Books by Joyce Carol Oates

Acclaimed and prolific author Joyce Carol Oates spins a chilling tale in which the American dream becomes a nightmare. "Any definition of art that excludes this novel is probably too narrow by far."--Time

These contemporary stories by emerging writers were judged by Joyce Carol Oates, who also wrote the introduction. Among the twenty stories in the anthology, there were two first prizes: Elizabeth Graver of Lincoln, Massachusetts, and Margo Rabb of Tucson, Arizona. Dulcie Leimback of New York City wrote the second prize story. Third prize went to Nancy Reisman of Madison, Wisconsin. An honorable mention went to Jim Nichols of Thomaston, Maine.

Featuring contributions by Irving, Hawthorne, Poe, Stephen King, Anne Rice, and many others, this definitive collection of chilling American fiction includes more than 40 of the best examples of the genre.

When Maurice Halleck, a minister of justice accused of corruption, dies an apparent suicide in a car accident, his children, believing he was betrayed by their mother and her lover, seek revenge.

In this sexy, racy collection of short prose takes by a master of the form, Joyce Carol Oates makes her own appointment with character and event--a sort of extended sequential reverie that surprises and sometimes shocks, but always satisfies.

In this gripping psychological thriller, Joyce Carol Oates, New York Times best-selling author and one of the most versatile and original voices in contemporary American fiction, delivers a startling, complex tale of a serial killer and the people that his ghastly crimes touch—and transform. People like Matt McBride. Matt was barely out of junior high when the mutilated body of the first victim—a popular, pretty teenager—was uncovered in the desolate New Jersey Pine Barrens. Although he had hardly known the girl, Matt has long felt guilty at not having been able somehow to prevent the atrocity. Now another attractive young woman has disappeared, and Matt knew this victim, too. Just possibly he knew her more intimately than he is prepared to admit. By degrees Matt becomes obsessed with a guilt he can neither comprehend nor assuage. His seemingly happy marriage begins to deteriorate, while his increasingly erratic behavior heightens police suspicions. It also draws official attention away from an artist—a man of limited talent but of fierce, demented vision—who signs his work Name Unknown. Under the spell of the missing woman, Matt follows a path that leads him out of the maze of tortured memory to a confrontation with not only the baleful Name Unknown but also his own long-unacknowledged self. The outcome is shattering. With "murder as an art and the serial killer as an artist," National Book Award–winner Joyce Carol Oates shows "how a murderer's savage creations ... transform a man's life."—Marilyn Stasio, The New York Times "Oates fans may judge [The Barrens] the best Smith novel yet."—Boston Herald

A young woman tumbles into a nightmare of decadent desire and corrupted innocence in a superb novella of suspense from National Book Award–winner Joyce Carol Oates. Art and arson, the poetry of D. H. Lawrence and pulp pornography, hero-worship and sexual debasement, totems and taboos mix and mutate into a startling, suspenseful tale of how a sunny New England college campus descends into a lurid nightmare. "A small gem.... Oates does not disappoint, nor does she waste a word."—The Washington Post Book World Oates often takes on sensational subject matter ... yet rarely has she done so with the churningly quiet understatement of ... Beasts."—Los Angeles Times "A cunning fusion of Gothic romance and psychological horror story, and one of her best recent books."—Kirkus Reviews "Oates's new novel is a slim one, but it packs a serious punch."—Associated Press "Delicious ... Beasts is something of a jeu d'esprit noir.... The novella length is exactly right for it."—The New York Review of Books

Joyce Carol Oates adds to her extraordinary body of work with this stunning novel of violence and love. At the heart of the story are two people, Iris Courtney, who is white, and handsome Jinx Fairchild, the black basketball player who, in protecting Iris, kills a white man.
Iris is the only witness to the crime.
The two of them are growing up in the early 1950s in a New York industrial town where racial boundaries keep people apart-or bring them together in explosive scenes of fear or desire. The secret link between Iris and Jinx is not only their attraction to each other, but a murder...and a bond of passion and guilt is formed between them. How this one irrevocable, tragic act shapes their lives and alters their destines becomes Joyce Carol Oates' finest, emotion-packed novel--a work the critics are calling a master piece, the best work of America's best writer of contemporary realism.

A wealthy and notorious clan, the Bellefleurs live in a region not unlike the Adirondacks, in an enormous mansion on the shores of mythical Lake Noir. Written with a voluptuousness and immediacy unusual even for Oates, Bellefleur was hailed upon publication as the culmination of her work.

