Twelve Plays
By Joyce Carol Oates Only a select number of authors have been able to master the art of writing both fiction and drama. As Joyce Carol Oates, one of the […]
Prison Noir
The blood jet is poetry—these words of Sylvia Plath have reverberated through my experience of reading and rereading the fifteen stories of Prison Noir.
(Woman) Writer: Occasions and Opportunities
And certain to provoke a variety of reactions, an astringent but objective consideration of the difficulties that confront a (woman) writer—among them (men) writers, from whom Oates quotes with quite devastating effect.
The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates: 1973-1982
What emerges is a fascinating portrait of the artist as a young woman, fully engaged with her world and her culture—a writer who paradoxically thought of herself as “invisible” while becoming one of the most respected, honored, discussed, and controversial figures in American letters.
Evil Eye: Four Novellas of Love Gone Wrong
Drenched with suspense and dread, and featuring the razor-sharp prose that has made Joyce Carol Oates a living legend, Evil Eye shows love as sporadically magical, mysterious, and murderous.
By the North Gate
BY THE NORTH GATE introduces a new young American writer of singular talent.
The Edge of Impossibility: Tragic Forms in Literature
The tragic hero dies but is reborn eternally in our dreams; the crudity of our desire for an absolute—an absolute dream, an absolute key—is redeemed by the beauty that so often surrounds this dream. One can explain the dream but never its beauty.
Blonde
With fresh insights into the heart of a celebrity culture hypnotized by its own myths, Blonde is a sweeping novel about the elusive magic of a woman, the lasting legacy of a star, and the heartbreak behind the creation of the most evocative icon of the twentieth century.
The Poisoned Kiss and Other Stories from the Portuguese
The tales in this collection are translated from an imaginary work, Azulejos, by an imaginary author, Fernandes de Briao. To the best of my knowledge he has no existence and has never existed, though without his very real guidance I would not have had access to the mystical “Portugal” of the stories …
Upon the Sweeping Flood And Other Stories
Here are stories that are intense, ironic, sinister, and violent, reflecting incisively the mores of a frightening world in which love is complex and difficult, in which evil is ordinary…
Beasts
Art and arson, the poetry of D. H. Lawrence and pulp pornography, hero-worship and sexual debasement, totems and taboos—out of narrative elements like these National Book Award-winner Joyce Carol Oates, one of the most adroit voices in contemporary American fiction, contrives a startling, suspenseful tale that turns the sunny idyll of New England college campus life into a lurid nightmare.
After the Wreck, I Picked Myself Up, Spread My Wings, and Flew Away
Jenna Abbott separates her life into two categories: before the wreck and after the wreck. Before the wreck, she was leading a normal life with her mom in suburban New York. After the wreck, Jenna is alone, trying desperately to forget what happened that day on the bridge. She’s determined not to let anyone get close to her—she never wants to feel so broken and fragile again.
The Time Traveler: Poems
Joyce Carol Oates is best known, of course, as a novelist and short story writer. But she is also an essayist and critic, a playwright, and a poet of great distinction. The Time Traveler is a generous collection of Oates’s poetry from recent years.
The Falls
Set against the mythic-historic backdrop of Niagara Falls, Joyce Carol Oates explores the American family in crisis, but also America itself in the mid-twentieth century.
Sourland: Stories
“Certainly this paradigm—the woman floundering about in a world of male force—returns to haunt nearly every story in the book, producing an intensity that we haven’t felt in the American art story—and I’m serious about this although it might seem extravagant to say—since the work of Poe”
The Doll-Master and Other Tales of Terror
In The Doll-Master and Other Tales of Terror, Joyce Carol Oates evokes the “fascination of the abomination” that is at the core of the most profound, the most unsettling, and the most memorable of dark mystery fiction.
Celestial Timepiece 