Remembering Bob Silvers
Such a devastating loss! I am trying to imagine our intellectual/ literary life without Bob Silvers, and it is a grim prospect. Bob had been my dear, kind, patient, thoughtful, […]
Joyce Carol Oates on Stephen King
Princeton University, 2016 It’s an honor and a pleasure to be introducing Stephen King to a Princeton audience, for the second time. Stephen came to Princeton for the first time […]
Joyce Carol Oates on Bob Dylan
I believe these things are true about Dylan, as they are true about any genius: 1. He is unstoppable. 2. “He” is both an individual and a medium, a process by which […]
Joyce Carol Oates on D.H. Lawrence
“If Lawrence hadn’t written those novels he would have been far more readily acclaimed as one of the greatest poets in the language.” —Joyce Carol Oates, Paris Review The Hostile Sun: […]
Joyce Carol Oates on Sylvia Plath
Joyce Carol Oates’s extensive essays and reviews of Sylvia Plath’s work.
Joyce Carol Oates on Fyodor Dostoevsky
That so prodigiously long and so luridly convoluted a novel as The Possessed evolves, nevertheless, with the structural coherence of a tragedy of Aeschylus or Euripides is a testament of Dostoyevsky’s unparalleled genius. It has always been known that he is a marvelous creator of character—he is the equal of Dickens, and perhaps even the equal of Shakespeare, in this regard. But that he is a genius as a craftsman is perhaps less well known.
Joyce Carol Oates on William Shakespeare
Cordelia, with her unearned kiss, symbolizes that moment of grace that forces the tragic action to a temporary halt, and allows a magical synthesis of the bliss of eternity and the tragedy of time that is so powerful in Shakespeare, because it is so rare.
Joyce Carol Oates on Charlotte and Emily Brontë
Jane Eyre: An Introduction One of the reasons for Jane Eyre’s authority over her own experience, and the confidence with which she assesses that experience, is that, as the romantically […]
On Writers & Writing
Read JCO’s take on classics and contemporaries, from William Shakespeare to Stephen King, as well as her view of the short story, the gothic & grotesque, American literary culture, and […]
Celestial Timepiece 