Joyce Carol Oates, Author . Ecco $28 (480p) ISBN 978-0-06-620946-3
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 the Lexus-crowded town of Salthill-on-Hudson,...
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Joyce Carol Oates, Author . Carroll & Graf $14 (128p) ISBN 978-0-7867-0896-3
Where there's smoke, there's fire—and, as the unstoppable Oates (Middle Age; Blonde; etc.) deftly demonstrates in this unsettling neo-gothic confessional, sometimes a combustible passion that has been stoked to incendiary heights. Set
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Joyce Carol Oates, Author . HarperCollins $16.95 (272p) ISBN 978-0-06-623756-5
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 indifference ("Since that day I woke up and knew I...
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Joyce Carol Oates, Author , read by Hilary Swank and Chad Lowe. HarperChildren's Audio $25 (, unabridged, four cassettes, 6 hrs., $25 ISBN ) ISBN 978-0-06-008969-6
Accomplished actors and real-life spouses Swank (Boys Don't Cry) and Lowe (Life Goes On) find a comfortable rhythm reading the alternating chapters from Oates' first YA novel. Swank is Ursula Riggs, whose alter-ego, "Ugly Girl,"...
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Joyce Carol Oates, Author . Ecco $25.95 (304p) ISBN 978-0-06-050117-4
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 the comfort of a family, finds education to be a...
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Joyce Carol Oates, Author . Ecco $25.95 (320p) ISBN 978-0-06-053106-5
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 anti-Semitism seethes beneath her tattoo-branded exterior....
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Joyce Carol Oates, Author . HarperTempest $7.99 (288p) ISBN 978-0-06-447347-7
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 credibly and compellingly, against a convincing high school
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Joyce Carol Oates, Author . HarperCollins $16.99 (341p) ISBN 978-0-06-623759-6
The daughter of a charismatic football star-turned-sportscaster narrates Oates's (Big Mouth & Ugly Girl) captivating novel, which bears some resemblance to the O.J. Simpson story. Fifteen-year-old Franky narrates and opens with a flashback...
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Joyce Carol Oates, Author . Carroll & Graf/ Penzler $16 (128p) ISBN 978-0-7867-1294-6
Prolific Oates (We Were the Mulvaneys
; Beast
; etc.) explores sexual violence and its aftermath in this taut, harrowing novella. Teena Maguire, a pretty, 30-something widow, is on her way home from a party when she is beaten, gang-raped and left...
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Joyce Carol Oates, Author . HarperCollins $24.95 (304p) ISBN 978-0-06-059288-2
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 underbellies of small towns and the bizarre and obsessive...
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Joyce Carol Oates, Author Harper-Tempest $7.99 (400p) 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.)
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Joyce Carol Oates, Author . Ecco $26.95 (496p) ISBN 978-0-06-072228-9
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 is especially appropriate to a story as turbulent as
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Joyce Carol Oates, Author . HarperTempest $16.99 (272p) ISBN 978-0-06-054149-1
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 psyche. Structured in short, introspective chapters, the novel unfolds entirely from the...
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Joyce Carol Oates, Author . HarperTempest $6.99 (341p) ISBN 978-0-06-447348-4
In our 2003 Best Books citation, PW
wrote, "The daughter of a charismatic football star-turned-sportscaster narrates this captivating novel, which bears some resemblance to the O.J. Simpson story. Oates builds the mounting tension masterfully.&
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Joyce Carol Oates, Author . Ecco $25.95 (434p) ISBN 978-0-06-081621-6
Oates's latest returns to upstate New York's Mount Ephraim, the setting of We Were the Mulvaneys
, Oates's 1996 novel—a 2001 Oprah
pick—about one family's privilege and decay. This time, Oates turns to the middle class:...
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Joyce Carol Oates, Author . Harcourt/Penzler $24 (275p) ISBN 978-0-15-101179-7
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 sure, they have provocation: abandonment, betrayal,...
