Bellefleur
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.
We Were the Mulvaneys
You will not read a novel more enthralling, more moving, more unforgettably illumined by profoundly human truth than this story of the rise, the fall, and the ultimate redemption of an American family. That family is the Mulvaneys.
them
By Joyce Carol Oates Loretta Wendall, her daughter Maureen, and her son Jules are “them”—three characters held together by corroding hatred and mute love. “Them” are also the forces that […]
Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang
By Joyce Carol Oates New York: Dutton, 1993 328 Pages foxfire revenge ! foxfire never says sorry ! foxfire burns & burns ! The time is the 1950s. The place […]
Marya: A Life
By Joyce Carol Oates “Amazingly gifted” was how The Times Literary Supplement recently described Joyce Carol Oates, and we would add “remarkably productive”—in 1984, not one but two of her works, the […]
The Sacrifice
New York Times bestselling author Joyce Carol Oates returns with an incendiary novel that illuminates the tragic impact of sexual violence, racism, brutality, and power on innocent lives and probes the persistence of stereotypes, the nature of revenge, the complexities of truth, and our insatiable hunger for sensationalism.
The Novels of Joyce Carol Oates
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 […]
The Works of Joyce Carol Oates
A future archeologist equipped only with her oeuvre could easily piece together the whole of postwar America.
Literary Structure: An Essay in Tweets
As the first sentence or paragraph in a novel is a (hidden) signal of all that is to come, so the first story in a collection is crucial.
The Accursed: Which Cover is Best?
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 […]
JCO’s Gothic Quintet Considered
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 […]
Joyce Carol Oates and France
Anne Korkeakivi writes about American literary fiction finding an audience in France. I asked Joyce Carol Oates about her avid French following. For me, the very sound of French spoken is musical, beautiful, subtly cadenced. Her involvement with French language began in high school; as an adult she has taught and published French literature. “This is my background for writing, and my relationship […]
Joyce Carol Oates on bringing Foxfire back to the big screen
Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang, the film based on a book written in the 1990s about a small town in the 1950s, has its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on Monday night and its theme is more timely than ever, says its author, Joyce Carol Oates.
Joyce Carol Oates on Zadie Smith
Joyce Carol Oates reviews Zadie Smith’s NW in the New York Review of Books: In its assiduously detailed evocation of the multicultural neighborhood of Willesden, in northwestern London, where in […]
Is Dickens the greatest of English novelists?
Joyce Carol Oates reviews Charles Dickens: A Life by Claire Tomalin in the New York Review of Books: Is Dickens the greatest of English novelists? Few would contest that he is […]
The Crosswicks Horror: At Last
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: […]
Celestial Timepiece 