Celestial Timepiece

By Joyce Carol Oates

THE WHEEL OF LOVE is Joyce Carol Oates’s newest collection of short stories, all of which concern the nature of love: love in its differing forms and visions; in its differing participants and their differing approaches. Almost all of the stories are prize winners, here brought together for the first time in book form.

From some early reviews of THE WHEEL OF LOVE:

“Quite simply, one of the finest collections of short fiction ever written by an American. . . . These 20 stories are the most violent, intense products we have yet had from an especially violent and intense creative imagination. . . . The two finest stories are striking expansions of the limits of fiction, prose poems in which Oates makes her impact in new ways, as did James in The Sacred Fount and Virginia Woolf in The Waves. . . . Oates’s horror is nameless and so savage that to find comparable literary experiences one must go all the way back to Poe and Melville. Her vision is . . . so totally felt and communicated that the reader feels a kind of exultation. . . . On the basis of THE WHEEL OF LOVE, Them, and portions of her earlier work, one must really call Joyce Carol Oates, at the outrageous age of 32, a great writer.” —Library Journal

“Rich, intent. . . taut with awareness. . . . [The stories] brilliantly search for the mystic/mythic folk imperatives in female sexuality.” —Kirkus Reviews

“May well be Joyce Carol Oates’s finest collection of short stories yet. . . the effects on the reader are apt to linger long after he has finished the individual stories.” —Barbara Bannon in: Publishers’ Weekly

Contents

• In the Region of Ice
• Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?
• Unmailed, Unwritten Letters
• Convalescing
• Shame
• Accomplished Desires
• Wild Saturday
• How I Contemplated the World from the Detroit House of Correction and Began My Life Over Again 
• The Wheel of Love
• Four Summers
• Demons
• Bodies
• Boy and Girl
• The Assailant
• The Heavy Sorrow of the Body
• Matter and Energy
• You
• I Was in Love
• An Interior Monologue
• What Is the Connection Between Men and Women?

Awards

• Pulitzer Prize finalist, 1971
• Best American Short Stories, 1970: “How I Contemplated the World from the Detroit House of Correction, and Began My Life Over Again”
• Prize Stories: The O Henry Awards, 1970: “How I Contemplated the World from the Detroit House of Correction, and Began My Life Over Again”
• Prize Stories: The O Henry Awards, 1970: “Unmailed, Unwritten Letters”
• Best Little Magazine Fiction, 1970: “Unmailed, Unwritten Letters”
• Prize Stories: The O Henry Awards, 2nd Prize, 1969: “Accomplished Desires”
• Prize Stories: The O Henry Awards, 1968: “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?“
• Best American Short Stories, 1967: “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?“
• Prize Stories: The O Henry Awards, 1st Prize, 1967: “In the Region of Ice”
• New York Times Notable Books of the Year

Book Covers

Epigraph

Wee can dye by it, if not live by love,
And if unfit for tombes and hearse
Our legend bee, it will be fit for verse;
And if no peece of Chronicle wee prove,
We’ll build in sonnets pretty roomes;
As well a well wrought urne becomes
The greatest ashes, as halfe-acre tombes,
And by these hymnes, all shall approve
Us Canoniz’d for Love:

—John Donne, “The Canoniztion”

Reviews

• Kirkus Reviews, August 1, 1970, p825
• Publishers Weekly, August 10, 1970, p47
• Library Journal, September 1, 1970, p2829
• Saturday Review, October 24, 1970, p36, 65
• New York Times Book Review, October 25, 1970, p4, 62
• Washington Post Book World, October 25, 1970, p4-5
• Time, October 26, 1970, p119
• New Leader, November 16, 1970, p14-15
• Elizabeth R. Fishel, The Harvard Crimson, December 8, 1970
• Life, December 11, 1970, p14
• Nation, December 14, 1970, p636-637
• National Observer, December 28, 1970, p17
• Christian Science Monitor, December 31, 1970, p5
• Best Sellers, January 1, 1971, p429
• Booklist, January 15, 1971, p401
• Listener, October 21, 1971, p550
• Observer, November 7, 1971, p34
• Virginia Quarterly Review, Winter 1971, pxv

Image: “Ferris Wheel” by Rodney Troy