A Joyce Carol Oates Patchwork
You begin your journey on so high an elevation that your destination is already in sight—a city that you have visited many times and that, moreover, is indicated on a traveler’s map you have carefully folded up to take along with you. You are a lover of maps, and you have already committed this map to memory, but you bring it with you just the same.
It was early afternoon when Swan reached the brink of the hill that sloped down to town. He gazed at it, at the flat, watery image he had been seeing for so long in his mind’s eye, and it was with an almost careless, brutal gesture that he drew his arm across his forehead.
BY THE NORTH GATE introduces a new young American writer of singular talent.
The tragic hero dies but is reborn eternally in our dreams; the crudity of our desire for an absolute—an absolute dream, an absolute key—is redeemed by the beauty that so often surrounds this dream. One can explain the dream but never its beauty.
With fresh insights into the heart of a celebrity culture hypnotized by its own myths, Blonde is a sweeping novel about the elusive magic of a woman, the lasting legacy of a star, and the heartbreak behind the creation of the most evocative icon of the twentieth century.
The tales in this collection are translated from an imaginary work, Azulejos, by an imaginary author, Fernandes de Briao. To the best of my knowledge he has no existence and has never existed, though without his very real guidance I would not have had access to the mystical “Portugal” of the stories …
Here are stories that are intense, ironic, sinister, and violent, reflecting incisively the mores of a frightening world in which love is complex and difficult, in which evil is ordinary…
Art and arson, the poetry of D. H. Lawrence and pulp pornography, hero-worship and sexual debasement, totems and taboos—out of narrative elements like these National Book Award-winner Joyce Carol Oates, one of the most adroit voices in contemporary American fiction, contrives a startling, suspenseful tale that turns the sunny idyll of New England college campus life into a lurid nightmare.
Jenna Abbott separates her life into two categories: before the wreck and after the wreck. Before the wreck, she was leading a normal life with her mom in suburban New York. After the wreck, Jenna is alone, trying desperately to forget what happened that day on the bridge. She’s determined not to let anyone get close to her—she never wants to feel so broken and fragile again.
Joyce Carol Oates is best known, of course, as a novelist and short story writer. But she is also an essayist and critic, a playwright, and a poet of great distinction. The Time Traveler is a generous collection of Oates’s poetry from recent years.
Christmas: The House Adrift in a wide white ocean of snow. Black December is a ditch winking overhead, but here beneath your parents’ roof the piecrust faces are dimpled by forks and the clock faces are round and smooth as buttons.
Set against the mythic-historic backdrop of Niagara Falls, Joyce Carol Oates explores the American family in crisis, but also America itself in the mid-twentieth century.
“Certainly this paradigm—the woman floundering about in a world of male force—returns to haunt nearly every story in the book, producing an intensity that we haven’t felt in the American art story—and I’m serious about this although it might seem extravagant to say—since the work of Poe”
In The Doll-Master and Other Tales of Terror, Joyce Carol Oates evokes the “fascination of the abomination” that is at the core of the most profound, the most unsettling, and the most memorable of dark mystery fiction.
A little girl who has witnessed a murder; a fragile, simple-minded woman deserted by her husband; a brilliant college student edging toward the brink of insanity; an American intellectual visiting in Poland, so closely identifying with “My Warszawa” that she finds her own sense of identity slipping away.
THE FIRST? That’s easy. My mom’s Bauer semiautomatic snubbie, a .25-caliber “defense weapon” good for six rounds. It was made of stainless steel with a pretty ivory grip and a barrel so short—two inches!—it looked like a toy. When we moved to Connecticut after Dad left us, she carried it in her purse sometimes when she went out after dark, but we weren’t supposed to know about this.
Celestial Timepiece 