Celestial Timepiece

The Glass Ark is a bibliography of works by and about Joyce Carol Oates covering her entire career, from the 1950s to the present, including 3,568 entries as of January, 2024.

JCO Articles

Articles authored by Joyce Carol Oates: short stories, poems, essays, etc.
(2,301 entries, January 2024)

JCO Books

Books authored or edited by Joyce Carol Oates: novels; novellas; short story collections, essay collections, poetry collections; anthologies; etc.
(249 entries, January 2024)

Criticism on JCO: Articles

Includes literary criticism, interviews, essays, etc. but not book reviews.
(513 entries, January 2024)

Criticism on JCO: Books & Theses

Book-length criticism on Joyce Carol Oates’s work.
(162 entries, January 2024)

Anthologies

Collections that include Joyce Carol Oates’s work.
(343 entries, January 2024)

Acknowledgements

Documenting the work of JCO is a task that would daunt even the diligent cartographer Emmanuel Bellefleur, and I make no claims to his thoroughness; consequently, you may find portions of this bibliography to be variously incomplete, inconsistent, or messy. I hope it is nonetheless useful, interesting, and continually improving.

The Glass Ark incorporates the work of Francine Lercangée and Bruce F. Michelson, whose Joyce Carol Oates: An Annotated Bibliography is the foundation of JCO bibliography. I am hopeful that this bibliography will eventually resemble their pristine work. I make grateful acknowledgement to the terrifically helpful work by Phil Stephensen-Payne and William G. Contento at Galactic Central, and  the creative commons work at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database.

Notes on missing or incomplete items are appreciated: southerr@usfca.edu (please include verifiable information: photo, scan, pdf of item).

For journalists and scholars who find this bibliography to be of use: acknowledgement is most appreciated.

Reference to “The Glass Ark”:

From Broke Heart Blues:

No matter how many times John had seen The Glass Ark, he was never prepared for its strange glittering beauty.

The Ark was a shock to the eye. Then it was a shock, or at least a puzzle, to the mind: what did it mean? why did it exist?—not a single ark, in fact, for Aaron Leander had added to his original vision, but five arks of approxi­mately the same size. Why had an aging man with no prior interest in art, or in craftsmanship, devoted so many years to piecing these fantastical struc­tures together out of discarded bottles, glassware, strips of shiny metal, tin­foil, “gilt,” stones collected from the beach? How did Aaron Leander Heart, who’d been a problem drinker until the last decade of his life, have the skill to create such elaborate, intricate designs? Had his vision really come from God?—but what was “God”? When they’d all lived in Vegas, John’s rakish cowboy-styled grandpa had applied himself to poker playing and gambling schemes that rarely worked out. He’d been something of a ladies’ man. He’d had an Old Testament temperament (as he liked to boast) but no religion— “Belief is for suckers, kid. The game is, to be what the suckers believe.”

Tildie said, “The Ark is very beautiful this morning, isn’t it? After rain it always sparkles in the sun.”

It was one thing to have a vision, John thought, but The Glass Ark was work.

Image: “Shattered” by Trey Ratcliff