Among contemporary writers, Joyce Carol Oates is the unrivaled American master of the short story. She has exploited the genre with such energy, versatility, and resourcefulness that critics routinely compare her not with any of her contemporaries but with past writers such as Chekhov and James.

Her work encompasses a broad range of styles and techniques, from realistic, carefully plotted stories in the tradition of Henry James to bold, metafictional experiments inspired by Nabokov and Borges. Underlying this dissimilarity of approach, however, is a consistent aesthetic program, described by Oates in 1982: “My method has always been to combine the ‘naturalistic’ world with the ‘symbolic’ method of expression, so that I am always—or usually—writing about real people in a real society, but the means of expression may be naturalistic, realistic, surreal, or parodistic. In this way I have, to my own satisfaction at least, solved the old problem—should one be faithful to the ‘real’ world, or to one’s imagination?”

—Greg Johnson, Joyce Carol Oates: A Study of the Short Fiction

Short Story Collections

For a fuller accounting of Joyce Carol Oates’s publications, see: The Glass Ark: A Joyce Carol Oates Bibliography

Posted on 4 By Randy Souther Works Posted in Works Tagged #,
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Randy Souther

I'm a Reference Librarian at the University of San Francisco's Gleeson Library, and I run the Joyce Carol Oates web site, Celestial Timepiece.

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  1. This is a very useful list. I did, however, acquire one collection which is not mentioned here. It’s Small Avalanches and Other Stories, published by HarperTempest, an imprint of Harpercollins in 2003 (copyrighted by the Ontario Press). It has twelve stories, nine of which, including the title story, had appeared previously in other collections. The three stories which I have not found anywhere else are: “Bad Girls,” “Capricorn,” and “The Visit.”

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    • Thanks for your note, Philip. I have “Small Avalanches” listed under the “Young Adult & Children’s” category, because it was collected specifically to be marketed to the young adult audience. This was during the period when JCO began writing young adult novels. And you’re correct that the three stories you mentioned have not appeared in another JCO collection; however, “Bad Girls” was also adapted as a play, and collected in “New Plays” (1998).

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      • Thanks for pointing out your list on the YA section. I do wonder if Small Avalanches and Other Stories should find a place on both lists because I’m not so sure we can sustain a firm distinction in Oates’s canon between YA fiction and general-audience fiction. Of the three stories in Avalanches not found elsewhere, only “The Visit,” with its straightforward lesson of compassion for the elderly (and for parents too), strikes me as firmly leaning to a YA audience; but, while I can see some YA appeal in the circumstances and detail of “Capricorn,” I think both it and (especially) “Bad Girls” have a good deal to interest general audiences too. No doubt what makes something YA- or general-audience-appropriate is a vexed question. Sorry if I’m belaboring it.

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