A Joyce Carol Oates Patchwork
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 …
Though frequently denounced and often misunderstood by a somewhat genteel literary community, my writing is, at least in part, an attempt to memorialize my parents’ vanished world; my parents’ lives. Sometimes directly, sometimes in metaphor.
Kerry Sutherland charts the connections between Joyce Carol Oates’s story “My Warszawa: 1980” and Henry James’s The Awkward Age.
The American Writers Museum will be opening in Chicago in March 2017. In the run up to the opening, The Creative Process exhibition is being launched next year and will be traveling to universities and museums, beginning with the Sorbonne in April 2016.
These feelings of empathy with those who are so similar to the author herself but who experienced a different fate reinforce Oates’s message throughout her writing that our existence is so often determined by mere chance.
So we know, we are blessed! We are very special amid so many millions drowned in the Hai River as in the great Yangtze and how many millions perished in the Revolution of no more consequence than infant girls extinguished before they can draw breath or cry.
In fact, the Pulitzer Prize Jury felt that them was the “best novel of 1969” and unanimously recommended that the award be given to Oates. Nonetheless, the Pulitzer Prize Board voted to give the award to Jean Stafford instead.
“I saw the newspaper headline and felt such a sense of loss,” Oates tells TIME. Then a 25-year-old newlywed, she had moved to Michigan that year with her husband, Raymond J. Smith, to teach at the University of Detroit. “How could such a beautiful, successful and famous young woman kill herself?”
Lovely, Dark, Deep, Joyce Carol Oates’s story collection from 2014 was a finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize in fiction.
“Childhood was the ideal soft metal for the permanent engravings of evil.” This beautifully, bleakly precise statement occurs early in Rafael Yglesias’s painful and candid new novel about the consequences, seemingly irremediable, of childhood sexual molestation …
The Buried Giant is a coolly orchestrated text in which ideas about human nature, human memory, and the vicissitudes of a war-tormented history constitute the essential drama …
It may surprise you, as it did us, to learn that we citizens of the United States have not yet built ourselves a museum to honor our great writers. Luckily, The American […]
Tanya Tromble writes on the relationship between fiction and fact in the latest article published in Bearing Witness: Joyce Carol Oates Studies. Joyce Carol Oates draws extensively on news stories, […]
The portrait of Joyce Carol Oates used on the banner of this website [January 2015] is by Italian artist Paolo Galetto. From his bio: Galetto was born in Turin in 1962. He […]
The Spring-Summer 1980 issue of Ontario Review is now available online, with reviews by Joyce Carol Oates and featuring Carlos Fuentes, John Updike, Maxine Kumin, and many others. Fiction A […]
The 41st issue of Ontario Review, originally published Fall/Winter 1994–95, is now available online. Featuring photographs by Bill Ravanesi, the issue also includes a drama feature with plays commissioned for […]
Celestial Timepiece 