JCO Miscellany: Four
A Hollywood film based on Joyce Carol Oates’s novella Rape: A Love Story is scheduled to begin shooting in June. The film will star Samuel L. Jackson, Maria Bello, and […]
Joyce / Carolee
Joyce Carol Oates will be at Bloomingdale’s to support Literacy Partners, a charitable organization teaching adult literacy skills. Fashion jewelry company CAROLEE will be selling an Author’s Collection of bangles […]
Wild Nights at McCarter!
Princeton’s McCarter Theatre presented readings yesterday of two new one-act plays by Joyce Carol Oates: Wild Nights, about a couple who purchase an android Emily Dickinson to liven up their […]
JCO on Hortense Calisher
The recent passing of Hortense Calisher prompted me to review Joyce Carol Oates’s writings about her. There were mentions in the Journal, and in an essay, “Imaginary Cities: America,” as well as book reviews of Calisher’s The New Yorkers and Mysteries of Motion. Of the latter, JCO writes: This massive, densely plotted novel of the not-very- distant future is Miss […]
Pumpkin Head in The New Yorker
Joyce Carol Oates has a new story, “Pumpkin Head,” in the January 12, 2009 issue of The New Yorker. This October evening, before the sun had entirely set, a pair […]
The Woman in White
In the September 25 edition of the New York Review of Books, Joyce Carol Oates reviews Christopher Benfrey’s A Summer of Hummingbirds: Love, Art, and Scandal in the Intersecting Worlds of Emily Dickinson, […]
Kentucky Welcomes JCO
Cheryl Truman, books editor of the Lexington Herald-Leader, profiles and interviews Joyce Carol Oates in advance of the Kentucky Women Writers Conference. Tidbits of interest: Oates didn’t used to be much of a TV watcher but admits immersing herself in tabloid-news TV to research My Sister, My Love: Bill O’Reilly, Geraldo Rivera and Nancy Grace (“I think sometimes she has a moral […]
The Pilgrim is Our Deepest and Purest American Self
Joyce Carol Oates reviews Curtis Sittenfeld’s novel, American Wife (and also looks at her previous novels), on page one of the New York Times Book Review: “Our greatest 19th-century prose writers from Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville through Henry James and Mark Twain took it for granted that ‘American’ is an identity fraught with ambiguity, as in those allegorical parables by Hawthorne in which ‘good’ and ‘evil’ […]
My Sister, My Love is John Barth with Heart
Kevin Morris and Glenn Altschuler of The Huffington Post offer a perceptive and entertaining review of Joyce Carol Oates’s My Sister, My Love: “Oates’ intentions are signaled with a quotation that precedes the book. In ‘Aesthetics of Composition’ (1846), we learn, E. A. Pym opined that ‘the death of a beautiful child is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world.’ […]
JCO on the Fringe
Two Joyce Carol Oates-related events will be presented at The New York International Fringe Festival (FringeNYC) in August: The first is a play based on JCO’s novel Zombie. The play is adapted and performed by Bill Connington, who notes that “by the end of the play … you might feel some empathy for a man who has done horrible things. […]
JCO Miscellany: Three
John Ranard We note the death of social-documentary photographer John Ranard last month, best known to Joyce Carol Oates fans for his work included in her book On Boxing. Quoted […]
New Stories
Joyce Carol Oates has a number of new stories out now: “Dear Joyce Carol,” in the Spring 2008 issue of Boulevard. This issue also bears the following dedication: In Memory of RAYMOND SMITH editor of Ontario Review and Ontario Review Press, beloved colleague and friend. Also out are “Suicide by Fitness Center” in the June 2008 issue of Harper’s Magazine. […]
JCO Miscellany: Two
Fact vs. Fiction Dan P. Lee of Philadelphia Magazine has published a long article on the death of John Fiocco, Jr. Selected details from initial reports on the tragedy were the starting point for a JCO story, “Landfill,” which publication in the New Yorker caused a brief local storm of indignation when its source material was identified. Philadelphia Magazine: “What […]
Of Seas Crimson and Tranquil
The current banner image for this blog and for Celestial Timepiece is taken from HubbleSite, run for NASA by the Space Telescope Science Institute. STScI titles the image “Cone Nebula […]
Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror 2008
Ace anthologist Ellen Datlow—called “the premiere horror editor of her generation” by Publisher’s Weekly—has announced in her blog the contents of the The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror 2008 which will include Joyce Carol Oates’s story “Valentine, July Heat Wave.” The story was first published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and later collected in The Museum of Dr. Moses: Tales […]
JCO Officially “Weird”
For its 85th anniversary issue, Weird Tales magazine has compiled a list of The 85 Weirdest Storytellers of the Past 85 Years. Of Joyce Carol Oates, they note that she is “arguably the darkest and weirdest writer to be fully embraced by the mainstream since Poe himself….”
Celestial Timepiece 