Joyce Carol Oates. Harper-Tempest, $7.99 (400pp) ISBN 978-0-06-001219-9
According to PW
, "A dozen mesmerizing short stories features females on the brink of adulthood from different eras and locales, who find themselves in painful, even desperate, situations—many of them sexual." Ages 12-up. (Mar.)
In a tale told primarily from the point of view of the youngest boy, Judd, listeners learn how each of the Mulvaneys struggles with 16-year-old Marianne's date rape and her father's fierce Continue reading »
A romance? The hero dies in the opening pages, adolescents renounce their parents and the grownups aren't true to themselves, much less each other, because they have no idea what they are. In Continue reading »
Believable, full-blooded characters propel Oates's first YA novel past some plotting that doesn't quite add up. Ursula Riggs, a high school junior, has adopted a stance of invincible Continue reading »
Most of us transcend the solipsism of loneliness by involvement in family, school or work. "Anellia," the narrator of Oates's 30th novel (who never reveals her real name), is denied Continue reading »
Guest editor Oates attempts a "swerve of engagement" in these 15 mostly staid, well-behaved stories culled from American writing programs and workshops. Sober realism rather than Continue reading »
When a reclusive, 38-year-old writer hires a near-illiterate young woman as an assistant at his suburban home in Carmel Heights, near Rochester, N.Y., he's unaware that a vehement Continue reading »
A high school junior leaps to her classmate's defense when his throwaway joke about blowing up the school makes him a suspected terrorist. "The relationship between the two grows Continue reading »
The daughter of a charismatic football star-turned-sportscaster narrates Oates's (Big Mouth & Ugly Girl) captivating novel, which bears some resemblance Continue reading »
Never one to shy away from grim or sensational themes, Oates writes about murder, rape, arson and terrorism in her latest collection of short fiction. In these 19 stories, she evokes the Continue reading »
Oates is not only on her authentically rendered home ground in this sprawling novel set in the city of Niagara Falls during the 1950s, she is also writing at the top of her form. Her febrile prose Continue reading »
As she did in Freaky Green Eyes
, Oates once again explores the link between sexuality and aggression as she delves deep inside a vulnerable 16-year-old's Continue reading »
In our 2003 Best Books citation, PW
wrote, "The daughter of a charismatic football star-turned-sportscaster narrates this captivating novel, which bears Continue reading »
The Female of the Species: Tales of Mystery and Suspense
Joyce Carol Oates
As evidenced in this collection of nine stories, Oates's imagination is still fertile, feverish and macabre. These females are killers, either by their own hands or through manipulation. To be Continue reading »
This hefty collection, featuring 10 new pieces along with stories culled from four decades, further establishes the prolific and wide-ranging Oates as a gifted chronicler of American culture. The Continue reading »
In 1975, racial tension still runs high at Genna Meade's mostly white Schuyler College in Pennsylvania. Her outcast black roommate, Minette Swift, is a D.C. preacher's daughter; Genna is Continue reading »
After the Wreck, I Picked Myself Up, Spread My Wings, and Flew Away
Joyce Carol Oates
As engrossing as Oates's Sexy
, this psychological drama explores how a teen is changed by a devastating automobile accident that leaves her mother dead. Continue reading »
At the beginning of Oates's 36th novel, Rebecca Schwart is mistaken by a seemingly harmless man for another woman, Hazel Jones, on a footpath in 1959 Chatauqua Falls, N.Y. Five hundred pages Continue reading »
The Museum of Dr. Moses: Tales of Mystery and Suspense
Joyce Carol Oates
The words “gothic” and “macabre” rather than “mystery” and “suspense” might better describe the 10 beautifully told stories in this superb Continue reading »
Writing is... a drug, sweet, irresistible, and exhausting,” writes Oates in this fascinating and significant record of an artist's life. She was 34 when she began this “experiment Continue reading »
Wild Nights! Stories About the Last Days of Poe, Dickinson, Twain, James and Hemingway
Joyce Carol Oates
In this intriguing collection, Oates writes fictional death scenes for five canonical American writers, adopting elements of their signature styles with mixed results. The Poe story, written as a Continue reading »
