Joyce Carol Oates
Less than twenty-four hours after exchanging vows with her new husband, Willem, Abby steps out into traffic. As his wife lies in her hospital bed, sleeping in fits and starts, Willem tries to determine whether this was an absentminded accident or a premeditated...
A powerful reckoning over the people we might have been if we'd chosen a different path, from a master of the short story
In this stirring, reflective collection of short stories, Joyce Carol Oates ponders alternate destinies: the other lives we might have led if we'd made different choices. An accomplished writer returns to her childhood home of Yewville, but the homecoming stirs troubled thoughts about the person she might
...With the novella and six stories collected here, Joyce Carol Oates reaffirms her singular reputation for portraying the dark complexities of the human psyche. The title novella tells the story of Marissa, an eleven-year-old girl with hair the color of corn silk....
Sixteen-year-old Katya Spivak is out for a walk on the gracious streets of Bayhead Harbor with her two summer babysitting charges when she's approached by silver-haired, elegant Marcus Kidder. At first his interest in her seems harmless, even pleasant; like his...
6) Mystery, Inc
Identified only by the hastily—and clumsily—chosen alias Charles Brockden, the narrator of this story finds a bookstore that instantly piques his desire. He must call it his own; he must add it to his already-extensive collection of bookstores. But surely the owner...
Robbie Whitcomb is five years old when he’s taken from his mother in a mall parking lot. In her attempt to chase the kidnapper, she’s left badly injured and permanently disfigured. Such are the methods of the man who calls himself Daddy...
10) Blonde
The National Book Award finalist and national bestseller exploring the life and legend of Marilyn Monroe
Soon to be a Netflix Film starring Ana de Armas, Adrien Brody, Bobby Cannavale and Julianne Nicholson
In one of her most ambitious works, Joyce Carol Oates boldly reimagines the inner, poetic, and spiritual life of Norma Jeane Baker—the child, the woman, the fated celebrity, and idolized blonde
...An ingenious, dystopian novel of one young woman's resistance against the constraints of an oppressive society, from the inventive imagination of Joyce Carol Oates
"Time travel" — and its hazards—are made literal in this astonishing new novel in which a recklessly idealistic girl dares to test the perimeters of her tightly controlled (future) world and is punished by being sent back in time to a region of North
...12) Breathe: A Novel
A NOVEL OF LOVE AND LOSS FROM BESTSELLING AND PRIZEWINNING AUTHOR JOYCE CAROL OATES
Amid a starkly beautiful but uncanny landscape in New Mexico, a married couple from Cambridge, MA takes residency at a distinguished academic institute. When the husband is stricken with a mysterious illness, misdiagnosed at first, their lives are uprooted and husband and wife each embarks upon a nightmare journey. At thirty-seven, Michaela
...A new collection of poetry from an American literary legend, her first in twenty-five years
Joyce Carol Oates is one of our most insightful observers of the human heart and mind, and, with her acute social consciousness, one of the most insistent and inspired witnesses of a shared American history.
Oates is perhaps best known for her prodigious output of novels and short stories, many of which have become contemporary
...This wonderfully bizarre new collection of stories by Joyce Carol Oates re-imagines the final days of five major American writers.
Edgar Allen Poe, Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Henry James and Ernest Hemingway—award-winning author Joyce Carol Oates evokes each of theses literary giants in her latest work of fiction, powerfully and audaciously reinventing the last days of their lives. In subtly nuanced language suggestive of each of
...The bonds of family are tested in the wake of a profound tragedy, providing a look at the darker side of our society by one of our most enduringly popular and important writers.
Night Sleep Death The Stars is a gripping examination of contemporary America through the prism of a family tragedy: when a powerful parent dies, each of his adult children reacts in startling and unexpected ways, and his grieving widow in the most
...Joshua Seigi is a celebrated but reclusive author. Young but in failing health, he reluctantly admits that he can no longer live alone and launches a search for an assistant. He is dissatisfied with everyone he meets until he encounters Alma. A young woman with synthetic-looking blond hair and pale, tattooed skin, she stirs something inside him. Unaware of her torturous past and the hatred that seethes within her, he has no idea that he is bringing
..."A painful truth of family life: the most tender emotions can change in an instant. You think your parents love you but is it you they love, or the child who is theirs?" —Joyce Carol Oates, My Life as a Rat
Which should prevail: loyalty to family or loyalty to the truth? Is telling the truth ever a mistake and is lying for one's family ever justified? Can one do the right thing, but bitterly regret it?
My Life
...New York Times bestselling author Joyce Carol Oates returns with an incendiary novel that illuminates the tragic impact of sexual violence, racism, brutality, and power on innocent lives and probes the persistence of stereotypes, the nature of revenge, the complexities of truth, and our insatiable hunger for sensationalism.
When a fourteen-year-old girl is the alleged victim of a terrible act of racial violence, the incident shocks and galvanizes
..."Hannah’s unreliable, elliptical narrative is seductive and compelling, like following someone into a fever dream ... [Oates] is in no hurry to trigger the action, dropping tiny morsels of foreshadowing...