A Joyce Carol Oates Patchwork
This occurred early in the second year of The Edict, when the first wave of arrests, fines and imprisonments, and frequent deaths had run their course; and all but the most desperate women were likely to accept the new conditions, and have their babies, as The Moral Law of The Land decreed.
The stories not only bleed across the categorical boundaries they have been assigned, but also expand the scope of what is terrifying about the body—living or dead, human or nonhuman—in the first place.
Because you gaze upon me with pity and contempt, thinking—Oh she is a monster! She is nothing like me.
But I am like you. In my heart that is without pity, I am you.
“Pushing things to extremes is Oates’ literary modus operandi, especially when it comes to the myriad betrayals of the mind and body. In her latest collection of macabre short stories, she extends the traditions of Edgar Allan Poe and Shirley Jackson in her own unique arias performed by characters assailed by mental illness and intent on destruction…. High-pitched, unnerving, and incisive.”
Oates typically leads her readers to focus on one plot element, while subtly rearranging the emotional landscape, leaving them in exhilaratingly uncharted territory. Spanning the first 30 years of Oates’s writing career, these stories aren’t for the faint of heart, but they’re a joy for anyone who appreciates the work of a master storyteller.
This is such a terrible story. It’s a story I have told a dozen times, never knowing why. Why I can’t forget it, I mean. Why it’s lodged so deep in me … like an arrow through the neck.
The six stories in the collection show Oates’ mastery of the form, across grisly body horror, experimental reflection, deep character study and sharp revenge fantasy. Across widely varying tone, from black comedy to utterly chilling, Oates is a writer utterly in command of her voice.
The stories comprising Night, Neon showcase Oates’ mastery of the suspense story―and her relentless use of the form to conduct unapologetically honest explorations of American identity.
These are dark stories about dark days, suffused, like most of Oates’s work, with themes of violence, loss and longing. She offers possibility here, too, but only as if to say that while the myriad choices we can make may produce wildly different journeys, none of us, ultimately, is spared.
One or two of these stories are as good as James’s and Conrad’s. None of them is conventional or commercial, the 25 of them add up to a magnificent achievement.
These are small, hard gems, full of the same rich emotion and startling observation that readers of Oates’s fiction have come to expect.
But no man joined Marilyn Monroe in her disguise as one of us in the Strand. No Leading Man, no dark prince. Like us (we began to see) this Marilyn Monroe required no man.
The Hungry Ghosts crackles with tension and wit, and its subjects—the foibles of academia and the literati—are tantalizing.
Here are five splendid stories, imagining five major American authors on the verge of death each rooted in biographical facts and presented in the authors own particular style that are harrowing, heartfelt, incredibly moving, that cut to the depths of the psyche, probing with such laser-lean, honed prose that it’ll take your breath away.
By Joyce Carol Oates An unprecedented collection of the best of Joyce Carol Oates’s short stories combined with eleven new stories. No other writer can match the impressive oeuvre of […]
By Joyce Carol Oates In the title story of her taut new fiction collection, Night-Gaunts and Other Tales of Suspense, Joyce Carol Oates writes: Life was not of the surface […]
Celestial Timepiece 