Oates revisits in fantastic fashion the JonBenet Ramsay murder, replacing the famous family with the Rampikes—father Bix, a bully and compulsive philanderer; mother Betsey, obsessed with making Continue reading »
The family ties that bind (and choke) are the overarching theme of Oates's grim but incisive collection. The title story takes the form of a rambling letter from an Andrea Yates–like Continue reading »
Sixteen-year-old Katya Spivak and elderly Marcus Kidder share a bizarre romance in Oates’s derivative and unpolished new novel. In bland Bayhead Harbor, N.J., Katya serves as a nanny to the Continue reading »
Beneath the Sturm und Drang of Oates's third book of 2009 is the archetypal fairy tale: beauty and the beast. The beauties are the narrator, Krista Diehl, and Zoe Kruller, a waitress and Continue reading »
``You would not choose to drown, to die . . . trapped together in a sinking car, with a stranger,'' a narrator observes about the fate of Kelly Kelleher, heroine of Oates's ( Because It Is Bitter and Continue reading »
A bad joke says writing is easy if you don’t know how to do it. This collection is a personal appreciation and piercing analysis of those who do it sublimely: Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson, Jean Continue reading »
Oates's latest collection explores certain favorite Oatesian themes, primary among them violence, loss, and privilege. Three of the stories feature white, upper-class, educated widows whose sheltered Continue reading »
The heart is a lonely hunter, and it also is vengeful, untrusting, and cruel, as Oates (The Female of the Species) proves in this fine collection of 10 tightly focused tales about love and its Continue reading »
Racial disharmony from the mid-'50s to mid-'60s propels this tale of the love that binds pk a black man and a white woman in an upstate New York industrial town wracked by violence and murder. Continue reading »
National Book Award winner Oates's ( Because It Is Bitter and Because It Is My Heart ) tightly-focused novella features a disturbed woman who enjoys the ambience of hospitals. Continue reading »
In a plot shocking for its blatant familiarity, a figure identified as The Senator tipsily drives a young woman away from a party and off of a dock.A two-week PW bestseller and a BOMC selection in Continue reading »
This is Oates's eighth volume of poetry, yet her voice still lacks the readily identifiable features that make her one of America's most distinguished novelists. Her narrative poems are particularly Continue reading »
In 44 short narratives ranging in length from a simple paragraph of five sentences to a dozen pages at most, Oates has captured precisely an essential presence and instant in the lives of her Continue reading »
Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?: Selected Early Stories
Joyce Carol Oates
In her 17th collection of short fiction, Oates ( With Shuddering Fall ) retrieves stories from her first six, as well as two stories not previously published in book form. And while the volume Continue reading »
Our review of Oates's 1971 masterpiece starring Jesse Vogel, reissued here with a new afterword, concluded: `` `Wonderland' is not a place from which one escapes unscathed but for those who care Continue reading »
The 35 stories in this exciting collection dramatize electrifying encounters and characters seized by heightened emotions, revealing them with inventiveness and boundless stylistic variety. Many of Continue reading »
Oates's compelling gothic tale, set in Upstate New York apparently in the late 1950s or early '60s, is an intense, perfervid study of child sexual abuse, religious hypocrisy and family breakdown. Continue reading »
Elegiac and urgent in tone, Oates's wrenching 26th novel (after Zombie) is a profound and darkly realistic chronicle of one family's hubristic heyday and its fall from grace. The wealthy, socially Continue reading »
Oates makes a false step with her first children's book, a strained tale of a kitten found by the side of the road. At the urging of their daughter, Lily, the Smiths take Muffin home, where he is Continue reading »
Dramatic, provocative and unsettlingly suggestive, Blonde is as much a bombshell as its protagonist, the legendary Marilyn Monroe. Writing in highly charged, impressionistic prose, Oates creates a Continue reading »
Atkinson narrates Oates's fictional biography of Marilyn Monroe in an intense, slightly husky voice that immediately grabs and holds the listener's attention. Film actress Atkinson deftly switches Continue reading »