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Joyce Carol Oates, Author . HarperTempest $7.99 (263p) ISBN 978-0-06-054151-4
In a starred review, PW
said, "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 psyche." Ages 14-up. (Jan.)
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Joyce Carol Oates, Author . HarperCollins/Ecco $34.95 (664p) ISBN 978-0-06-050119-8
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 theme of girls and women preyed upon by violent men...
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Joyce Carol Oates, Author . Ecco $25.95 (272p) ISBN 978-0-06-112564-5
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 descended from the college's founder. Minette...
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Joyce Carol Oates, Author . HarperTempest $16.99 (292p) ISBN 978-0-06-073525-8
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. Fifteen-year-old Jenna is sitting in the passenger seat when the car her mother is driving...
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Joyce Carol Oates, Author . Ecco $26.95 (592p) ISBN 978-0-06-123682-2
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 later, Rebecca will find out that the man who accosted
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Joyce Carol Oates, Author . Harcourt/Penzler $24 (229p) ISBN 978-0-15-101531-3
The words “gothic” and “macabre” rather than “mystery” and “suspense” might better describe the 10 beautifully told stories in this superb collection from the prolific Oates (The Female of the Species
)
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Joyce Carol Oates, Author . Ecco $24.95 (238p) ISBN 978-0-06-143479-2
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 diary in the months after Poe’s death, doesnR
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Joyce Carol Oates, Author . Ecco $25.95 (576p) ISBN 978-0-06-154748-5
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 her daughter, Bliss, into a prize-winning figure...
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Joyce Carol Oates, Author . Ecco $24.95 (326p) ISBN 978-0-06-170431-4
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 mother after her infanticide is completed, detailing...
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Joyce Carol Oates, Author . Houghton Mifflin Harcourt $22 (165p) ISBN 978-0-15-101516-0
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 Engelhardts’ two young children. Attractive...
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Joyce Carol Oates, Author . Ecco $25.99 (442p) ISBN 978-0-06-182983-3
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 singer who was murdered in Sparta, N.Y., in 1983. The...
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Joyce Carol Oates, Author Dutton/Signet $17 (160p) ISBN 978-0-525-93455-4
``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 Because It Is My Heart ) gripping and...
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Joyce Carol Oates, Author Ecco 14.99 (416p) ISBN 978-0-06-196398-8
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 Stafford, Roald Dahl (considered in his adult work),
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Joyce Carol Oates, Ecco, $25.99 (384p) ISBN 978-0-06-199652-8
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 married lives have left them unprepared for life...
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Joyce Carol Oates, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt/Penzler, $25 (272p) ISBN 978-0-547-38546-4
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 aftermath. In the epistolary title story, a young woman...
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Joyce Carol Oates, Author Plume Books $16 (416p) ISBN 978-0-452-26581-3
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. Protagonists Jinx and Iris are ``brilliantly portrayed,''
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Joyce Carol Oates, Author New Directions Publishing Corporation $10.95 (142p) ISBN 978-0-8112-1213-7
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. (Sept.)
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Joyce Carol Oates, Author Plume Books $13 (160p) ISBN 978-0-452-26986-6
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 cloth, this novella is gripping and hallucinatory. (M
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Joyce Carol Oates, Author Plume Books $15 (336p) ISBN 978-0-452-27231-6
Oates depicts a gang of five adolescent girls growing up amidst violence and frustration in upstate New York during the 1950s. (Aug.)
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Joyce Carol Oates, Author Ontario Review Press $18.95 (91p) ISBN 978-0-86538-085-1
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 prosaic, posing the question as to why Oates didn't
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Joyce Carol Oates, Author Ontario Review Press $24.95 (522p) ISBN 978-0-86538-077-6
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 includes some of her best-known work (``Where Are You...
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Joyce Carol Oates, Author Ontario Review Press $14.95 (511p) ISBN 978-0-86538-075-2
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 about the best in American fiction it must be visited.'
