Into the Void: Lovecraft and the World Fantasy Award
Lovecraft differs in degree but not in kind from racism/anti-Semitism of Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Jack London, Hemingway & many, many more.
“At Least I Have Made a Woman of Her”: Images of Women in Yeats, Lawrence, Faulkner
The paradox with which the feminist critic or sympathizer must contend is this: that revolutionary advances in literature often fail to transcend deeply conservative and stereotypical images of women, as if, in a sense, the nineteenth century were eerily superimposed upon even the most defiantly inventive literary “visions” of the twentieth century.
Drowned at Birth
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.
If Joyce Carol Oates Ruled the World
“In my kingdom firearms would be rigged so as to fire backward. Even as the avid gun-wielder pulls the trigger he is doing his small part in eradicating a global […]
Zombie
By Joyce Carol Oates New York: Dutton, 1995 181 Pages Meet Quentin P. He is a problem for his professor father and his loving mother, though of course they do […]
Gregory Heisler’s portrait of Joyce Carol Oates
Ultimately, as soon as I saw her beseeching expression, the little doll’s hand seemed superfluous. It was a photographer’s contrivance, the one-thing-too-many in the picture. The first thing I did was retouch it out.
The Pulitzer Prize that wasn’t given to THEM
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.
Deadly Girls’ Voices …
Pascale Antolin writes about Deadly Girls’ Voices in the latest article from Bearing Witness: Joyce Carol Oates Studies. This article focuses on deadly girls’ voices in “The Banshee” and “Doll: A Romance […]
Inspiration and Obsession in Life and Literature
Without the stillness, thoughtfulness, and depths of art, and without the ceaseless moral rigors of art, we would have no shared culture—no collective memory.
The Female of the Species: Tales of Mystery and Suspense
By Joyce Carol Oates A young wife is home alone when the phone rings in “So Help Me God.” Is the strange voice flirting with her from the other end […]
Joyce Carol Oates Remembers Marilyn Monroe and the Novel She Inspired
“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?”
“I Know You!”: The Implications of Knowing in Joyce Carol Oates’s Marya: A Life
Josephene T.M. Kealey addresses the idea of “knowing” in her essay on Joyce Carol Oates’s Marya: A Life, published in Bearing Witness: Joyce Carol Oates Studies. “Joyce Carol Oates’s Preface […]
Eric K. Anderson reviews Jack of Spades
Joyce Carol Oates has considered the issues of authorship and identity at length in both her fiction and nonfiction.
2015 Pulitzer Prize Finalist: Lovely, Dark, Deep
Lovely, Dark, Deep, Joyce Carol Oates’s story collection from 2014 was a finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize in fiction.
JCO Reviews Rafael Yglesias’s The Wisdom of Perversity
“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 …
Jocoserious Joyce
Ulysses is certainly the greatest novel in the English language, and one might argue for its being the greatest single work of art in our tradition. How significant, then, and how teasing, that this masterwork should be a comedy and that its creator should have explicitly valued the comic “vision” over the tragic …
Celestial Timepiece 