For this singular collection, Joyce Carol Oates selected fifty-five unforgettable essays by the finest American writers of the twentieth century. Here is a sampling -- twelve unabridged essays -- featuring a wide variety of contemporary writers reading classics of the genre, along with authors reading their own work. Nothing less than a political, spiritual, and intensely personal record of America's tumultuous modern age, THE BEST AMERICAN ESSAYS OF THE CENTURY is "an outstanding, galvanic collection" (Entertainment Weekly).

Compiles the best literary essays of the year originally published in American periodicals.

The National Book Award-winning author of Then serves as guest editor for this new collection of the outstanding mystery tales of the year, in an anthology that incorporates pieces of short fiction by Scott Turow, Louise Erdrich, Dennis Lehane, George V. Higgins, David Means, and other notable authors. Simultaneous.

Featured in this volume are "Billy Budd", Melville's posthumously published novella, the story of the rivalry between a handsome sailor and his demonic captain; the tale of the apathetic "Bartleby, the Scrivener; " the riveting "Benito Cereno", the story of a slave ship mutiny written at the time of the Amistad case and "The Town-Ho's Story", a chapter from Melville's masterpiece, "Moby Dick". Introduction by Joyce Carol Oates.

Joyce Carol Oates has taken a shocking story that has become an American myth and, from it, has created a novel of electrifying power and illumination. Kelly Kelleher is an idealistic, twenty-six-year-old "good girl" when she meets the Senator at a Fourth of July party. In a Brilliantly woven narrative, we enter her past and her present, her mind and her body as she is fatally attracted to this older man, this older man, this hero, this soon-to-be-lover. Kelly becomes the very embodiment of the vulnerable, romantic dreams of bright and brave women, drawn to the power that certain men command--at a party that takes on the quality of a surreal nightmare; in tragic car ride that we hope against hope will not end as we know it must end. One of the acknowledged masters of American fiction, Joyce Carol Oates has written a bold tour de force that parts the black water to reveal the profoundest depths of human truth.

In her most ambitious work to date, 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 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.

In nineteenth-century Pennsylvania's Bloodsmoor Valley, the five Zinn sisters search for love and, when Miss Deirdre Zinn sails away in an outlaw balloon, move headlong into an age of time machines, the spirit world, and passion.

John Reddy Heart, a handsome young heartthrob, becomes the obsession of a small town in New York State during a sensational trial after a man is murdered in his mother's house. Reprint.

In 25 gothic horror tales from the master of the short story, Oates explores waking nightmares of life with eyes wide-open, facing what the bravest of us fear the most in a stunning, richly diverse anthology of mood and menace.

America's premier short story writer makes her children's literature debut with this engaging tale about a special kitty's journey into the woods. When the Smith family rescues Muffin on the side of a country road, he appears to be a typical lost kitten in search of a home. But little Lily Smith soon discovers that this watermelon-loving, peanut butter-eating new friend is no ordinary kitty! Muffin sits at the dinner table, enjoys lettuce and rye crackers, and keeps a protective eye on the other cats in the family. One chilly winter morning, Muffin notices two lost fawns outside Lily's bedroom window. Determined to be helpful to others, Muffin heads out into the forest to deliver the fawns back to their mother. Hooting owls, grumpy squirrels, and chirping chickadees are encountered along the way, until Muffin realizes he has roamed very far into unfamiliar surroundings. The resourceful cat learns that he must rely on his own ingenuity to get himself out of trouble and back into the warmth of his cozy home. In her first children's book, Joyce Carol Oates pairs playful prose with the exquisite naturalistic oil paintings of Mark Graham. Engaging and atmospheric, this charming tale is one that children will want to hear again and again.

Essays consider Shakespeare, Joyce, Dostoevsky, Wilde, Conrad, and Lawrence, as well as English and Scottish traditional ballads.

Twenty-five interviews share Oates' views on literature, the responsibility of the writer, major themes and influences in her work, and her approach to writing.

This electrifying collection explores the thin and terrifying line between danger and passion, lust and evil, by following an unfaithful husband who plays the ultimate game of seduction, a gorgeous predator who toys with her prey until the very end, and a sadistic beauty who will do anything for attention. Original.

Many of these short stories are connected by the reappearance of certain characters. Includes "The Scream," which follows a married woman named Renee who is supposed to meet her lover but stops at a museum instead, and is at once repulsed and captivated by a photo of an Indian woman holding a dead child, caught in mid-shriek. Subtle, intense, and thrumming with taut emotion, the story captures many themes that appear in Oates's work--self-definition, love, rebellion--but is atypically not violent.

A woman's lover becomes reckless with his life, which is taken from him abruptly and cruelly, and his disgraceful end is especially horrible for his children and former wife.

