Lives of the Twins
Molly Marks is a very pretty young woman who has never been able to get her life together. She has taken hundreds of courses in various disciplines but doesn’t exactly have a […]
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 […]
The Museum of Dr. Moses: Tales of Mystery and Suspense
Ten suspenseful stories explore with chilling accuracy the ways in which evil enters our lives: In “Hi! Howya Doin!” an intrusive jogger meets with an abrupt fate; in “The Man […]
Marriages and Infidelities: Short Stories
MARRIAGES AND INFIDELITIES is Joyce Carol Oates’s fourth volume of short stories. In this collection, Miss Oates, who has been called “the best young novelist in the United States today,”* […]
The Corn Maiden and Other Nightmares
An incomparable master storyteller in all forms, in The Corn Maiden and Other Nightmares Joyce Carol Oates spins six imaginative tales of suspense. “The Corn Maiden” is the gut-wrenching story of Marissa, […]
Golden Anniversary: Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?
As Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” surely contains the most frightening monologue in our literature, so Joyce Carol Oates’s most famous short story—”Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”—contains its most frightening dialogue.
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 […]
Criticism on “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”
A bibliography of criticism on JCO’s famous story.
“Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” Edited and with an Introduction by Elaine Showalter
Joyce Carol Oates’s prize-winning story “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” takes up troubling subjects that continue to occupy her in her fiction: the romantic longings and limited […]
“Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” and Smooth Talk: Short Story Into Film
Laura Dern is so dazzlingly right as “my” Connie that I may come to think I modeled the fictitious girl on her, in the way that writers frequently delude themselves about motions of causality.
Introduction: “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”
Connie is always at the mercy of men who will come with a vehicle to take her away, to take her somewhere else. Women have no agency, no vehicle, no wheels. It’s not coincidental that Arnold Friend’s golden convertible is part of his magic.
Black Dahlia & White Rose
A wildly inventive new collection of stories by Joyce Carol Oates that charts the surprising ways in which the world we think we know can unexpectedly reveal its darker contours. […]
Big Momma
Quickly Mr. Clovis said, in his most tender voice, “I don’t think that’s a wise idea, Rita Mae. You’ll just get your dear friend in trouble if you put her up to such a thing. Violet’s mother loves her, just as I love you and your brothers and sisters. You can’t just steal away a girl from her own mother.”
Muhammad Ali: “The Greatest”
Who would have thought that Muhammad Ali’s defiant repudiation of American foreign policy, in the mid-1960s considered virtually traitorous by some observers, would come to be, in the decade to follow, a widespread and altogether respectable political position?
SMILE
SMILE of course I was, I had always already begun SMILE yes certianly SMILE I laughed breathless I was plead- ing SMILE struck like paralysis SMILE! SMILE! as the darts […]
The Dream Boxes of Gloria Vanderbilt
These are striking creations inside plexiglass boxes that merit close, sympathetic scrutiny in the way that the most subtle of poems and dreams merit our scrupulous attention.
