A Joyce Carol Oates Patchwork
As Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” surely contains the most frightening monologue in our literature, so Joyce Carol Oates’s most famous short story—”Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”—contains its most frightening dialogue.
I believe these things are true about Dylan, as they are true about any genius: 1. He is unstoppable. 2. “He” is both an individual and a medium, a process by which […]
A bibliography of criticism on JCO’s famous story.
Joyce Carol Oates’s prize-winning story “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” takes up troubling subjects that continue to occupy her in her fiction: the romantic longings and limited […]
Laura Dern is so dazzlingly right as “my” Connie that I may come to think I modeled the fictitious girl on her, in the way that writers frequently delude themselves about motions of causality.
Connie is always at the mercy of men who will come with a vehicle to take her away, to take her somewhere else. Women have no agency, no vehicle, no wheels. It’s not coincidental that Arnold Friend’s golden convertible is part of his magic.
“Quite simply, one of the finest collections of short fiction ever written by an American. . . . These 20 stories are the most violent, intense products we have yet had from an especially violent and intense creative imagination.”
Joyce Carol Oates answers the frequently asked question: Joyce Carol Oates in San Francisco, City Arts & Lectures, 2004. Joyce Carol Oates on Dylan’s “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” […]
First published in Epoch, Fall 1966. Included in Prize Stories: O Henry Award Winners (1968), and The Best American Short Stories (1967). First collected in The Wheel of Love and Other Stories. Information […]
Celestial Timepiece 