Oates long ago established herself as the nation's literary Weegee, prowling the mean streets of the American mind and returning with gloriously lurid takes on our midnight obsessions. If she has Continue reading »
In a dozen mesmerizing short stories, 10 of which were previously published and three of which have won O. Henry Awards, Joyce Carol Oates's Small Avalanches and Other Stories features females on Continue reading »
Where Is Little Reynard? by Joyce Carol Oates, illus. by Mark Graham, stars Lily and the Smith family from their Come Meet Muffin!, plus the orange runt of a litter of kittens. Little Reynard is Continue reading »
In 12 short thematic essays and an interview, all previously published, the hyper-prolific author of novels (Blonde), story collections (Faithless), plays (In Darkest America) and poems (Tenderness) Continue reading »
The prolific, bestselling novelist Oates wears a critic's hat in this tastefully textured compilation of prose pieces. Guided by her overarching desire ""to call attention solely to books and writers Continue reading »
Some formative scenes from the ""life'' of an American writer and scholar: At eight, Marya is deserted by her mother when her father is killed by union strike-breakers. Raised by an uncaring aunt and Continue reading »
The variety of topics covered in this collection of 27 essays is as remarkable as the proliferation of insights each contains. There are essays on somewhat general subjectssuch as the creative Continue reading »
Prolific writer Oates demonstrates awesome talent in her new novel, a family saga, set against the backdrop of conservatism that marked America in the 1950s. Through the actions of Lyle Stevick and Continue reading »
In her 19th novel, the prolific author of You Must Remember This dishes up a heady concoction of lust, murder and courtroom drama. Ian and Glynnis McCullough, an apparently happy couple for 26 years, Continue reading »
In 44 short narratives, ``Oates has captured precisely an essential presence and instant in the lives of her characters,'' commented PW. `` Logical as daydreams, with endings similarly as interrupted Continue reading »
In the moving title sequence of this aggressively diverse collection, Oates's ( Invisible Woman ) presents Americans traveling in Eastern Europe, where ``we are `not ourselves.' / We are mimes, Continue reading »
A drunken quarrel over suspected infidelity provokes a brawl and the fatal injury of a food writer. According to PW , this is ``a zippy story about successful lives dramatically altered by one sudden Continue reading »
Murder galvanizes an industrial town in upstate New York when a husky red-haired corpse is fished from a polluted river in 1956. With sure strokes, Oates ( American Appetites ) delineates the racial Continue reading »
As in her recent highly praised novel, Because It Is Bitter and Because It Is My Heart , Oates unfolds another tale of ill-starred love between a white woman and a black man. The narrator tells the Continue reading »
Between her major novels ( Because It Is Bitter and Because It Is My Heart ), Oates turns out such tightly focused novellas as I Close My Door Upon Myself and this story of a disturbed woman. Kathy Continue reading »
Selected by Oates ( Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart ) , this year's best-essay picks offer up a mixture of blather, self-indulgent and/or unfocused scribbling and incisive writing. Continue reading »
Set around the turn of the century, this centers on the ill-starred love between a white woman and a black man. Oates `` powerfully creates a hallucinatory and harrowing atmosphere charged with Continue reading »
The Sophisticated Cat: 2a Gathering of Stories, Poems, and Miscellaneous Writings about Cats
Joyce Carol Oates
In his introduction to this mostly delightful anthology, Antaeus editor Halpern stresses that cats are not unattached, independent creatures. Yet while many of these stories, poems and essays by 99 Continue reading »
``It was between the ages of thirteen and seventeen that I belonged to FOXFIRE and FOXFIRE made sacred those years.'' Madeleine Faith Wirtz narrates Oates's 22nd novel in first-person promiscuous, Continue reading »
Fiction machine Oates ( Foxfire ) industriously cranks out her 18th short-story collection, a wide-ranging offering of 16 grisly tales. She knows which literary buttons to push, and while there's Continue reading »