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Joyce Carol Oates, Author Ecco $18.95 (193p) ISBN 978-0-88001-283-6
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 the stories are little more than brief vignettes,...
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Joyce Carol Oates, Author Dutton Books $24.95 (464p) ISBN 978-0-525-94223-8
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 elite Mulvaneys live on historic High Point Farm,...
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Joyce Carol Oates, Author Ecco $27.5 (737p) ISBN 978-0-06-019607-3
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 striking and poignant portrait of the mythic star...
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Joyce Carol Oates, Author HarperAudio $29.95 (0p) ISBN 978-0-694-52312-2
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 back and forth between Oates's prose, a breathy...
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Joyce Carol Oates, Author Ecco $27 (400p) ISBN 978-0-06-018525-1
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 left a stone in the shared unconscious unturned, she...
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Joyce Carol Oates, Author Harper Teen $16.99 (400p) ISBN 978-0-06-001217-5
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 the brink of adulthood from different eras and...
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Joyce Carol Oates, Author Ecco $21.95 (176p) ISBN 978-0-06-056553-4
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) examines the writing life, aiming to focus on""the
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Joyce Carol Oates, Author Ecco $24.95 (370p) ISBN 978-0-06-077556-8
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 that merit such attention, and to avoid whenever...
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Joyce Carol Oates, Author Dutton Books $16.95 (0p) ISBN 978-0-525-24374-8
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 uncle, she is sexually abused by their son. A...
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Joyce Carol Oates, Author Dutton Books $18.95 (402p) ISBN 978-0-525-24652-7
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 impulse, what it means to be a woman writer though the...
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Joyce Carol Oates, Author Dutton Books $13.95 (436p) ISBN 978-0-525-24545-2
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 his family, Oates creates a vivid portrait of...
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Joyce Carol Oates, Author Dutton Books $18.95 (340p) ISBN 978-0-525-24725-8
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, orbit painlessly in the academic universe of the...
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Joyce Carol Oates, Author Harper Perennial $11 (195p) ISBN 978-0-06-097246-2
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 or unforeseen, these stories reveal a master of...
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Joyce Carol Oates, Author Plume Books $9.95 (0p) ISBN 978-0-525-48505-6
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, smilers, / objects of curiosity, / objects of much...
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Joyce Carol Oates, Author Harper Perennial $12.5 (340p) ISBN 978-0-06-097278-3
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 and inexplicable lapse of judgment.'' (Jan.)
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Joyce Carol Oates, Author Dutton Books $19.95 (405p) ISBN 978-0-525-24860-6
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 hatreds leading to the crime that then entangles...
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Joyce Carol Oates, Author Ecco $15.95 (108p) ISBN 978-0-88001-260-7
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 story of her grandmother, Edith Freilicht, whose...
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Joyce Carol Oates, Author New Directions Publishing Corporation $16.95 (135p) ISBN 978-0-8112-1171-0
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 Hennessy finds she loves the ambience of the...
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Joyce Carol Oates, Author Plume Books $9.95 (112p) ISBN 978-0-452-26708-4
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 sensuality and destruction,'' said PW. (Dec.)
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Joyce Carol Oates, Author Dutton Books $21 (336p) ISBN 978-0-525-93632-9
``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, chronicling intimately the violent comings and...
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Joyce Carol Oates, Author Dutton Books $21.95 (320p) ISBN 978-0-525-93655-8
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 certainly suspense in these selections, it's...
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Joyce Carol Oates, Author Plume Books $15 (320p) ISBN 978-0-452-27374-0
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. (Feb.)
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Joyce Carol Oates, Author Dutton Books $19.95 (192p) ISBN 978-0-525-94045-6
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 macabre imagination to the extreme. It depicts the...
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Joyce Carol Oates, Author Plume Books $20 (624p) ISBN 978-0-452-27269-9
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 and a PEN/Faulkner nominee. (Oct.)
