Joyce Carol Oates to Retire—Reluctantly—from Princeton
The New York Times reports that in 2015 Joyce Carol Oates will, reluctantly, retire from Princeton University, where she has taught creative writing for more than 35 years. I can […]
The Accursed: Which Cover is Best?
Joyce Carol Oates’s novel The Accursed has been published with two very different dust jacket illustrations. Ron Charles writes in the Washington Post that they provide “a surprising study in national […]
JCO’s Gothic Quintet Considered
Matthew Surridge, writing for Blackgate.com, consideres each book in Joyce Carol Oates’s “Gothic” series, in preparation for The Accursed, the final book of the series to be published. Bellefleur “Published in 1980, Joyce Carol Oates’ novel Bellefleur is an astonishing gothic tour-de-force, a breathtaking and phantasmagoric book that whirls through generations of an aristocratic New England family. It deals in […]
Joyce Carol Oates and France
Anne Korkeakivi writes about American literary fiction finding an audience in France. I asked Joyce Carol Oates about her avid French following. For me, the very sound of French spoken is musical, beautiful, subtly cadenced. Her involvement with French language began in high school; as an adult she has taught and published French literature. “This is my background for writing, and my relationship […]
Joyce Carol Oates on bringing Foxfire back to the big screen
Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang, the film based on a book written in the 1990s about a small town in the 1950s, has its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on Monday night and its theme is more timely than ever, says its author, Joyce Carol Oates.
Joyce Carol Oates: By the Book
What book had the greatest impact on you? What book made you want to write? Lewis Carroll’s “Alice in Wonderland” and “Through the Looking-Glass,” which my grandmother gave me when […]
Joyce Carol Oates on Zadie Smith
Joyce Carol Oates reviews Zadie Smith’s NW in the New York Review of Books: In its assiduously detailed evocation of the multicultural neighborhood of Willesden, in northwestern London, where in […]
EDWARD HOPPER’S “11 A.M.,” 1926
By Joyce Carol Oates Originally published in the New Yorker, August 27, 2012 She’s naked yet wearing shoes. Wants to think nude. And happy in her body. Though it’s a fleshy […]
PEN Center USA Lifetime Achievement Award
Joyce Carol Oates will be awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award from the PEN Center USA at their annual awards festival on October 22, 2012.
Joyce Carol Oates Wins Mailer Prize
Joyce Carol Oates has won the 2012 Mailer Prize for Lifetime Achievement. The Mailer Prize, given by the Norman Mailer Center, is awarded to writers whose work over the years […]
Gore Vidal
Joyce Carol Oates on Gore Vidal’s Lincoln: Prodigious Gore Vidal … so kaleidoscopic in his interests, his energies and the remarkable range of his talents, the Vidal voice is as readily discernible in the comic masterpiece “Myra Breckinridge” as in the somber meditation upon mortality “Two Sisters,” as fully present in those critical essays in which, out of habit perhaps, […]
Is Dickens the greatest of English novelists?
Joyce Carol Oates reviews Charles Dickens: A Life by Claire Tomalin in the New York Review of Books: Is Dickens the greatest of English novelists? Few would contest that he is […]
Dickens’s Night Walks
My favorite prose on the subject [of walking] is Charles Dickens’s “Night Walks,” which he wrote some years after having suffered extreme insomnia that propelled him out into the London streets at night. Written with Dickens’s usual brilliance, this haunting essay seems to hint at more than its words reveal. He associates his terrible night restlessness with what he calls […]
Stone Award for Lifetime Literary Achievement
Joyce Carol Oates will receive Oregon State University’s inaugural Stone Award for Lifetime Literary Achievement in May. The biennial award is given to a major American author who has created a body of critically acclaimed work and who has – in the tradition of creative writing at OSU – been a dedicated mentor to young writers. The honorarium for the award […]
The Crosswicks Horror: At Last
Admirers of Joyce Carol Oates’s brilliant Gothic novels ( Bellefleur; A Bloodsmoor Romance; Mysteries of Winterthurn; My Heart Laid Bare ) will be pleased to hear that the final book of this thematic series, known for years as “The Crosswicks Horror,” is currently being “revised / recast / rewritten.” The new title is “The Accursed.” View early manuscript images of The Crosswicks Horror (see: […]
Upon the Sweeping Flood at 45
Oates has written many great books, and this one, though not discussed as often as her award-winning novels, is, in my opinion, her best work, and deserves to be mentioned as one of the best collections of stories in the latter half of the twentieth century.
Celestial Timepiece 