A woman's lover becomes reckless with his life, which is taken from him abruptly and cruelly, and his disgraceful end is especially horrible for his children and former wife.

Here are eight of the world's most famous authors ruminating on their favorite transgressions: Thomas Pynchon on Sloth, Mary Gordon on Anger, John Updike on Lust, William Trevor on Gluttony, Richard Howard on Avarice, Gore Vidal on Pride, A. S. Byatt on Envy, Joyce Carol Oates on Despair.

A master of "perfectly pitched psychological suspense" ("The New York Times Book Review") returns with a mesmerizing tale of crime and sexual obsession.

Joyce Carol Oates's personal favorites among Emily Dickinson's poems, including both the much-anthologized and the more obscure. In her introduction, Oates states, "Dickinson is one of very few poets whose work repays countless readings, through a lifetime."

The twenty-third volume in the series includes selections both famous and lesser-known from the poems of Emily Dickinson, capturing both her droll humor and her elegiac longing, including an introduction by the editor. Reprint.

Richard Everett, aged 11, shoots and kills his mother with a mail-order gun. He confesses, but is not believed. Seven years later, he is still free, living in a filthy room and growing obese. His mother Nada, a writer, was an elusive woman, gravitating towards the monied people of town. Richard's father, Elwood, worshipped Nada, but was also a distant father.

This collection of fifty-two poems from the author of Angel Fire and Anonymous Sins explores the annihilation of the time-bound ego, a liberating, sometimes terrifying experience for all who live within the 'fabulous beast' of history and nature. The poems explore the shifting, elusive point at which the inwardness of individual experience touches upon the larger consciousness of a species or an era, forming a connection with a 'self' that goes beyond subjectivity.

Poems include "Broken Connections," "After Terror," "The Impasse," "Wonders of the Invisible World," and "A Posthumous Sketch."

Joyce Carol Oates is an artist ideally suited to answer essential questions about what makes a story striking, a novel come alive, a writer an artist as well as a craftsman. In The Faith of a Writer she provides valuable lessons on how language, ideas, and experience are assembled to create art. Discussing those subjects most important to the narrative craft, Oates touches on topics such as inspiration, memory, self-criticism, and "the unique power of the unconscious." On a more personal note, she pays homage to those she calls her "significant predecessors," and discusses the importance of reading in the life of a writer. Oates also speaks of childhood inspirations, offers advice to young writers, and discusses the wildly varying states of mind of a writer at work.

In this collection of twenty-one unforgettable stories, Joyce Carol Oates explores the mysterious private lives of men and women with vivid, unsparing precision and sympathy. By turns interlocutor and interpreter, magician and realist, she dissects the psyches of ordinary people and their potential for good and evil with chilling understatement and lasting power.

A man climbs over the railings and plunges into Niagara Falls. A newlywed, he has left behind his wife, Ariah Erskine, in the honeymoon suite the morning after their wedding. "The Widow Bride of The Falls," as Ariah comes to be known, begins a relentless, seven-day vigil in the mist, waiting for his body to be found. At her side throughout, confirmed bachelor and pillar of the community Dirk Burnaby is unexpectedly transfixed by the strange, otherworldly gaze of this plain, strange woman, falling in love with her though they barely exchange a word. What follows is their passionate love affair, marriage, and children -- a seemingly perfect existence.

But the tragedy by which their life together began shadows them, damaging their idyll with distrust, greed, and even murder. What unfurls is a drama of parents and their children; of secrets and sins; of lawsuits, murder and eventually redemption.

Set against the mythic historic backdrop of Niagara Falls, Joyce Carol Oates explores the American family in crisis, but also America itself in the mid-twentieth century. The Falls is a love story gone wrong and righted and it alone places Joyce Carol Oates definitively in the company of the great American novelists.

Performed by Anna Fields

Josie S--has come with her mother Delia to live in her great-aunt Esther Burkhardt's house in upstate New York. Also living there is Josie's cousin, Jared, Jr., on leave from the Presbyterian seminary. Preoccupied with his studies, impeccably dressed in his starched white shirts, distant and mysterious, Jared, Jr. is an intriguing figure to Josie's curious and impressionable young mind. One summer afternoon, when Josie encounters Jared, Jr. at the riverbank behind the Burkhardt house, dark secrets are shared between them as an unnatural love blooms.

Nearly thirty top writers from Canada and the United States discuss their influences, goals, and opinions about the purpose and skills of writing.

Oates's most powerful work yet, now in a trade paper edition. Foxfire chronicles the life of five unforgettably real teenage girls in upstate New York in the 1950s. This controversial, topical tale captures the exhilaration of conspiracy, the blaze of youth, and the inevitable end of violence.

