A Joyce Carol Oates Patchwork
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. […]
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 