The 1980s began on May 21, 1980, with the release of the film The Empire Strikes Back. They ended on September 16, 1991, when the band Talk Talk issued their final masterpiece, Laughing Stock. In between those two events was a lot of brilliant art, literature, theology and music. No one has ever written a book about the culture of the time.

In his book Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984, Simon Reynolds notes that to be alive and young in the 1980s was to be against nostalgia. I was a high school and then college student living in Washington, D.C. in the 80s. The cultural atmosphere was one that celebrated the latest artists, writers and musicians. Just a few blocks from the small row house I shared with three other guys in Georgetown were two jazz clubs, two art house cinemas, three record stores, and a used bookstore owned by the writer Larry McMurtry, whose masterpiece Lonesome Dove had been published in 1985. In one weekend I could see Ran, or David Cronenberg’s Videodrome, pick up the latest record by avant-garde modernists Siouxsie and the Banshees, see the Replacements at the 9:30 club, and browse paperbacks by the newest and best writers. In 1984 Editor Gary Fisketjon launched Vintage Contemporaries, a paperback imprint of Random House. By the end of the 80s, Vintage Contemporaries would have almost one hundred titles. As Joy Williams once noted, “The line was a mix of reprints and originals, and nearly thirty years later the checklist found in the back of the books reads like a ballot for some Cooperstown of late-20th Century fiction.” There was a culture. We weren’t atomized or become digital slaves.