The first book in Oates’s famous trilogy that includes Expensive People and the National Book Award winner them

In her second novel, Joyce Carol Oates, author of many bestselling novels, including We Were the Mulvaneys and Blonde, created one of her most memorable heroines, Clara, the beautiful daughter of migrant farmworkers. Intent upon rising above her haphazard life of violence and poverty, Clara struggles for independence while relying on four men to fashion her destiny: her father, a hardened laborer simmering with resentment; Lowry, who rescues the teenage Clara from her family and offers her a first glimpse of love; Revere, the wealthy married man who promises Clara stability; and Swan, Clara’s son, who bears the burden of his mother’s mistaken identity.

For this Modern Library 20th Century Rediscovery edition, Joyce Carol Oates has revised and rewritten three fourths of the novel, originally published in 1966, a feat comparable to Henry James’s revisions of his early novels in 1908, when he was at the height of his artistic powers. With a new Afterword by the author, this is the definitive edition of an early masterpiece by one of our greatest living writers.

Best known for his depictions of the brutal world of boxing, George Bellows is reintroduced to the public by Joyce Carol Oats in this new investigation of his work. A multi-faceted artist, his early days were spent as a Whitmanesque voyeur of the New York street scene. He later moved to Maine where he experimented with a "heroic" vision of man in nature, and in his last period produced "paradisical" work in the tradition of Emerson and Thoreau. This volume is part of the Writers on Art series from Ecco Press.

Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart confirmed Joyce Carol Oates' place in the front rank of contemporary novelists. Now Heat, her first collection of short fiction in five years, reaffirms her mastery of the story as well. "Powerful tales . . . tapping into the darkest currents of ritual and nightmare, the erotic and the unconscious".--Publishers Weekly.

A seminal anthology of outstanding short fiction, selected by the author herself, features selections from such collections as The Wheel of Love, Marriages and Infidelities, and Heat, as well as nine previously unpublished works. Reprint. 20,000 first printing.

I Am No One You Know contains nineteen startling stories that bear witness to the remarkably varied lives of Americans of our time. In "Fire," a troubled young wife discovers a rare, radiant happiness in an adulterous relationship.

In "Curly Red," a girl makes a decision to reveal a family secret, and changes her life irrevocably. In "The Girl with the Blackened Eye," selected for The Best American Mystery Stories 2001, a girl pushed to an even greater extreme of courage and desperation manages to survive her abduction by a serial killer. And in "Three Girls," two adventuresome NYU undergraduates seal their secret love by following, and protecting, Marilyn Monroe in disguise in Strand Used Books on a snowy evening in 1956.

These vividly rendered portraits of women, men, and children testify to Oates's compassion for the mysterious and luminous resources of the human spirit.

Narrated by Calla's granddaughter, "I Lock My Door Upon Myself" is the story of Calla Freilicht, born in 1890. Calla's mother died in childbirth; raised by relatives, Calla is deemed eccentric. She meets a water diviner named Tyrell Thompson, and the bulk of the novel concerns her relationship with him.

Joyce Carol Oates's 30th novel, which takes place in the early 1960s, is about a young woman (nameless, though she has given herself the name "Anellia") who grew up on a farm and wins a scholarship to an upstate New York college. In the course of trying to understand the effect on her of her highly dysfunctional family, which includes an absent father, she becomes involved with a black intellectual who treats her badly. And when she re-encounters her father, it is only to lose him again. I'LL TAKE YOU THERE contains autobiographical elements: Oates herself experienced some similar events when she was a student at Syracuse University in the '60s. The novel was a New York Times Notable Book for 2002.

A collection of twenty original crime stories includes contributions by Edna Buchanan, Jeffery Deaver, Jeremiah Healy, Laurie R. King, Margaret Maron, Joyce Carol Oates, Bill Pronzini, and many others. Reprint.

A collection of eleven stories that explores the experiences of Americans abroad, in locations such as Berlin, Warsaw, and Africa.

While having an affair with Dr. Jonathan McElwain, young and pretty Molly Marks secretly decides to have an affair with Jonathan's identical twin brother--with devastating results.