The prolific NBA-winning author presents 16 multifarious horror stories ranging from a reworking of James's The Turn of the Screw to macabre, contemporary thrillers. Continue reading »
Periodically, Oates seems compelled to write grim novels that explore humanity's darkest corners. Coming on the heels of last year's excellent What I Lived For, this depressing narrative carries Continue reading »
Another big novel from the prolific Oates, this tale of a successful middle-aged real estate developer whose hidden past surges up to wreak havoc on his present was one of PW's best books for 1994 Continue reading »
Born in Columbus, Ohio, in 1882, George Bellows journeyed east in 1904, against his conservative father's wishes, and reinvented American art with his poetic realist canvases of New York City's Continue reading »
Narrator Ingrid Boone tells the story of her desperate, unbalanced young life in one long, breathless monologue, behind which the alert reader may hear echoes of such popular classics of mental Continue reading »
Is there a rogue gene? Such is the intriguing premise of Oates's frisky and bitingly ironic 28th novel (after What I Lived For), in which a dynasty of confidence artists is launched by a convicted Continue reading »
The Collector of Hearts: New Tales of the Grotesque
Joyce Carol Oates
Although these 27 macabre stories will trigger familiar fears (of death, of the human potential for violence), they provide many surprising turns as they tour familial traumas and human isolation. In Continue reading »
Huge, humorous, manic and multi-layered, Oates's 29th novel will rank high among the best work she has produced in her prolific career. In 1967, John Reddy Heart--a 16-year-old, James Dean-like Continue reading »
Where I've Been, and Where I'm Going: Essays, Reviews, Prose
Joyce Carol Oates
All of these approximately 50 essays, reviews and prose pieces, produced over the last decade by one of America's most prolific and respected writers, have been previously published in such Continue reading »
A serial killer and his pursuer engage in a lurid dance in this overextended psychological thriller written under the name Oates uses for her psycho-dramas (like Double Delight). The novel charts the Continue reading »
Early one morning in February 2008, Oates drove her husband, Raymond Smith, to the Princeton Medical Center where he was admitted with pneumonia. There, he developed a virulent opportunistic Continue reading »
Short stories that revolve around wishes form this volume created to raise money for Book Wish Foundation, a nonprofit organization working to build libraries for Darfur refugees living in Chad. Continue reading »
Oates’s introduction to Akashic’s noir volume dedicated to the Garden State, with its evocative definition of the genre, is alone worth the price of the book. While few of the 19 selections qualify Continue reading »
The seven stories in this stellar collection from the prolific Oates (Give Me Your Heart) may prompt the reader to turn on all the lights or jump at imagined noises. In the excruciating title tale, a Continue reading »
Oates begins her 38th novel with a nod to Nietzsche (“What is man? A ball of snakes”) that lies at the mud-caked heart of this tale of the rise and stumbling fall of M.R. Neukirchen, a brilliant Continue reading »
The Corn Maiden and Other Nightmares: Novellas and Stories of Unspeakable Dread
Joyce Carol Oates
In this chilling audio edition of the latest collection from the prolific Oates, the author offers up a selection of seven dark and psychologically thrilling tales that delve into everything from Continue reading »
The new short story collection from the prolific Oates (after the novel Two or Three Things I Forgot to Tell You) contains sinister and charged moments tempered by humor and masterful storytelling. Continue reading »
At the start of this gripping psychological thriller from Oates (The Gravedigger’s Daughter), Dinah Whitcomb is playing the “find our car” game with her five-year-old son, Robbie, in the parking lot Continue reading »
Merissa is the envy of all her similarly privileged peers, yet she also lost her friend Tink six months ago to suicide. While good things fall into place for Merissa (getting into a great college Continue reading »
Oates has published more than enough books to take risks, and her newest is exactly that: first drafted in the early 1980s, then set aside, the novel is, in addition to being a thrilling tale in the Continue reading »
