
Marriages and Infidelities: Short Stories
MARRIAGES AND INFIDELITIES is Joyce Carol Oates’s fourth volume of short stories. In this collection, Miss Oates, who has been called “the best young novelist in the United States today,”* […]
A Joyce Carol Oates Patchwork
MARRIAGES AND INFIDELITIES is Joyce Carol Oates’s fourth volume of short stories. In this collection, Miss Oates, who has been called “the best young novelist in the United States today,”* […]
Joyce Carol Oates is renowned for her rare ability to “illuminate the mind’s most disturbing corners” (Seattle Times). That genius is on full display in her new collection of seven […]
An incomparable master storyteller in all forms, in The Corn Maiden and Other Nightmares Joyce Carol Oates spins six imaginative tales of suspense. “The Corn Maiden” is the gut-wrenching story of Marissa, […]
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 unexpectedly reveal its darker contours. […]
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.
“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.
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.
In this collection of twenty-one unforgettable stories, Joyce Carol Oates explores the mysterious private lives of men and women with vivid, unsparing precision and sympathy. By turns interlocutor and interpreter, […]
So much anger, so much feeling, so many truths, Rape: A Love Story in which a traumatized child seeks a hero at a time of terror, demonstrates not only the passion, pathos and psychological intensity of this most explosive of major, if unsung, US writers, but also again showcases her fullblooded, soaring prose.
“Quite simply, one of the finest collections of short fiction ever written by an American. . . . These 20 stories are the most violent, intense products we have yet had from an especially violent and intense creative imagination.”
The Senator. The girl. The Fourth of July party on the island. The ride through the night. The accident. The death by water.
When Iris Courtney is a young girl, she is the only witness to a murderous street fight between Jinx Fairchild and a white man who has threatened her. A bond of passion and guilt is formed between the two—at first unstated, then slowly, year by year, gathering force until it must inevitably declare itself, and the consequences are fateful.
Oates’s dazzling plunge into the male psyche is at once a bravura technical performance and an indelible portrait of one man’s road to moral ruin. From its very first page, What I Lived For announces itself as a novel epic in vision and scale.
After local prejudice and the family’s own emotional frailty result in unspeakable tragedy, the gravedigger’s daughter, Rebecca, begins her astonishing pilgrimage into America, an odyssey of erotic risk and imaginative daring, ingenious self-invention, and, in the end, a bittersweet—but very “American”—triumph.
When a young wife and mother named Zoe Kruller is found brutally murdered, the Sparta police target two primary suspects, her estranged husband Delray Kruller and her longtime lover Eddy Diehl. In turn, the Krullers’s son Aaron and Eddy Diehl’s daughter Krista become obsessed with one another, each believing the other’s father is guilty.
In the world of A Bloodsmoor Romance, time machines run rampant, Transcendentalism gives way to the Spirit World, and decorum and etiquette fall to the exigencies of the passions. Amid yards of lace, sweet songs, and hope chests filled with twelve dozen of everything, the Zinn daughters—and America—are thrust headlong into the modern age. This is the tale our classics never dared reveal, the other side of Little Women as only Joyce Carol Oates can tell it.