Fresh from the triumph of We Were the Mulvaneys, Joyce Carol Oates continues her exploration of family love and possibilities of human redemption with this compelling story of how one young woman suffers profoundly in the pursuit of love, but manages to emerge safe and whole. Set in several towns on the Chatauqua River in upstate New York, Man Crazy tells the story of Ingrid Boone, who at age eight is taken into hiding by her beautiful young mother, Chloe. Sought by the men who have taunted Chloe, the authorities, and Ingrid's loving but volatile father still haunted by memories of Vietnam, Ingrid and her mother fight to survive both together and apart. "Man crazy" is the label assigned to teenage Ingrid, whose desperate need to find a substitute for her father's affection makes her easy prey for the charismatic leader of a violent cult. Eventually, the police surround the cult compound and a tense standoff erupts in bullets and flames. Ingrid escapes to rebuild her life, and Oates' depiction of this severely damaged young woman's slow but miraculous process of healing stands as one of the most brilliant portraits she has ever created. Oates' gift for haunting imagery reaches new heights in this emotionally resonant work. This will be published simultaneously with the Dutton release of a major new novel from Oates, My Heart Laid Bare. We Were the Mulvaneys was a national bestseller.

Presents a portrait of a modern woman in search of self-understanding and self-fulfillment.

Here is an eclectic compendium of the finest short fiction of the last 150 years, featuring works by Isabelle Allende, Ambrose Bierce, Raymond Chandler, Joseph Conrad, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Aldous Huxley, Joyce Carol Oates, Philip Roth, Paul Theroux, and others.

In Salthill-on-Hudson, a half-hour train ride from Manhattan, everyone is rich, beautiful, and -- though they look much younger -- middle-aged. But when Adam Berendt, a charismatic, mysterious sculptor, dies suddenly in a brash act of heroism, shock waves rock the town. But who was Adam Berendt? Was he in fact a hero, or someone more flawed and human?

A small upstate New York town is stunned when one of its beloved longtime inhabitants, Gwen Eaton, is murdered by a violent ex-con. The story is narrated by Gwen's daughter Nikki, a reporter for the local paper, who tells her mother's story via a series of talks with the people in Gwen's life, past and present.

Mythic in scope and ballad-like in the telling, "My Heart Laid Bare" is the sweeping saga of the fortunes and misfortunes of a family of enterprising confidence artists in 19th-century America.

A re-release of the National Book Award-winning author's favorite work follows detective Xavier Kilgarvan's confrontation with three cases, including "The Virgin in the Rose-Bower," "The Devil's Half-Acre," and "The Blood-Stained Gown." Reprint.

A series of unexplained deaths in an academic community could be the work of a killer looking for revenge when an eminent professor, accused of raping a male graduate student, escapes unpunished for his crime.

The topics of these essays include Henry James, Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, Samuel Beckett, Harriette Arnow, Sylvia Plath, Norman Mailer, Flannery O'Connor, and James Dickey

Joyce Carol Oates's fourth and most distinguished collection includes three flail-length plays, Bad Girls, Black Water, The Passion of Henry David Thoreau, and eight shorter pieces, which have been performed in various cities throughout the country. Bad Girls is the story of three teenage sisters who ruin the life of the man who comes between them and their single mother; Black Water is a dramatization of Oates's widely acclaimed novel of that title; and The Passion of Henry David Thoreau is a portrayal of the turbulent life and premature death of Thoreau. The subjects of the shorter pieces range widely, from a serial murder to a nightmarish visit to an adoption agency. In plays ranging from the realistic to the surreal, Oates convincingly demonstrates her mastery of the form.

A collection of essays, poems, and short stories concerning sleep, dreams, and insomnia includes authors, such as Emily Dickinson, Richard Wilbur, and John Updike.

Updated to incorporate two all new essays, a literary collection examines the history, lore, and allure of boxing, including its overall mystique as it is seen in literature and film, its relationship to women, and the question of whether or not it should be banned. Reprint.

One of our greatest living writers offers a sweeping survey of American short fiction. Joyce Carol Oates' collection of 56 tales combines classic works by writers such as Ernest Hemingway and Edgar Allan Poe with many "different, unexpected" gems, inviting readers to explore a wealth of important pieces by women and minority writers.

From one of America's foremost novelists and short story writers comes a stunning new collection of plays, consisting of two full-length plays--THE PERFECTIONIST, nominated for a 1994 American Theatre Critics Award, and BLACK--and nine one-act plays. Charged with tension, menace, and the shock of the unexpected, these dramas showcase yet another dimension of Joyce Carol Oates's extraordinary talent.

From one of America's foremost novelists and short story writers comes a stunning new collection of plays, consisting of two full-length plays--THE PERFECTIONIST, nominated for a 1994 American Theatre Critics Award, and BLACK--and nine one-act plays. Charged with tension, menace, and the shock of the unexpected, these dramas showcase yet another dimension of Joyce Carol Oates's extraordinary talent.

This volume includes essays on Lewis Carroll, WUTHERING HEIGHTS, John Updike as a comic writer, and women in the works of Faulkner. It also collects reviews of the work of such writers as Jean Stafford, Colette, Anne Sexton, Iris Murdoch, Flannery O'Connor, and Simone Weil.