With this latest collection, Oates continues to delve into the dark depths of the human condition with diverse stories of loss, regret, angst, and murder. This audio edition features a series of Continue reading »
Oates’s disturbing tale is chillingly conveyed in this audio edition thanks to Christine Williams’s compelling narration. The story begins in 2007 with the kidnapping of five-year-old Robbie Whitcomb Continue reading »
Clocking in at a whopping 23 hours, this sweeping narrative set at the turn of the 20th century, tells the tale of a town in New Jersey where evil seems to have been birthed and is wreaking havoc: a Continue reading »
These four exquisitely suspenseful novellas from Oates (The Accursed) offer sharp characterizations, whether it be the naïve and romantic 16-year-old Lizbeth Marsh; the deeply spoiled, deeply Continue reading »
The new collection of novellas from Oates presents an excellent vehicle to showcase the talents of four talented narrators. Each performer does a first-rate job of matching the unique atmosphere that Continue reading »
Oates (The Accursed) returns with another novel that ratchets up the unsettling to her signature feverish pitch. Beginning with an attention-grabbing opener that begets addictive reading—Zeno Continue reading »
Oates (Evil Eye) offers unexpected glimmers of redemption amid the grotesquerie, degradation, and exploitation that fill this collection’s eight tales. The volume picks up momentum after the Continue reading »
Each of the six performers chosen to narrate Oates’s collection of dark character studies suits the atmosphere of malaise and despair that emerges from the author’s odd, elegant prose. Ray Chase Continue reading »
Oates's (Carthage) newest collection characteristically mines the depths of the female psyche to find darkness there. In particular, she deals with women who hide medical Continue reading »
In this disjointed tale of race, community, and pride, a teenage black girl named Sybilla Frye is raped and left for dead in the basement of an abandoned New Jersey factory. Inspired by the 1988 Continue reading »
A writer’s secret pseudonymous identity becomes a conduit for his murderous dark side in Oates’s sleek and suspenseful excursion into the literary macabre. For years refined crime novelist Andrew J. Continue reading »
Joe Barrett has a great time bringing to life this twisted tale of a man’s fall into madness and murder. Andrew J. Rush is a celebrated literary novelist, with enough critical accolades and money to Continue reading »
“I scarcely remember myself as a child. Only as an eye, an ear, a ceaselessly inquisitive center of consciousness,” Oates (A Widow’s Story) admits, and so this memoir of her early life Continue reading »
A bizarre medical condition%E2%80%94anterograde amnesia%E2%80%94is the linchpin holding together Oates's latest novel, a profound and moving meditation on how memory shapes our personalities and, by Continue reading »
Oates (Jack of Spades) convincingly demonstrates her mastery of the macabre with this superlative story collection. Though the titular opening tale sets the creepy tone, narrator Robbie, who Continue reading »
Soul at the White Heat: Inspiration, Obsession, and the Writing Life
Joyce Carol Oates
This collection of essays, reviews, and lectures from a reigning doyenne of American letters is a bit of a hodgepodge, but taken as a whole provides an eclectic survey of contemporary American Continue reading »
On Nov. 2, 1999 in Muskegee Falls, Ohio, a self-described “soldier of God” named Luther Dunphy loads a shotgun, drives to an abortion clinic near his home, and guns down Dr. Augustus Voorhees as he Continue reading »
One frigid night last January, a diminutive woman in a full-length down coat and decidedly feminine hat raced across the train tracks to the lot where her car was Continue reading »
In a futuristic world in which 60% of people have mutated to develop superpowers, transgender teen Oberon, who has a panic disorder, is the only one of his siblings without a Continue reading »
Three days after her 15th birthday, Nell Strand manifests her matrilineal magic in the form of yellow ladybugs that alight on her piano keys as she searches for the perfect Continue reading »
Ever since her mother’s death, Japanese American seventh grader Megumi Mizuno has felt like school is a waste of time. Following her latest expulsion, Meg is enrolled at strict, Continue reading »
Drawing from personal memories, per an afterword, Agra Deedy (Carina Felina) kicks off this relational telling focusing on the friendship between a child, Coqui, and Emilio, the Continue reading »