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Joyce Carol Oates, Author Ecco Press $22 (0p) ISBN 978-0-88001-437-3
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 teeming street life. Novelist/essayist Oates...
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Joyce Carol Oates, Author Dutton Books $23.95 (336p) ISBN 978-0-525-93972-6
The 22 intensely imagined, haunting stories in Oates's (American Appetites ) 19th anthology of reprinted short fiction mine her familiar territory--gothic, supernatural atmospheres, doppelgangers, icily estranged couples locked in mortal...
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Joyce Carol Oates, Author Dutton Books $23.95 (288p) ISBN 978-0-525-94232-0
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 illness as The Bell Jar and I Never Promised You a Rose
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Joyce Carol Oates, Author Dutton Books $26.95 (420p) ISBN 978-0-525-94442-3
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 felon in 18th-century London. The scene then shifts...
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Joyce Carol Oates, Author Dutton Books $24.95 (336p) ISBN 978-0-525-94445-4
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 general, Oates's characters are hapless victims...
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Joyce Carol Oates, Author Dutton Books $24.95 (369p) ISBN 978-0-525-94451-5
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 white-trash newcomer to a small town near Buffalo, N.Y.-
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Joyce Carol Oates, Author Plume Books $13.95 (450p) ISBN 978-0-452-28053-3
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 distinguished venues as the New York Review of Books and...
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Joyce Carol Oates, Ecco, $25.99 (432p) ISBN 978-0-06-201553-2
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 infection and died just one week later. Suddenly and...
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Edited by Joyce Carol Oates. Akashic, $24.95 (320p) ISBN 978-1-61775-026-7
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 as outstanding, highlights include Lou Manfredo’s “S
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Joyce Carol Oates. Grove/Atlantic/Mysterious, $24 (224p) ISBN 978-0-8021-2602-3
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 novella subtitled “A Love Story,” an adolescent...
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Joyce Carol Oates. Ecco, $25.99 (448p) ISBN 978-0-06-209562-6
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 academic whose childhood starts in the mudflats of the
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Joyce Carol Oates. Ecco, $24.99 (288p) ISBN 978-0-06-219569-2
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. The title tale blends fact and fiction and...
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Joyce Carol Oates. Grove/Atlantic/Mysterious, $24 (288p) ISBN 978-0-8021-2099-1
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 of an Ypsilanti, Mich., mall when a stranger...
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Joyce Carol Oates. HarperTeen, $17.99 (288p) ISBN 978-0-06-211047-3
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 early, for one), neither she nor her friends can...
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Joyce Carol Oates. Ecco, $27.99 (688p) ISBN 978-0-06-223170-3
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 best gothic tradition, a lesson in master...
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Joyce Carol Oates. Grove/Atlantic/Mysterious, $23 (224p) ISBN 978-0-8021-2047-2
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 disturbed Bart Hansen; or Mariana Mohr, the fourth wife...
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Joyce Carol Oates. Ecco, $26.99 (496p) ISBN 978-0-06-220812-5
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 Mayfield and a search party are on the hunt for Mayfield’s
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Joyce Carol Oates. Grove/Atlantic/Mysterious, $23 (256p) ISBN 978-0-8021-2265-0
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 predictable and slow-paced opener, “The Home at...
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Joyce Carol Oates. Ecco, $25.99 (432p) ISBN 978-0-06-235694-9
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 procedures—including, presciently, abortion—from their loved ones ("Sex With...
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Joyce Carol Oates. Ecco, $26.99 (320p) ISBN 978-0-06-233297-4
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 Tawana Brawley case, this supposed whodunit becomes...
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Joyce Carol Oates. Grove/Atlantic/Mysterious, $24 (240p) ISBN 978-0-8021-2394-7
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. Rush—known to his audience as “the gentleman’s...
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Joyce Carol Oates. Ecco, $27.99 (368p) ISBN 978-0-06-240867-9
“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 strings together the recollections that most deeply impressed...
