A Joyce Carol Oates Patchwork
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Eric K. Anderson reviews The Man Without a Shadow in the latest volume of Bearing Witness: Joyce Carol Oates Studies.
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.
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.
Award winning and revered, Joyce Carol Oates is peerless when writing about the horrors that lurk next door, and in Daddy Love she delivers a terrifying novel about every parent’s worst nightmare.
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.
Carthage plunges us deep into the psyche of a wounded young corporal haunted by unspeakable acts of wartime aggression, while unraveling the story of a disaffected young girl whose exile from her family may have come long before her disappearance.
With fresh insights into the heart of a celebrity culture hypnotized by its own myths, Blonde is a sweeping novel about the elusive magic of a woman, the lasting legacy of a star, and the heartbreak behind the creation of the most evocative icon of the twentieth century.
Set against the mythic-historic backdrop of Niagara Falls, Joyce Carol Oates explores the American family in crisis, but also America itself in the mid-twentieth century.
A taut and fascinating novel that examines the mysteries of human memory and personality as they are bound up with the most mysterious phenomenon of all—love.
Joyce Carol Oates has considered the issues of authorship and identity at length in both her fiction and nonfiction.
From one of our most distinguished authors comes her most ambitious novel to date: an elaborate series of interlocking tales of six generations of the Bellefleur family and more than a century of American history.
Celestial Timepiece 