American Appetites
By Joyce Carol Oates Joyce Carol Oates moves into new territory in the first novel she has written in a contemporary setting since Solstice. American Appetites takes us into affluent, upper-class suburbia […]
Golden Anniversary: Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?
As Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” surely contains the most frightening monologue in our literature, so Joyce Carol Oates’s most famous short story—”Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”—contains its most frightening dialogue.
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 […]
“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
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 […]
Harper Lee: Like a Grimm’s Fairy Tale
On the occasion of Harper Lee’s death, Joyce Carol Oates considers her “astonishing” story via Twitter.
Nicolas Cage to Direct Film Based on Rape: A Love Story
Update: March 8, 2016 The Hollywood Reporter writes that Nicolas Cage will now direct as well as star in Vengeance: A Love Story. Variety reports that “Nicolas Cage will star in […]
The Consumption of Racial Minorities in Zombie
April Pitts argues that “serial killer Q_P_’s assimilation of the dominant culture’s bigoted attitudes towards racial minority groups leads him to believe that his social inclusion depends on their subjugation.
Review of The Man Without a Shadow
Eric K. Anderson reviews The Man Without a Shadow in the latest volume of Bearing Witness: Joyce Carol Oates Studies.
High Crime Area: Tales of Darkness and Dread
Joyce Carol Oates is an unparalleled investigator of human flaws. In these eight stories, she deftly tests the bonds between damaged individuals—a brother and sister, a teacher and student, two strangers on a subway—in the fearless prose for which she’s become so celebrated.
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.
Pseudonymous Selves
In 1984 the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters awarded one of its distinguished fiction prizes to a new and presumably young Chicano writer named Danny Santiago, for his first novel, Famous All Over Town. Subsequent to the award it was revealed, with some embarrassment, that the newly discovered Chicano writer was not Chicano at all …
Celestial Timepiece 