On Inspiration and Obsession
Joyce Carol Oates delivered the Robert B. Silvers lecture at the New York Public Library entitled “Is the Uninspired Life Worth Living?”, about inspiration and obsession. “Inspiration is an elusive term. […]
JCO: Overheard with Evan Smith
Robert Frost, family, art, technology, and teaching are all topics of this video interview with Joyce Carol Oates on “Overheard with Evan Smith.” Be sure to watch the separate audience […]
Lovely, Dark, Deep: Stories
Insightful, disturbing, and mesmerizing in their lyrical precision, the stories in Lovely, Dark, Deep display Joyce Carol Oates’s astonishing ability to make visceral the fear, hurt, and uncertainty that lurks at the edges of ordinary lives.
The Sacrifice
New York Times bestselling author Joyce Carol Oates returns with an incendiary novel that illuminates the tragic impact of sexual violence, racism, brutality, and power on innocent lives and probes the persistence of stereotypes, the nature of revenge, the complexities of truth, and our insatiable hunger for sensationalism.
Forthcoming Books
See also: Recently published stories, essays, poems, and other articles by Joyce Carol Oates. Double Trouble An omnibus by Joyce Carol Oates Publication date: February 23, 2026 A double dose […]
Jack of Spades: A Tale of Suspense
From one of the most highly regarded writers working today, Jack of Spades is an exquisite, psychologically complex thriller about the opposing forces within the mind of one ambitious writer, and the delicate line between genius and madness.
The Novels of Joyce Carol Oates
Oates’s achievements are indisputable for anyone who has read her work extensively. Her body of novels … is among the most wide-ranging in contemporary writing. …she is the nearest America […]
The Short Story Collections of Joyce Carol Oates
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 […]
The Poetry of Joyce Carol Oates
Oates’s poetry … forms a body of work on its own merits and does not need to be interpreted only as an adjunct to her novels and short stories, as […]
The Plays of Joyce Carol Oates
In my writing for the theater I always have in mind, as an undercurrent shaping and guiding the surface action, the ancient structure of drama as a sacrificial rite. Drama […]
The Novellas of Joyce Carol Oates
My sense of the novella is that of a rapturously extended prose poem driven by a narrative; the more suspenseful the narrative, the more dreamlike and obsessive the atmosphere of […]
The Nonfiction of Joyce Carol Oates
Essays, articles, memoirs … these forms are wrongly considered unimaginative, or, in any case, considered somehow less significant than the imaginative writer’s ‘real’ work. As if one does not speak […]
The Anthologies of Joyce Carol Oates
Isn’t the implicit promise of an anthology that it will, or aspires to, present something different, unexpected? How ironic, it seemed to me, yet, perhaps, how symbolic, that in our […]
The Works of Joyce Carol Oates
A future archeologist equipped only with her oeuvre could easily piece together the whole of postwar America.
The Young Adult & Children’s Books of Joyce Carol Oates
Young adults do change rapidly; they are enormously impressionable, and subject to influences both good and bad. In this genre, I would never involve adolescent characters in the sort of […]
“Too Young to Marry but Not Too Young to Die”
Songwriter and Novelist Ben Arthur wrote and recorded a song answering a poem by Joyce Carol Oates: “Too Young to Marry but Not Too Young to Die.” Arthur and Oates both performed […]
Celestial Timepiece 