The victim of a Fourth of July gang rape, single mother Teena Maguire and her daughter become the target of harassment and violence on the part of the assailants after Teena identifies the perpetrators for the Niagara Falls Police Department. Reprint.

A collection of sixteen stories explores the mysteries and varieties of American experience and includes "Golden Gloves," the story of a would-be champion boxer whose career and marriage fall tragically short of his expectations.

A collection of sixteen stories explores the mysteries and varieties of American experience and includes "Golden Gloves," the story of a would-be champion boxer whose career and marriage fall tragically short of his expectations.

The sport of boxing is celebrated and analyzed by such writers as A.J. Liebling, Norman Mailer, Gay Talese, Pete Hamill, Edward Hoagland, Joyce Carol Oates, and others.

The sport of boxing is celebrated and analyzed by such writers as A.J. Liebling, Norman Mailer, Leonard Gardner, Bill Barish, Gay Talase, Pete Hamill, Edward Hoagland, Joyce Carol Oates, and others.

The author draws the reader into the secret life of Kathleen Hennessy, a nurse's aide who, as both martyr and avenging angel, is a memorable portrait of one of the 'insulted and injured' of American society. Set in the underside of working-class Detroit of the '60s and '70s, this short, lyric novel sketches Kathleen's violent childhood-shattered by a broken home, child-beating, and murder-and follows her into her early adult years as a hospital health-care worker. Overworked, underpaid, and quietly overzealous, Kathleen falls in love with a young doctor, whose exploitation of her sets the course of the remainder of her life, in which her passivity masks a deep fury and secret resolve to take revenge.

A collection of stories exploring the puzzles and potentials of passionate love includes tales of a divorcee's hasty marriage, a rich executive's affair with a wayward girl, and the erotic love between two cousins.

A collection of stories exploring the puzzles and potentials of passionate love includes tales of a divorcee's hasty marriage, a rich executive's affair with a wayward girl, and the erotic love between two cousins.

While trying to find acceptance and come to terms with his own identity, a young boy goes on a journey of self-discovery that brings him into new worlds where he soon finds necessary answers to many of his questions from the most unexpected sources. Reprint.

Lovely blonde Gina O'Meara had seemingly the ideal life--a devoted husband, two well-behaved children, a comfortable home--but something draws her to magnetic, evil ex-con Lee Roy Sears. Reprint. PW.

Presents a collection of short stories focusing on the relationship between and mother and daughter from such authors as Margaret Atwood, Gloria Naylor, and Alice Walker.

Back in print, one of the most engrossing of Joyce Carol Oates's earlier novels explores a relationship between two women. Originally published in 1985, Solstice is the gripping story of Monica Jensen and Sheila Trask, two young women who are complete opposites yet irresistibly attracted to each other. Blonde, shy, recently divorced Monica is a school teacher; dark, nocturnal, sophisticated Sheila is a painter of stature, driven by the needs of her art. Over the months, their friendship deepens, first to love and then to a near-fatal obsession.

A visitor in his relatives' wealthy community, Colin Asch is an expert, remorseless killer whose twisted love becomes fixed to the beautiful Dorothea Deverell, for whom he will murder relentlessly.

Lily Merrick is overjoyed at the return of her twin sister after a fifteenyear separation, unaware that the prodigal sibling has left a trail of male corpses in sleazy hotel rooms all over the country. By the author of Double Delight. Reprint.

As Rosamond Smith, Joyce Carol Oates has explored the secret kinship of twins, often depicted as diabolical doubles who are mirror-images of our darker more violent selves. In Starr Bright Will Be With You Soon, she takes this scenario to terrifying new heights as we enter the mind and heart of a female serial killer who seeks refuge with her estranged twin sister. When Lily Merrick's twin returns home after 15 years, Lily is overjoyed. What she has no way of knowing is that, under the alias Starr Bright, Sharon has left a trail of murdered men in seedy motel rooms across the country. She is driven by an insatiable need for love and security, yet has found only lust and degradation and time and again, a murderous rage forces her to strike out against them. A novel of tense and mesmerizing power, Starr Bright Will Be With You Soon is a haunting exploration of the helplessness and rage buried deep in the female psyche-- and of the intimate, unspoken bond sisters share.

In a college town in upstate New York, a reclusive scholar named Joshua Seigl engaged in a new translation of the AENEID, hires as his assistant a young woman named Alma, who has a tattooed face and a dubious past. Joshua's solitary, bookish existence is threatened not only by his officious sister Jet but by Alma's thoroughly nasty boyfriend, Dmitri Meatte.

