A Joyce Carol Oates Patchwork
From one of the most highly regarded writers working today, Jack of Spades is an exquisite, psychologically complex thriller about the opposing forces within the mind of one ambitious writer, and the delicate line between genius and madness.
Assembling a story collection is very like structuring a novel: stories are “chapters” in a (subterranean? atmospheric? oblique) narrative. As the first sentence or paragraph in a novel is a […]
What book had the greatest impact on you? What book made you want to write? Lewis Carroll’s “Alice in Wonderland” and “Through the Looking-Glass,” which my grandmother gave me when […]
Joyce Carol Oates comments on the death of JD Salinger for the Guardian [link no longer available]: “Salinger’s great, obsessive theme was the moral rootlessness of contemporary American materialism and its corrosive effect upon precocious, highly sensitive children and adolescents whose religious yearnings were both esoteric (eastern, mystic) and sentimental (narcissistic, naively self-regarding).” Now, the world will eagerly await Salinger’s […]
Guest post by Tanya Tromble Joyce Carol Oates made an appearance in Paris on Saturday, July 4, for an interview and book signing session at the Virgin Megastore on the Champs Elysées. The appearance was to promote the release of the French translation of her Journal. She responded to questions from an interviewer and then from the audience for about […]
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 […]
John Updike was “the contemporary American writer [Joyce Carol Oates] most admired,” according to Greg Johnson’s biography of JCO: “Updike’s rural upbringing, his devotion to the art of fiction, his […]
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 […]
Kevin Morris and Glenn Altschuler of The Huffington Post offer a perceptive and entertaining review of Joyce Carol Oates’s My Sister, My Love: “Oates’ intentions are signaled with a quotation that precedes the book. In ‘Aesthetics of Composition’ (1846), we learn, E. A. Pym opined that ‘the death of a beautiful child is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world.’ […]
Two Joyce Carol Oates-related events will be presented at The New York International Fringe Festival (FringeNYC) in August: The first is a play based on JCO’s novel Zombie. The play is adapted and performed by Bill Connington, who notes that “by the end of the play … you might feel some empathy for a man who has done horrible things. […]
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 […]
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 […]
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. […]
Celestial Timepiece 