, and the whole postwar American promise, until his stuttering daughter plants a bomb in 1968. Roth takes a decent man apart.
★ 7.7
Infinite Jest
1996 · 970 pages
Somewhere there is a film so entertaining that anyone who watches it stops eating. Wallace chases it through a tennis academy and a halfway house full of addicts he writes with real love.
★ 7.7
The Savage Detectives
1998 · 592 pages
Two young poets calling themselves visceral realists vanish into the Sonoran desert hunting a woman who published a single poem decades earlier. Forty voices over twenty years piece together where they went.
★ 7.7
Disgrace
1999 · 220 pages
David Lurie loses his professorship over an affair with a student and retreats to his daughter's farm in the new South Africa, where three men arrive. Coetzee offers no comfort and no absolution.
★ 7.7
All the Pretty Horses
1992 · 302 pages
Sixteen years old and landless, John Grady Cole rides into Mexico in 1949 and finds work breaking horses on a great hacienda. McCarthy writes horses and hard country better than any American novelist.
★ 6.8
The Wind Up Bird Chronicle
1994 · 607 pages
Toru Okada looks for his wife's cat, then his wife disappears. He sits in a dry well while the novel opens onto Japan's war in Manchuria and atrocities the country never faced.
★ 6.8
Into Thin Air
1997 · 332 pages
Krakauer climbed Everest on assignment for Outside magazine, summited on May 10, 1996, and came down through the storm that killed eight climbers. He is hardest on his own conduct.
★ 6.8
The Rings of Saturn
1995 · 304 pages
Sebald walks the Suffolk coast, and each mile opens onto herring fleets, the wandering skull of the physician Thomas Browne, a town swallowed by the sea. Essayists have spent thirty years imitating this.
★ 6.7
Titan
The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr.
1998 · 832 pages
Rockefeller controlled ninety percent of American oil refining by the time he was forty, tithed to his church weekly, and saw no contradiction. Chernow makes him legible without absolving him.
★ 6.7
Seeing like a State
How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed
1998 · 464 pages
States can govern only what they can see, so they flatten society into maps and census rows, then plan from the flattening. Scott traces Soviet collectivization and Tanzanian villagization to that one mistake.
★ 6.7
Embracing Defeat
Japan in the Wake of World War II
1999 · 680 pages
Defeated Japan is starving and occupied. Dower tells the years after 1945 from street level, through black markets, pulp magazines, and letters to MacArthur. The Japanese emerge remaking themselves rather than remade.
★ 6.7
Guns, Germs and Steel
1997 · 528 pages
A New Guinean politician asked why white people had so much cargo and his people so little. Diamond answers with barley, cattle, and smallpox, and historians have been writing rebuttals for a generation.
★ 6.7
The God of Small Things
1997 · 333 pages
Twin brother and sister in Kerala watch their divorced mother fall in love with Velutha, a carpenter of the untouchable caste. Roy hands you the catastrophe first and then makes you understand it.
★ 6.7
My Name Is Red
1998 · 417 pages
The dead man narrates his own murder, and so do a coin and a tree, in the Istanbul of 1591 where painting a face as the eye sees it is treated as blasphemy.
★ 6.7
The Age of Extremes
1914-1991
1994 · 672 pages
The twentieth century runs from 1914 to 1991 in Hobsbawm's account, moving through catastrophe, a golden age of postwar boom, then landslide. No later history of the century has displaced it.
★ 6.5
Friday Night Lights
A Town, A Team, And A Dream
1990 · 367 pages
Bissinger spent the 1988 season in Odessa, Texas, where a whole town's self-worth rode on schoolboy football and one black star's ruined knee took his only way out. Odessa answered with death threats.
★ 6.4
Young Men and Fire
1992 · 333 pages
At Mann Gulch in 1949 a wildfire turned uphill and killed twelve smokejumpers and a fire guard in minutes. Maclean, past seventy, walked that Montana slope for years to learn what happened.
★ 6.4