The Works of Joyce Carol Oates
A future archeologist equipped only with her oeuvre could easily piece together the whole of postwar America.
A Joyce Carol Oates Patchwork
A future archeologist equipped only with her oeuvre could easily piece together the whole of postwar America.
Joyce Carol Oates has “the creative vitality of the great 19th Century writers of fiction; … whose gothic plots are metaphors for states of psychic tension and tell us something essential about the American experience”
“Some find it difficult to believe that anyone so productive could be so good.”
—Ralph Ellison, author of Invisible Man, welcoming JCO as a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, 1978
“Joyce Carol Oates, born in 1938, was perhaps born a hundred years too late; she needs a lustier audience, a race of Victorian word-eaters, to be worthy of her astounding productivity.”
“She has, I fear, rather overwhelmed the puny, mean-minded critical establishment of this country. Single-mindedness and efficiency rather than haste underlie her prolificacy; if the phrase ‘woman of letters’ existed, she would be, foremost in this country, entitled to it.”
—John Updike, Odd Jobs: Essays and Criticism
“A future archeologist equipped only with her oeuvre could easily piece together the whole of postwar America.”
“Joyce Carol Oates has … become one of the elemental forces of American fiction, a daemon from the lower depths. And yet to the museum keepers of national culture, her skill at resisting critical containment must be unnerving. She picks up and discards generic forms at will: re-creating versions of familiar ones (the political thriller, the courtroom drama), and inventing new ones (her brilliant postmodern Gothic romances, for instance). She refuses to restrict herself to one subject, to one stratum of society, one personality type. Indeed, her very productivity stands as a reproach. Over [forty] years ago, Oates confessed to the ambition of putting the whole world in her fiction—an ambition she termed ‘laughably Balzacian.’ It may have seemed so to her. But no one is laughing now.”
—Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Nation
For a fuller accounting of Joyce Carol Oates’s publications see: The Glass Ark: A Joyce Carol Oates Bibliography
Novellas |
Anthologies |
Young Adult |
---|---|---|
The Triumph of the Spider Monkey / 1976 | Scenes from American Life: Contemporary Short Fiction / 1973 | Big Mouth & Ugly Girl / 2002 |
I Lock My Door Upon Myself / 1990 | The Best American Short Stories 1979 / 1979 | Small Avalanches and Other Stories / 2003 |
The Rise of Life on Earth / 1991 | Night Walks: A Bedside Companion / 1982 | Freaky Green Eyes / 2003 |
Black Water / 1992 | First Person Singular: Writers On Their Craft / 1983 | Sexy / 2005 |
Zombie / 1995 | STORY: Fictions Past and Present / 1987 | After the Wreck, I Picked Myself Up, Spread my Wings, and Flew Away / 2006 |
First Love: A Gothic Tale / 1996 | Reading the Fights / 1988 | After the Wreck, I Picked Myself Up, Spread my Wings, and Flew Away / 2006 |
Beasts / 2002 | The Best American Essays 1991 / 1991 | Two or Three Things I Forgot to Tell You / 2012 |
Rape: A Love Story / 2003 | The Oxford Book of American Short Stories / 1992 | |
A Fair Maiden / 2010 | The Sophisticated Cat / 1992 | |
Patricide / 2012 | The Essential Dickinson / 1996 | |
The Rescuer / 2012 | American Gothic Tales / 1996 | |
Evil Eye: Four Novellas of Love Gone Wrong / 2013 | Tales of H.P. Lovecraft / 1998 | |
Cardiff, by the Sea: Four Novellas of Suspense / 2020 | Telling Stories: An Anthology for Writers / 1998 | |
The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Fiction / 1998 | ||
The Best American Essays of the Century / 2000 | ||
Snapshots: 20th Century Mother-Daughter Fiction / 2000 | ||
Best New American Voices 2003 / 2003 | ||
Best American Mystery Stories 2005 / 2005 | ||
The Ecco Anthology of Contemporary American Short Fiction / 2008 | ||
Shirley Jackson: Novels and Stories / 2010 | ||
New Jersey Noir / 2011 | ||
The Oxford Book of American Short Stories, 2nd Ed. / 2012 | ||
Prison Noir / 2014 | ||
Cutting Edge: New Stories of Mystery and Crime by Women Writers / 2019 | ||
A Darker Shade of Noir: New Stories of Body Horror by Women Writers / 2023 |
Poetry |
Plays |
Children’s |
---|---|---|
Anonymous Sins & Other Poems / 1969 | Miracle Play / 1974 | Come Meet Muffin! / 1998 |
Love and Its Derangements: Poems / 1970 | Three Plays / 1980 | Where Is Little Reynard? / 2003 |
Angel Fire: Poems / 1973 | In Darkest America: Two Plays / 1991 | Naughty Chérie! / 2008 |
The Fabulous Beasts: Poems / 1975 | I Stand Before You Naked / 1991 | The New Kitten / 2019 |
Women Whose Lives Are Food, Men Whose Lives Are Money / 1978 | Twelve Plays / 1991 | |
Invisible Woman: New & Selected Poems 1970-1982 / 1982 | The Perfectionist and Other Plays / 1995 | |
The Time Traveler / 1989 | New Plays / 1998 | |
Tenderness / 1996 | Dr. Magic: Six One Act Plays / 2004 | |
American Melancholy / 2021 | Wild Nights! and Grandpa Clemens & Angelfish 1906: Two One Act Plays / 2009 |
I’m of the same era as J.C.O. She has always been my favorite author, though why is difficult for me to explain–difficult for many to understand. Our upbringing is similar, I see, in reading this study of her life. So revealing for her faithful readers–*Invisible Writer* is a remarkable achievement. Ms Oates indeed illuminates from the dark, “simply” doing what she can.
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I am slightly younger than JCO but I believe it is easy to see why she would be your (and my) favorite writer. She describes the way we think more convincingly than any other writer ever has. After reading a story by JCO, a story by any other writer is just a story. I wasn’t really captured by Oates until The Wheel of Love was published. I didn’t really appreciate her novels as much as her stories until the Gothic novels came out in the early eighties. But, beginning with “them” I realized that the novels were a more complex portrait of the same mental processes that occupy her short stories. For about 25 years I have been teaching the first course that we offered at my university dedicated to only one writer. I developed this course because I believe that people will look back on her in a few hundred years as we look back on Shakespeare.
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