My Life as a Rat
A novel by Joyce Carol Oates “A painful truth of family life: the most tender emotions can change in an instant. You think your parents love you but is it […]
Hazards of Time Travel
An ingenious, dystopian novel of one young woman’s resistance against the constraints of an oppressive society, from the inventive imagination of Joyce Carol Oates. “Time travel” — and its hazards—are […]
Son of the Morning
SON OF THE MORNING is the story of Nathanael Vickery conceived in sin but blessed with evangelical purpose. For him, even as a child of five, God is near; as […]
The Assassins: A Book of Hours
When a bullet strikes a powerful political figure, when the burial rites are over and done with, when all that remains of that great promise is his lingering charisma, when […]
With Shuddering Fall
With the publication of BY THE NORTH GATE, Joyce Carol Oates established herself firmly on the literary scene. In WITH SHUDDERING FALL, her first novel, she justifies her acclaim even […]
American Appetites
Joyce Carol Oates moves into new territory in the first novel she has written in a contemporary setting since Solstice. American Appetites takes us into affluent, upper-class suburbia in the late American […]
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 […]
A Book of American Martyrs
A Book of American Martyrs is a stunning, timely depiction of an issue hotly debated on a national stage but which makes itself felt most lastingly in communities torn apart by violence and hatred.
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.
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.
Little Bird of Heaven
When a young wife and mother named Zoe Kruller is found brutally murdered, the Sparta police target two primary suspects, her estranged husband Delray Kruller and her longtime lover Eddy Diehl. In turn, the Krullers’s son Aaron and Eddy Diehl’s daughter Krista become obsessed with one another, each believing the other’s father is guilty.
Review of The Man Without a Shadow
Eric K. Anderson reviews The Man Without a Shadow in the latest volume of Bearing Witness: Joyce Carol Oates Studies.
A Bloodsmoor Romance
In the world of A Bloodsmoor Romance, time machines run rampant, Transcendentalism gives way to the Spirit World, and decorum and etiquette fall to the exigencies of the passions. Amid yards of lace, sweet songs, and hope chests filled with twelve dozen of everything, the Zinn daughters—and America—are thrust headlong into the modern age. This is the tale our classics never dared reveal, the other side of Little Women as only Joyce Carol Oates can tell it.
Mudwoman
A riveting novel that explores the high price of success in the life of one woman—the first female president of a lauded ivy league institution—and her hold upon her self-identity in the face of personal and professional demons.
