A Joyce Carol Oates Patchwork
I first read this unclassifiable prose piece— hardly a “tale” in any conventional sense, still less a “story”—when I was an undergraduate at Syracuse University, and I have been haunted by its images ever since. Herman Melville, our first native feminist?—can it be so?
It is my conviction that all human beings “create” personality. Some do so passively, helplessly, and are in a sense created by others, whom they come to fear or hate; others create their personalities half-consciously, and are therefore half-pleased with their creations, though they suspect something is missing; a few human beings, gifted with the ability to “see” themselves as “other,” and not overly intoxicated with the selfness of the self, actually devise works of art that are autobiographical statements of a hypothetical, reality-testing nature, which they submit with varying degrees of confidence to the judgment of their culture.
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 […]
Eric K. Anderson reviews JCO’s novel The Sacrifice in Bearing Witness: Joyce Carol Oates Studies, and notes the references back to a much earlier novel. This new novel has a natural predecessor in Oates’s National Book Award-winning novel them (1969). In this earlier novel the struggles of a lower middle class family are seen as running parallel to and becoming entangled with the 1967 […]
A longtime aficionado of the sweet science, Oates first became interested in boxing as a child, as an offshoot of her father’s interest.
Mike Tyson, a boy warrior, has become legendary, in a sense, before there is a legend to define him. And never has the collective will of a crowd—the very nearly palpable wish of a crowd—been more powerfully expressed than it is tonight in Las Vegas.
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 […]
Joyce Carol Oates answers the frequently asked question: Joyce Carol Oates in San Francisco, City Arts & Lectures, 2004. Joyce Carol Oates on Dylan’s “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” […]
Elaine Showalter reports on JCO’s Princeton retirement celebration: Joyce Carol Oates was celebrated Nov. 7 as she retires from the Princeton University Creative Writing Program after 36 years. It was a gala day […]
Those wishing to schedule a JCO speaking engagement should contact Steven Barclay at: steven@barclayagency.com, or visit the web site at: Steven Barclay Agency. June 15 – 19, 2023 Taobuk Taormina […]
Joyce Carol Oates delivered the Robert B. Silvers lecture at the New York Public Library entitled “Is the Uninspired Life Worth Living?”, about inspiration and obsession. “Inspiration is an elusive term. […]
Robert Frost, family, art, technology, and teaching are all topics of this video interview with Joyce Carol Oates on “Overheard with Evan Smith.” Be sure to watch the separate audience […]
Insightful, disturbing, and mesmerizing in their lyrical precision, the stories in Lovely, Dark, Deep display Joyce Carol Oates’s astonishing ability to make visceral the fear, hurt, and uncertainty that lurks at the edges of ordinary lives.
New York Times bestselling author Joyce Carol Oates returns with an incendiary novel that illuminates the tragic impact of sexual violence, racism, brutality, and power on innocent lives and probes the persistence of stereotypes, the nature of revenge, the complexities of truth, and our insatiable hunger for sensationalism.
From one of the most highly regarded writers working today, Jack of Spades is an exquisite, psychologically complex thriller about the opposing forces within the mind of one ambitious writer, and the delicate line between genius and madness.
Oates’s achievements are indisputable for anyone who has read her work extensively. Her body of novels … is among the most wide-ranging in contemporary writing. …she is the nearest America […]
Celestial Timepiece 