Joyce Carol Oates on Bob Dylan
I believe these things are true about Dylan, as they are true about any genius: 1. He is unstoppable. 2. “He” is both an individual and a medium, a process by which […]
Criticism on “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”
A bibliography of criticism on JCO’s famous story.
“Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” Edited and with an Introduction by Elaine Showalter
Joyce Carol Oates’s prize-winning story “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” takes up troubling subjects that continue to occupy her in her fiction: the romantic longings and limited […]
“Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” and Smooth Talk: Short Story Into Film
Laura Dern is so dazzlingly right as “my” Connie that I may come to think I modeled the fictitious girl on her, in the way that writers frequently delude themselves about motions of causality.
Introduction: “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”
Connie is always at the mercy of men who will come with a vehicle to take her away, to take her somewhere else. Women have no agency, no vehicle, no wheels. It’s not coincidental that Arnold Friend’s golden convertible is part of his magic.
Black Dahlia & White Rose
Stories by Joyce Carol Oates A wildly inventive new collection of stories by Joyce Carol Oates that charts the surprising ways in which the world we think we know can […]
A Book of American Martyrs
A Book of American Martyrs is a stunning, timely depiction of an issue hotly debated on a national stage but which makes itself felt most lastingly in communities torn apart by violence and hatred.
Big Momma
Quickly Mr. Clovis said, in his most tender voice, “I don’t think that’s a wise idea, Rita Mae. You’ll just get your dear friend in trouble if you put her up to such a thing. Violet’s mother loves her, just as I love you and your brothers and sisters. You can’t just steal away a girl from her own mother.”
Muhammad Ali: “The Greatest”
Who would have thought that Muhammad Ali’s defiant repudiation of American foreign policy, in the mid-1960s considered virtually traitorous by some observers, would come to be, in the decade to follow, a widespread and altogether respectable political position?
SMILE
SMILE of course I was, I had always already begun SMILE yes certianly SMILE I laughed breathless I was plead- ing SMILE struck like paralysis SMILE! SMILE! as the darts […]
The Dream Boxes of Gloria Vanderbilt
These are striking creations inside plexiglass boxes that merit close, sympathetic scrutiny in the way that the most subtle of poems and dreams merit our scrupulous attention.
“This is the Season”
“This is the season when the husbands lie in their hemp-woven hammocks for the last time …” Hear Joyce Carol Oates read the brief poem in The New Yorker.
Edna O’Brien’s “The Little Red Chairs”
Joyce Carol Oates reviews Edna O’Brien’s novel The Little Red Chairs in the New York Times Book Review
Soul at the White Heat: Inspiration, Obsession, and the Writing Life
“Why do we write?” With this question, Joyce Carol Oates begins an imaginative exploration of the writing life, and all its attendant anxieties, joys, and futilities, in this collection of seminal essays and criticism.
Black Girl / White Girl
Oates writes from the frontier of integration, where race is all but tells us so much less than we might assume, imply or assert. Black Girl/White Girl is the third novel in which Oates plays variations on the psychologically complex themes of interwoven class and ethnic conflict.
David T. Hanson’s “Wilderness to Wasteland”
Any landscape of Hanson’s at which we look, however initially attractive, will soon yield its terrible secret—one need only look more closely. “Wilderness to Wasteland,” David T. Hanson’s striking and […]
Celestial Timepiece 