Drawn from Joyce Carol Oates's reading list at Princeton University, the pieces collected in Telling Stories provide beginning writers with models and inspiration for their own writing. Oates gathers here a diverse anthology of over one hundred works, including "miniature" narratives, dramatic monologues, poems that tell stories, memoir and diary excerpts, and a generous sampling of classic and contemporary short stories. Throughout, Oates has chosen exemplary writings - by relative newcomers and established authors alike - to delight readers as well as to stimulate students' own creative work. A general introduction and an afterword on the writing workshop offer students encouragement, advice, and exercises for writing. A text for creative writers, an anthology for fiction courses, Telling Stories provides a master's portrait of the art and craft of storytelling.

Tenderness, her eighth volume, is a generous selection of fifty-seven poems written during the past eight years. Most of them have been previously published in literary journals and magazines, including The Atlantic Monthly, Boulevard, Gettysburg Review, The New Yorker, and TriQuarterly. The poems gathered here range from the lyric to the narrative and satiric, from a glimpse into childhood ("O Crayola!") to a woman's recollections of her adolescent experiences with men ("Sexy" and "Flirtation, July 1953"), from an epiphany in a supermarket ("Tenderness") to sardonic reflections on an American obsession ("$") and a chilling dramatic monologue by a convicted sex offender ("Like Walking to the Drug Store, When I Get Out"). Joyce Carol Oates is at the height of her powers here.

Winner of the National Book Award and in print for more than thirty years, them ranks as one of the most masterly portraits of postwar America ever written by a novelist. Including several new pages and text substantially revised and updated by the author, this Modern Library edition is the most current and accurate version available of Oates' seminal work.
        
A novel about class, race, and the horrific, glassy sparkle of urban life, them chronicles the lives of the Wendalls, 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 fam-ily--broken, marginal, and romantically proud. The novel's title, pointedly uncapitalized, refers to those Americans who inhabit the outskirts of society--men and women, mothers and children--whose lives many authors in the 1960s had left unexamined. Alfred Kazin called her subject "the sheer rich chaos of American life." The Nation wrote, "When Miss Oates' potent, life-gripping imagination and her skill at narrative are conjoined, as they are preeminently in them, she is a prodigious writer."
        
In addition to the text revisions, this--new edition contains an Afterword by the author and a new Introduction by Greg Johnson, Oates' biographer and the author of two monographs on the work of Joyce Carol Oates.

When an actor and recently divorced woman meet in a Manhattan bar, the two engage in a bit of romantic fantasy, transforming both of their lives and creating the context for a powerfully revealing mystery. Reprint.

Poems deal with travel, nature, mortality, language, social life, art, religion, aging, and the past.

Poems deal with travel, nature, mortality, language, social life, art, religion, aging, and the past.

This generous collection includes four novels, including THE SHELTERING SKY, as well as the title novella and 12 stories.

A fourth collection of previously unpublished novellas includes pieces by some of today's top writers and features such works as "The Resurrection Man" by Sharyn McCrumb, Joyce Carol Oates's "The Corn Maiden," and Anne Perry's "Hostages," a tale of suspense set against the backdrop of modern-day Ireland. Original.

Among the plays collected in this volume are: "Tone Clusters," "The Eclipse." "How Do You Like Your Meat?" and "The Ballad of Love Canal."

A collection of thirty-seven essays, reviews, and works of criticism includes the author's discussions of key works by Sylvia Plath, E. L. Doctorow, Patricia Highsmith, Anne Tyler, Emily Brontd, and Ernest Hemingway, among others. By the author of We Were the Mulvaneys.

Looks at the lives of the men and women of a prestigious upstate college, including Albert St. Dennis, Professor of Poetry, and the people he meets--Brigit, a divorcee, and Alexis, a pianist and composer.

In March 1845 Henry David Thoreau "borrowed an exe and went down to the woods by Walden Pond" where he lived for more than two. Now, for the first time, here are selections from Thoreau's Walden, chosen especially for the picture book reader. Full-color illustrations.

The Mulvaneys, at first a close and very lucky family, drift apart over the years, until the youngest son, Judd, discovers the secret of their downfall and sets out to help reunite the family.

Jerome "Corky" Corcoran. A money-juggling wheeler-dealer, rising politico, popular man's man, and successful womanizer. It is a Memorial Day weekend, and we are about to live with him, breathe with him, and sweat with him in a nonstop marathon of mounting desperation as he tries to keep his financial empire from unraveling, his love life from shredding, and his rebellious daughter from destroying both herself and him. Seldom if ever in fiction has a man been brought so vividly to life in all his strength and weakness, hunger and ambition, carnality and corruption. Rarely has the complex web of American society been revealed so rivetingly. And never has one of today's supreme writers, Joyce Carol Oates, written a bolder and better novel than this mesmerizing masterpiece.

