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 reviews Keith Gessen’s All the Sad Young Literary Men in the New York Review of Books: “Beginning with its risky yet playful title, All the Sad Young Literary Men is a rueful, undramatic, mordantly funny, and frequently poignant sequence of sketch-like stories loosely organized by chronology and place and the prevailing theme of youthful literary ideals vis-à-vis […]
What is the worst thing that can happen? Lisa, from the long-running TV show The Simpsons, imagines herself in prison on the March 23, 2008 episode. The guard arrives with […]
With the passing of its editor, Raymond J. Smith, Ontario Review itself will cease publication with the forthcoming Spring 2008 issue. Smith began Ontario Review in 1974 in Windsor, Ontario, with his wife Joyce Carol Oates as associate editor; the Review later moved with its editors to Princeton, NJ.
I have learned, with great sadness, of the death of Raymond J. Smith, who was for more than 30 years editor of Ontario Review, as well as Ontario Review Press; […]
Fifty years ago (1958), Joyce Carol Oates published the short story “Rapport” in Syracuse 10, the undergraduate literary magazine at Syracuse University where she was majoring in English. The year […]
Blogger Elizabeth Howard presents a strangely angry depiction of Joyce Carol Oates’s appearance at Fairfield University on Sunday. The afternoon event is presented as a would-be ambush by Professor “Buttercup,” an “eminent nobody” whose puny attack is casually dismissed by an Olympian JCO. Howard ridicules the presumptuous “man-professor,” academics in general, and any Connecticut resident there who might have a […]
Just added to Celestial Timepiece are introductions to two of the most recent anthologies edited by Joyce Carol Oates. In the introduction to The Best American Mystery Stories 2005, JCO recounts the history of violence and mystery in both her mother’s and father’s families, and notes that it’s not an irony that she’s drawn to this kind of material as […]
Joyce Carol Oates’s short story, “Nowhere,” originally published in Conjunctions, is included in the 2008 edition of The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses. This is JCO’s twelfth piece in the prize anthology.
The National Book Critics Circle announced their 2007 award finalists, and Joyce Carol Oates’s works are named in two categories: The Gravedigger’s Daughter for the fiction award, and The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates: 1973-1982 for the autobiography award. The winners will be announced on March 6. JCO last had an NBCC award finalist in 1992 with Black Water, which […]
Joyce Carol Oates’s third children’s book, Naughty Chérie, goes on sale today. Illustrated by Mark Graham, all three books involve kitten characters based on real cats who have owned JCO. […]
Janet Coleman, author, actor, and Cat Radio Café host, speaks with Joyce Carol Oates about the life and work of Norman Mailer. “I have to say that as soon as Mailer died, the kinds of remarks made about him in the press I did not think were helpful, or deep enough, or worthy. I thought there was a lot of […]
Sam Coale, Professor of English at Wheaton College, reviews The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates in The Providence Journal. “In this dazzling, forthright and revealing record of her life from ages 34 to 44, … Oates feels herself existentially marooned between the polarities of work and life, public image and private reality, obsession and community, the self in all its […]
Jennifer Reese, a director of the National Book Critics Circle, and a critic for Entertainment Weekly, has chosen the 10 Best Fiction Books of 2007, including Joyce Carol Oates’s The Gravedigger’s Daughter at number 7. Reese interviewed JCO earlier this summer about the novel, her grandmother, and her productivity; the interview includes comments from JCO’s editor, Daniel Halpern, and novelist […]
Michael Dirda, a Washington Post book critic, reviews several Joyce Carol Oates works in the New York Review of Books, including The Gravedigger’s Daughter (“Though one may argue about aspects of the book, there can be no question of its power and conviction. The same can be said about most of Oates’s major novels …. Oates is never merely a […]
Joyce Carol Oates reviews Bernard Malamud: A Writer’s Life by Philip Davis in the Times Literary Supplement. JCO offers a brief overview of Malamud’s work, and judges Davis with appreciation: “Most biographies trudge along the surface of a life, amassing and presenting facts, like rubble on a shovel, in which a very few precious gems might be visible; this pioneering […]
Celestial Timepiece 