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Joyce Carol Oates. Ecco, $27.99 (384p) ISBN 978-0-06-241609-4
A bizarre medical condition—anterograde amnesia—is the linchpin holding together Oates's latest novel, a profound and moving meditation on how memory shapes our personalities and, by extension, the emotions that we provoke in others. When...
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Joyce Carol Oates. Grove/Atlantic/Mysterious, $24 (336p) ISBN 978-0-8021-2488-3
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 has a thing for “found dolls” as an eighth grader, is odd...
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Joyce Carol Oates. Ecco, $27.99 (416p) ISBN 978-0-06-256450-4
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 literature. Oates is likely most familiar to readers as...
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Joyce Carol Oates. Ecco, $29.99 (768p) ISBN 978-0-06-264304-9
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 arrives at work. In this chilling novel,...
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Joyce Carol Oates, Author, J. Todd Adams, Read by , read by J. Todd Adams. HighBridge $29.95 (0p) ISBN 978-1-56511-494-4
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 reaction to it—Mike Mulvaney bans his...
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Joyce Carol Oates, read by Adam Verner and Christine Williams. HighBridge Audio, unabridged, nine CDs, 11 hrs., $34.95 ISBN 978-1-61174-601-3
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 kidnapping and ritual sacrifice to twins, childhood...
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Joyce Carol Oates, read by multiple narrators. HighBridge Audio, , six CDs, 7 hrs., unabridged, $29.95 ISBN 978-1-62231-464-5
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 starts the collection by portraying an orderly at a...
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Joyce Carol Oates, read by Paul Michael Garcia, Coleen Marlo, and Tavia Gilbert. HarperAudio, library edition, unabridged, seven CDs, 8.75 hrs., $59.99 ISBN 978-0-06-224615-8
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 winning performances from narrators Paul Michael...
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Joyce Carol Oates, read by Grover Gardner. HarperAudio, unabridged, digital download, 23 hrs., $40.99 ISBN 978-0-06-224368-3
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 curse, disappearances, abduction, and even an...
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Joyce Carol Oates, read by Donna Postel, Luci Christian, Chris Patton, and Tamara Marston. HighBridge Audio, unabridged, six CDs, 6.5 hrs., $29.95 ISBN 978-1-61174-960-1
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 Oates creates in these four works. Donna Postel’s
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Joyce Carol Oates, read by Joe Barrett. HighBridge Audio, , unabridged, 4 CDs , 4.5 hrs., $29.99 ISBN 978-1-62231-933-6
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 satisfy any author. It would appear that Rush...
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Joyce Carol Oates, Author, Robert Atwan, Editor, Joyce Carol Oates, Editor Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH) $9.95 (0p) ISBN 978-0-89919-928-3
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. Piquing our interest, Mario Vargas Llosa asks how...
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Joyce Carol Oates, Author, Barry Moser, Illustrator Ecco $18 (0p) ISBN 978-0-88001-457-1
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. Eleven-year-old Josie and her ruthlessly self-centered
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Joyce Carol Oates, Author, Mark Graham, Illustrator Ecco $18 (32p) ISBN 978-0-88001-556-1
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 ""welcomed"" by their two other cats. The tone,...
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Joyce Carol Oates, Author, Mark Graham, Illustrator HarperCollins Publishers $15.99 (32p) ISBN 978-0-06-029559-2
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 the odd furball out (""His sisters laughed at his ...
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Joyce Carol Oates, read by Christine Williams. Mysterious Press-HighBridge Audio, unabridged, six CDs, 6.75 hrs., $29.95 ISBN 978-1-61174-992-2
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 from a Michigan mall parking lot. During the...
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Joyce Carol Oates, Author, Oates, Author Ecco $16.95 (192p) ISBN 978-0-88001-200-3
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 characters. These short takes offer brilliant bursts of...
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Joyce Carol Oates, Author, Daniel Halpern, Editor, Joyce Carol Oates, Editor Dutton Books $23 (400p) ISBN 978-0-525-93522-3
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 literary figures dispel misconceptions of the cat...
