Call For Papers: Intertextuality in the Work of Joyce Carol Oates
We invite scholars to submit paper proposals on any aspect of Oates studies for our panel at the annual ALA conference in Chicago. Proposal deadline: January 10, 2026.
Fox: A Novel
Oates owns the realm of genre-fluid fiction that focuses on the physical and psychological vulnerabilities of young women. Her latest foray explores the disturbing and chilling milieu of pedophilia from the viewpoints of predator and prey, protector and victim, exposing how easily people can be misled and the devastating consequences of misplaced trust. Menacing, mesmerizing, and thoroughly provocative. —Carol Haggas, Booklist
Flint Kill Creek: Stories of Mystery and Suspense
“The proximity of love and hate—or at least attraction and violence—animate most of the tales, each a compact gem of unease.”
First Love: A Gothic Tale
In Oates’ dreamlike, utterly convincing world, the strong brutalize the weak simply because they can. And the weak? They succumb or they get strong and start hunting for prey of their own. No mere victim, Josie learns about willpower and choice. What she does with her newfound strengths makes “First Love” a weirdly beautiful gothic tale of survival and transcendence. — Judith Wynn
Butcher
From one of our most accomplished storytellers, an extraordinary and arresting novel about a women’s asylum in the 19th century, and a terrifying doctor who wants to change the world.
Joyce Carol Oates: Letters to a Biographer
In this generous selection of Joyce Carol Oates’s letters to her biographer and friend Greg Johnson, readers will discover a never-before-seen dimension of her phenomenal talent.
Don’t You Trust Me?
This occurred early in the second year of The Edict, when the first wave of arrests, fines and imprisonments, and frequent deaths had run their course; and all but the most desperate women were likely to accept the new conditions, and have their babies, as The Moral Law of The Land decreed.
A Darker Shade of Noir: New Stories of Body Horror by Women Writers
The stories not only bleed across the categorical boundaries they have been assigned, but also expand the scope of what is terrifying about the body—living or dead, human or nonhuman—in the first place.
Parole Hearing, California Institution for Women, Chino, CA
Because you gaze upon me with pity and contempt, thinking—Oh she is a monster! She is nothing like me.
But I am like you. In my heart that is without pity, I am you.
Against Nature
“Still, the earth is your place. A tidy grave site measured to your size. Or, from another angle of vision, one vast democratic grave.”
Zero-Sum: Stories
“Pushing things to extremes is Oates’ literary modus operandi, especially when it comes to the myriad betrayals of the mind and body. In her latest collection of macabre short stories, she extends the traditions of Edgar Allan Poe and Shirley Jackson in her own unique arias performed by characters assailed by mental illness and intent on destruction…. High-pitched, unnerving, and incisive.”
Joyce Carol Oates on Cormac McCarthy
“he is a titan of literature fierce & indomitable as a tornado”
In Rough Country I: Cormac McCarthy
Blood Meridian and the Border Trilogy are counterpoised: the one a furious debunking of the legendary West, the other a subdued, humane, and subtle exploration of the tangled roots of such legends of the West as they abide in the human heart. Whereas Blood Meridian scorns any idealism except the jeremiad—“War is god”—the interlinked novels of the Border Trilogy testify to the quixotic idealism that celebrates friendship, brotherhood, loyalty, the integrity of the cowboy-worker as one whose life is bound up with animals in a harsh, exhausting, and dangerous environment.
Mysteries of Winterthurn
Mysteries of Winterthurn is a work of haunting intensity, brilliantly conceived and executed, a terrifying portrait of a fallen world. And yet, as one senses the presence of light in the empirical datum of darkness, this phenomenology of the demonic hints at a mysterious presence of quite another kind, the ultimate paradox that shatters all finite categories of reason.
My Heart Laid Bare
Oates paints a dark vision of America as a land where love of money is the root of everything and people are doomed to repeat their crimes. Oates, who rarely falters throughout this epic, does offer glimmers of justice and hope. But ultimately she has written an American tragedy.
48 Clues into the Disappearance of My Sister
So much more than the kind of standard-issue unreliable narrator, Georgene is a vastly complex character whose every word, every use of parentheses and italics, must be examined closely for intent. A thematically and stylistically ambitious novel that displays the author’s literary gifts to their maximum effect.
Celestial Timepiece 