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.
“This is the Season”
“This is the season when the husbands lie in their hemp-woven hammocks for the last time …” Hear Joyce Carol Oates read the brief poem in The New Yorker.
Edna O’Brien’s “The Little Red Chairs”
Joyce Carol Oates reviews Edna O’Brien’s novel The Little Red Chairs in the New York Times Book Review
Soul at the White Heat: Inspiration, Obsession, and the Writing Life
“Why do we write?” With this question, Joyce Carol Oates begins an imaginative exploration of the writing life, and all its attendant anxieties, joys, and futilities, in this collection of seminal essays and criticism.
Black Girl / White Girl
Oates writes from the frontier of integration, where race is all but tells us so much less than we might assume, imply or assert. Black Girl/White Girl is the third novel in which Oates plays variations on the psychologically complex themes of interwoven class and ethnic conflict.
David T. Hanson’s “Wilderness to Wasteland”
Any landscape of Hanson’s at which we look, however initially attractive, will soon yield its terrible secret—one need only look more closely. “Wilderness to Wasteland,” David T. Hanson’s striking and […]
Harper Lee: Like a Grimm’s Fairy Tale
On the occasion of Harper Lee’s death, Joyce Carol Oates considers her “astonishing” story via Twitter.
Faithless: Tales of Transgression
By Joyce Carol Oates In this collection of twenty-one unforgettable stories, Joyce Carol Oates explores the mysterious private lives of men and women with vivid, unsparing precision and sympathy. By […]
Rape: A Love Story
So much anger, so much feeling, so many truths, Rape: A Love Story in which a traumatized child seeks a hero at a time of terror, demonstrates not only the passion, pathos and psychological intensity of this most explosive of major, if unsung, US writers, but also again showcases her fullblooded, soaring prose.
Nicolas Cage to Direct Film Based on Rape: A Love Story
Update: March 8, 2016 The Hollywood Reporter writes that Nicolas Cage will now direct as well as star in Vengeance: A Love Story. Variety reports that “Nicolas Cage will star in […]
The Wheel of Love And Other Stories
“Quite simply, one of the finest collections of short fiction ever written by an American. . . . These 20 stories are the most violent, intense products we have yet had from an especially violent and intense creative imagination.”
Black Water
The Senator. The girl. The Fourth of July party on the island. The ride through the night. The accident. The death by water.
The Consumption of Racial Minorities in Zombie
April Pitts argues that “serial killer Q_P_’s assimilation of the dominant culture’s bigoted attitudes towards racial minority groups leads him to believe that his social inclusion depends on their subjugation.
Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart
When Iris Courtney is a young girl, she is the only witness to a murderous street fight between Jinx Fairchild and a white man who has threatened her. A bond of passion and guilt is formed between the two—at first unstated, then slowly, year by year, gathering force until it must inevitably declare itself, and the consequences are fateful.
What I Lived For
Oates’s dazzling plunge into the male psyche is at once a bravura technical performance and an indelible portrait of one man’s road to moral ruin. From its very first page, What I Lived For announces itself as a novel epic in vision and scale.
The Gravedigger’s Daughter
After local prejudice and the family’s own emotional frailty result in unspeakable tragedy, the gravedigger’s daughter, Rebecca, begins her astonishing pilgrimage into America, an odyssey of erotic risk and imaginative daring, ingenious self-invention, and, in the end, a bittersweet—but very “American”—triumph.
Celestial Timepiece 