A Joyce Carol Oates Patchwork
From one of the most highly regarded writers working today, Jack of Spades is an exquisite, psychologically complex thriller about the opposing forces within the mind of one ambitious writer, and the delicate line between genius and madness.
Oates’s achievements are indisputable for anyone who has read her work extensively. Her body of novels … is among the most wide-ranging in contemporary writing. …she is the nearest America […]
Among contemporary writers, Joyce Carol Oates is the unrivaled American master of the short story. She has exploited the genre with such energy, versatility, and resourcefulness that critics routinely compare […]
Oates’s poetry … forms a body of work on its own merits and does not need to be interpreted only as an adjunct to her novels and short stories, as […]
In my writing for the theater I always have in mind, as an undercurrent shaping and guiding the surface action, the ancient structure of drama as a sacrificial rite. Drama […]
My sense of the novella is that of a rapturously extended prose poem driven by a narrative; the more suspenseful the narrative, the more dreamlike and obsessive the atmosphere of […]
Essays, articles, memoirs … these forms are wrongly considered unimaginative, or, in any case, considered somehow less significant than the imaginative writer’s ‘real’ work. As if one does not speak […]
Isn’t the implicit promise of an anthology that it will, or aspires to, present something different, unexpected? How ironic, it seemed to me, yet, perhaps, how symbolic, that in our […]
A future archeologist equipped only with her oeuvre could easily piece together the whole of postwar America.
Young adults do change rapidly; they are enormously impressionable, and subject to influences both good and bad. In this genre, I would never involve adolescent characters in the sort of […]
Songwriter and Novelist Ben Arthur wrote and recorded a song answering a poem by Joyce Carol Oates: “Too Young to Marry but Not Too Young to Die.” Arthur and Oates both performed […]
The Spring-Summer 1980 issue of Ontario Review is now available online, with reviews by Joyce Carol Oates and featuring Carlos Fuentes, John Updike, Maxine Kumin, and many others. Fiction A […]
The 41st issue of Ontario Review, originally published Fall/Winter 1994–95, is now available online. Featuring photographs by Bill Ravanesi, the issue also includes a drama feature with plays commissioned for […]
Independent filmmakers Brandon Nease and Jackson Wickham plan to turn Joyce Carol Oates’s short story “Mark of Satan” into a short film, and you can help make this happen.
Matthew Surridge, writing for Blackgate.com, considered each book in Joyce Carol Oates’s “Gothic” series, in preparation for The Accursed, the final book of the series to be published. He now offers his take on The Accursed, as well as the series as a whole.
Melville’s Ahab (19th century), Fitzgerald’s Gatsby (20th century)—our tragic American heroes to set beside Hamlet, Macbeth, Lear.
Celestial Timepiece 