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Joyce Carol Oates, Author, Rosamond Smith, Author Da Capo Press $25 (320p) ISBN 978-0-7867-0847-5
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 emotional ruin of Matt McBride, a real estate...
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Joyce Carol Oates, Author, Greg Johnson, Editor . Ecco $29.95 (509p) ISBN 978-0-06-122798-1
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 in consciousness,” which follows the gestation
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Joyce Carol Oates, Author, John Kulka, Editor, Natalie Danford, Editor . Harvest $14 (328p) ISBN 978-0-15-600716-0
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 exhilarating experimentation characterizes most of the...
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Book Wish Foundation. Putnam, $17.99 (288p) ISBN 978-0-399-25454-3
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. Mixing poems, stories, and even a comic, the book...
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Joyce Carol Oates. Ecco, $26.99 (304p) ISBN 978-0-06-303520-1
Oates (Night. Sleep. Death. The Stars) delivers a dark, moody collection permeated by themes of obsession, remorse, and violence. In the title story, a secondhand bookstore owner ruminates over the college entrance exam that sealed her fate to...
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Joyce Carol Oates. Knopf, $30 (312p) ISBN 978-0-593-53777-0
Oates (Zero-Sum) delivers a deliciously arch and relentlessly gloomy fictional biography of Dr. Silas Aloysius Weir, a character based on two 19th-century doctors. Weir, known during his time as the “Father of Modern Gyno-Psychiatry,” was also...
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Joyce Carol Oates. Mysterious, $26.95 (288p) ISBN 978-1-61316-381-8
Narrated by postal worker Georgina Fulmer, this exquisite novel of suspense from Oates (Babysitter) examines a crime and its consequences. On Apr. 11, 1991, when Georgina was 23, her beautiful, talented 30-year-old sister, Marguerite, disappeared...
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Joyce Carol Oates. Mysterious, $30 (528p) ISBN 978-1-61316-315-3
Nothing is as it first appears to be, and nothing can be taken for granted, in each of the 24 vividly told stories in this outstanding collection from Oates (Night, Neon: Tales of Mystery and Suspense). Highlights include “The Revenge of the Foot,”...
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Joyce Carol Oates. Ecco, $28.99 (368p) ISBN 978-0-06-308547-3
Shards of nightmarish grief coalesce in Oates’s powerful latest (after The (Other) You), a fever dream unleashed when a woman fails to come to terms with the death of her husband. As the story opens, memoir writer Michaela wills her older, very ill...
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Joyce Carol Oates. Mysterious, $25.95 (312p) ISBN 978-1-61316-230-9
Abuse, madness, confinement, and flight are prominent themes in this strong collection of nine varied, dark, and disquieting stories from Oates (Night, Sleep, Death, the Stars). Masterly executed stream-of-consciousness prose bolsters unpredictable,
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Joyce Carol Oates. Ecco, $26.99 (128p) ISBN 978-0-06-303526-3
In urgent and unsettling poems that question national mythology, Oates (Tenderness) brings her talent as a storyteller and powers of observation to bear on a variety of American characters and institutions. Oates’s subjects range from Marlon Brando,
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Joyce Carol Oates. Mysterious, $25 (256p) ISBN 978-0-8021-2652-8
Greater variety—along the lines of Oates’s outstanding 2016 collection, The Doll-Master—would have enhanced these seven well-crafted stories of menace, madness, and murder. The first four each feature a psychologically vulnerable female protagonist,
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Joyce Carol Oates. Ecco, $29.95 (800p) ISBN 978-0-06-297948-3
Oates’s quintessential examination of grief (after Pursuit) draws on the closing lines of Walt Whitman’s “A Clear Midnight,” which reverberate and reappear throughout this weighty chronicle of a family’s reckoning with the death of a father and...
