A Joyce Carol Oates Patchwork
In Oates’ dreamlike, utterly convincing world, the strong brutalize the weak simply because they can. And the weak? They succumb or they get strong and start hunting for prey of their own. No mere victim, Josie learns about willpower and choice. What she does with her newfound strengths makes “First Love” a weirdly beautiful gothic tale of survival and transcendence. — Judith Wynn
In these twenty-seven tales of the forbidden, Joyce Carol Oates explores the waking nightmares of life with eyes wide open, facing what the bravest of us fear the most. With eerie brilliance, this master of the short story reminds us just how seductive—and terrifying—they can be.
A major historical novel from “one of the great artistic forces of our time” (The Nation)—an eerie, unforgettable story of possession, power, and loss in early-twentieth-century Princeton, a cultural crossroads of the powerful and the damned.
By Joyce Carol Oates Originally Published in American Gothic Tales Though in many of its aspects this visible world seems formed in love, the invisible spheres were formed in fright. […]
By Joyce Carol Oates Originally published as an Afterword to Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque What is the “grotesque”—and what is “horror”—in art? And why do these seemingly repellent states of […]
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 […]
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 […]
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: […]
Joyce Carol Oates reviews Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle for the New York Review of Books: Of the precocious children and adolescents of mid-twentieth-century American fiction—a dazzling lot that includes the tomboys Frankie of Carson McCullers’s The Member of the Wedding (1946) and Scout of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), the murderous eight-year-old Rhoda Penmark of […]
Joyce Carol Oates makes her first appearance (I believe!) in the monumental Library of America this Fall when the two-volume American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny, edited by Peter […]
Celestial Timepiece 