If Beale Street Could Talk
It is so vividly human and so obviously based upon reality, that it strikes us as timeless.
Edna O’Brien’s “The Little Red Chairs”
Joyce Carol Oates reviews Edna O’Brien’s novel The Little Red Chairs in the New York Times Book Review
Review of The Lost Landscape
These feelings of empathy with those who are so similar to the author herself but who experienced a different fate reinforce Oates’s message throughout her writing that our existence is so often determined by mere chance.
“Us” and “them”
Eric K. Anderson reviews JCO’s novel The Sacrifice in Bearing Witness: Joyce Carol Oates Studies, and notes the references back to a much earlier novel. This new novel has a natural predecessor in Oates’s National Book Award-winning novel them (1969). In this earlier novel the struggles of a lower middle class family are seen as running parallel to and becoming entangled with the 1967 […]
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 […]
Joyce Carol Oates on Shirley Jackson
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 […]
Celestial Timepiece 