A Joyce Carol Oates Patchwork
I'm a Reference Librarian at the University of San Francisco's Gleeson Library, and I run the Joyce Carol Oates web site, Celestial Timepiece.
Joyce Carol Oates’s story collection Wild Nights! is among the finalists for the 2008 Shirley Jackson Award. Other finalists in the “collection” category include A Better Angel, Chris Adrian; Dangerous Laughter, Steven […]
Deborah Solomon interviews Joyce Carol Oates for the New York Times Magazine: Why do you find violence so alluring as a literary subject? If you’re going to spend the next year of your life writing, you would probably rather write “Moby Dick” than a little household mystery with cat detectives. I consider tragedy the highest form of art. Topics briefly […]
Joyce Carol Oates was awarded the Medal of Honor in Literature at the National Arts Club on April 7th. The event was emceed by Roger Rosenblatt, with remarks given by JCO’s editor at Ecco Press, Dan Halpern, fellow Princeton author Edmund White, and artist Gloria Vanderbilt. In a gossipy New York Observer article, Leon Neyfakh reports on the scene.
Joyce Carol Oates adds to her many writings on Flannery O’Connor in the April 9 New York Review of Books with The Parables of Flannery O’Connor, a review-essay around Brad Gooch’s biography of O’Connor. JCO, a great admirer of O’Connor’s work, speaks of her “cartoon art” (but this term is desrciptive, not derogatory): Is the art of caricature a lesser […]
With the recent death by hanging of Nicholas Hughes, son of Sylvia Plath, the New York Times asks “Why the Plath Legacy Lives”? Joyce Carol Oates notes, The suicide of […]
Joyce Carol Oates is among the contenders this year for the biennial Man Booker International Prize, recognizing one writer for their achievement in fiction. Previous winners were Chinua Achebe in 2007 and Ismail […]
When she was a junior at Syracuse University, JCO entered her short story “In the Old World” in the Mademoiselle College Fiction Competition. The story was selected as co-winner of the competition (two winners each year) and was published in the August 1959 issue.
The Guardian asks Joyce Carol Oates and others whether writing for a living is a joy or a chore; JCO suggests don’t trust anybody’s answer: Recall that DH Lawrence warned us to trust the tale, not the teller – the teller of fictions is likely to be a liar. Darwinian evolutionary psychology suggests that none of us really knows what […]
A Hollywood film based on Joyce Carol Oates’s novella Rape: A Love Story is scheduled to begin shooting in June. The film will star Samuel L. Jackson, Maria Bello, and […]
Joyce Carol Oates will be at Bloomingdale’s to support Literacy Partners, a charitable organization teaching adult literacy skills. Fashion jewelry company CAROLEE will be selling an Author’s Collection of bangles […]
Princeton’s McCarter Theatre presented readings yesterday of two new one-act plays by Joyce Carol Oates: Wild Nights, about a couple who purchase an android Emily Dickinson to liven up their […]
The recent passing of Hortense Calisher prompted me to review Joyce Carol Oates’s writings about her. There were mentions in the Journal, and in an essay, “Imaginary Cities: America,” as well as book reviews of Calisher’s The New Yorkers and Mysteries of Motion. Of the latter, JCO writes: This massive, densely plotted novel of the not-very- distant future is Miss […]
Joyce Carol Oates has a new story, “Pumpkin Head,” in the January 12, 2009 issue of The New Yorker. This October evening, before the sun had entirely set, a pair […]
In the September 25 edition of the New York Review of Books, Joyce Carol Oates reviews Christopher Benfrey’s A Summer of Hummingbirds: Love, Art, and Scandal in the Intersecting Worlds of Emily Dickinson, […]
Cheryl Truman, books editor of the Lexington Herald-Leader, profiles and interviews Joyce Carol Oates in advance of the Kentucky Women Writers Conference. Tidbits of interest: Oates didn’t used to be much of a TV watcher but admits immersing herself in tabloid-news TV to research My Sister, My Love: Bill O’Reilly, Geraldo Rivera and Nancy Grace (“I think sometimes she has a moral […]
Joyce Carol Oates reviews Curtis Sittenfeld’s novel, American Wife (and also looks at her previous novels), on page one of the New York Times Book Review: “Our greatest 19th-century prose writers from Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville through Henry James and Mark Twain took it for granted that ‘American’ is an identity fraught with ambiguity, as in those allegorical parables by Hawthorne in which ‘good’ and ‘evil’ […]
Celestial Timepiece 