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Joyce Carol Oates. Mysterious, $23 (224p) ISBN 978-0-8021-4791-2
Billed as a novel of suspense, this creepy thriller from Oates (My Life as a Rat) reads more like an extended short story. Abby Zengler lies in the ICU of a New Jersey hospital after accidentally stepping in front of a bus—or was it an accident?...
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Joyce Carol Oates. Hard Case Crime, $9.95 trade paper (224p) ISBN 978-1-78565-677-4
Originally published in 1976 and long out of print, this novella by Oates (Hazards of Time Travel) is a dark, disturbing trek through the mind of a psychotic killer. Bobbie Gotteson was found as an infant inside a New York City bus terminal...
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Joyce Carol Oates. Ecco, $28.99 (416p) ISBN 978-0-06-289983-5
Oates’s remarkable latest (after 2018’s Hazards of Time Travel) chronicles how a 12-year-old girl’s fate is determined after her family disowns her. The story opens in 1991 as Violet Rue Kerrigan, the youngest in a large Irish-Catholic family where...
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Joyce Carol Oates. Ecco, $26.99 (336p) ISBN 978-0-06-231959-3
Oates’s eerie dystopian novel (following Beautiful Days) is set both in New Jersey circa 2039 and in Wisconsin in 1959. In 2039, 17-year-old Adriane Strohl, who narrates, is to be her graduating class’s valedictorian. Doing well in school is...
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Joyce Carol Oates. Mysterious, $26 (352p) ISBN 978-0-8021-2810-2
The eponymous creatures haunting the Providence, R.I., mansion where the gothic title story is set seem about as terrifying as toddlers draped in bedsheets compared to some of the humans in this unsettling collection from Oates (Beautiful Days). “Sig
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Joyce Carol Oates. Ecco, $26.99 (416p) ISBN 978-0-06-279578-6
Oates (A Book of American Martyrs) toes the line between condemnation of and fascination with her characters in this collection of ethical failures. In part one, the characters’ self-definitions blind them to the pain they cause themselves and each...
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Joyce Carol Oates, edited by Greg Johnson. Akashic, $28.95 (336p) ISBN 978-1-63614-116-9
Novelist Johnson (Night Journey)—who published Invisible Writer, an authorized biography of Oates, in 1998—brings together an inviting compendium of his correspondence with the National Book Award winner from 1975 to 2006. Johnson first reached out...
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Edited by Ellen Datlow. Titan, $24.95 (320p) ISBN 978-1-78909-715-3
Winner of Multiple Hugo Awards, Datlow (Final Cuts) brings together 18 outstanding, atmospheric horror shorts from some of the biggest names in the genre—including Carmen Maria Machado, Stephen Graham Jones, and Joyce Carol Oates—in tribute to the...
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Joyce Carol Oates. Knopf, $30 (448p) ISBN 978-0-593-53517-2
In this polished yet soulless story from Oates (Extenuating Circumstances: Stories of Crime and Suspense), three people with varying agendas converge during the late 1970s as Detroit is racked by unsolved child murders. Bored, lonely suburban...
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Joyce Carol Oates. Knopf, $29 (272p) ISBN 978-0-593-53586-8
Oates (Blonde) exploits the relentless and unforgiving natures of her characters in this captivating collection. The “sulky-shy” philosophy student at the center of the title story obsesses over her married professor, whose unexpected betrayal...
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Joyce Carol Oates, illus. by Dave Mottram. HarperCollins, $17.99 (32p) ISBN 978-0-06-256392-7
Cherie the cat has a plummy life with the Smith family, until they bring home Cleopatra, a kitten who immediately seems to displace Cherie in everyone’s affections. Cherie’s journey back into the heart of the family takes some predictable twists and
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Joyce Carol Oates. Mysterious, $26 (416p) ISBN 978-0-8021-5799-7
The four novellas in this spellbinding collection from Oates (Night. Sleep. Death. The Stars.) carefully tread the boundary between psychological and supernatural expressions of the macabre. In the title story, a sinister gothic confection, a young...
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