More from Joyce Carol Oates

[Jessica]

More from Joyce Carol Oates

Them
This is the first of the four books in the Wonderland Quartet. The Wendalls are a family on the steep edge of poverty in the windy, riotous Detroit slums. Loretta, beautiful and dreamy and full of regret by age sixteen, and her two children, Maureen and Jules, make up Oates' vision of the American family -- broken, marginal, and romantically proud. The novel's title, pointedly uncapitalized, refers to those Americans who inhabit the outskirts of society whose lives many authors in the 1960s had left unexamined.

We Were the Mulvaneys
The Mulvaneys are blessed by all that makes life sweet -- a hardworking father, a loving mother, three fine sons, and a bright, pretty daughter. They are confident in their love for each other and their position in the rural community of Mt. Ephraim, New York. But something happens on Valentine's Day, 1976 -- an incident that is hushed up in the town and never spoken of in the Mulvaney home -- that rends the fabric of their family life. As the years pass the secrets they keep from each other threaten to destroy them, but ultimately they bridge the chasms between them, and reunite in the spirit of love and healing.

Wild Nights!: Stories About the Last Days of Poe, Dickinson, Twain, James, and Hemingway
Oates evokes each of these American literary icons in this work of fiction, poignantly and audaciously reinventing the climactic events of their lives. In subtly nuanced language suggestive of each of these writers, Oates explores the mysterious regions of the unknowable self that is "genius."

Black Girl / White Girl
In 1975 Genna Hewett-Meade's college roommate died a mysterious, violent death partway through their freshman year. Minette Swift had been assertive, fiercely individualistic, and one of the few black girls at their exclusive, "enlightened" college; and Genna, daughter of a prominent civil defense lawyer, felt duty-bound to protect her at all costs. But fifteen years later, while reconstructing Minette's tragic death, Genna is forced to painfully confront her own past life, identity, and her deepest beliefs about social obligation in a morally gray world.

Joyce Carol Oates: Conversations 1970-2006
In her acceptance speech for the National Book Award in 1970, Joyce Carol Oates remarked that "language is all we have to pit against death and silence." In this remarkable new collection of interviews spanning more than 35 years of Oates's career, she talks candidly and insightfully about literature, the writing life, her background, and many other topics. These interviews should interest not only Oates's many fans but anyone who cares about contemporary American literature.

The Falls
A man climbs over the railings and plunges into Niagara Falls. A newlywed, he has left behind his wife, Ariah Erskine. "The Widow Bride of The Falls," as Ariah comes to be known, begins a relentless seven-day vigil, waiting for his body to be found. At her side throughout, confirmed bachelor and pillar of the community Dirk Burnaby is unexpectedly transfixed Ariah, falling in love with her though they barely exchange a word. What follows is their passionate love affair, marriage, and children -- but her tragic past shadows them, damaging their idyll with distrust and greed.

Blonde
Oates boldly reimagines the inner, poetic, and spiritual life of Norma Jeane Baker -- the child, the woman, the fated celebrity and idolized blonde the world came to know as Marilyn Monroe. In a voice startlingly intimate and rich, Norma Jeane tells her own story of an emblematic American artist -- intensely conflicted and driven -- who had lost her way. A powerful portrait of Hollywood's myth and an extraordinary woman's heartbreaking reality, Blonde is a sweeping epic that pays tribute to the elusive magic and devastation behind the creation of the great twentieth-century American star.

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