Compilation of twenty fictional pieces which explore the many moods and emotions of love.

This volume collects stories written and published between 1963 and 1974. In addition to the much-anthologized title story, it includes "Edge of the World," "The Fine White Mist of Winter," "The Lady with the Pet Dog," "Unmailed, Unwritten Letters," and "How I Contemplated the World from the Detroit House of Correction and Began My Life Over Again."

One of America's foremost novelists comments on the classics of literature and art and the perennial questions of the human condition in her first essay collection in a decade.

In dramatic, tightly focused narratives charges with tension, menace, and the shock of the unexpected, Where Is Here? examines a world in which ordinary life is electrified by the potential for sudden change. Domestic violence, fear and abandonment and betrayal, and the obsession with loss shadow the characters that inhabit these startling, intriguing stories. With the precision and intensity that are the hallmarks of her remarkable talent, Joyce Carol Oates explores the unexpected turns of events that leave people vulnerable and struggling to puzzle out the consequences of their abrupt reversals of fortune.

As in the title story, in which a married couple find their controlled life irrevocably altered by a stranger's visit, the fiction in this new collection is punctuated again and again by mysterious, perhaps unanswerable, questions: "Out of what does our life arise? Out of what does our consciousness arise? Why are we here? Where is here?" Like the questions they pose, these tales -- at once elusive and direct -- unfold with the enigmatic twists of riddles and, often, the blunt shock of tragedy. Where is Here? is the work of a master practitioner of the short story.

Mama cat has seven kittens. Little Reynard is the smallest, and his brothers and sisters tease him about his size and his orange color. Because he is so small and timid, the little girl, Lily, takes special care of Little Reynard. She gives him his own bowl and even lets him sleep on her pillow, yet sometimes he still feels he doesn’t really belong. Then one cold winter day Little Reynard peers out of an open window and sees two young foxes that look very much like him, and when the foxes invite him to join them, Little Reynard says yes!

In their second picture-book collaboration, following come meet muffin!, acclaimed author Joyce Carol Oates and artist Mark Graham introduce an irresistible feline character who will make himself at home in your heart.

Reimagines the final days of five major American writers, in a collection of short works written in the subtly nuanced language style of each. By the National Book Award-winning author of The Gravedigger's Daughter. 35,000 first printing.

With the precision and intensity that are the hallmarks of her remarkable talent, Joyce Carol Oates once again surveys the American scene with 22 stories that take the reader from inner cities to isolated backwaters and ably demonstrate that she is a master of the genre. "Supercharged".--"The New York Times Book Review".

Surveying a cross-section of the American scene, a collection of twenty-four short stories takes readers from inner cities to isolated backwaters with such titles as "The Goose Girl" and "Good To Know You."

Twenty-seven essays touch upon everything from Moby Dick to Boxing, cover literati from Emily Dickinson to Kafka, and take up the fiery debate over differences and similarities between male and female writers.

Oates's fifth volume of poems tells of the central concerns of everyday lives, the metamorphoses undergone in life and death, and the merging of the individual self with others.

The novel D. H. Lawrence considered his best work traces the passions of two English couples during the First World War, with commentary by Anthony Burgess, Harold Bloom, and Frank Kermode, among others. Reprint.

A traumatized Jesse Vogel's search for the key to his shattered identity takes him through endless mazes in his youth and manhood, from rural Lockport, New York, to his successful career as a Chicago neurosurgeon, to his battle to save his own daughter from the ravages of the drug-laden counter-culture. Reprint. 15,000 first printing.

Published in 1847, Wuthering Heights is set on the bleak Yorkshire moors, where the drama of Catherine and Heathcliff, Heathcliff's cruel revenge against Edgar and Isabella Linton, and the promise of redemption through the next generation, unfolds.

Joyce Carol Oates's epic novel of an American family in the 1950's probes the tender division between the permissible and the forbidden, between ordinary life and the secret places of the heart. Set in an industrial, working-class town in upstate New York, this book chronicles the frustrating marriage of parents Lyle and Hannah; the idealistic political journey of son Warren, and the passionate, obsessive relationship that develops between 15-year-old Enid Maria and her uncle Felix, a professional boxer twice her age. While brilliantly re-creating a decade that worshipped conformity, You Must Remember This presents the lives of family members that break every convention in the search for meaning and fulfillment.

A journey into the mind of paroled sex offender Quentin P. draws a meticulous portrait of cold calculation and dark obsession.