New Releases by Joyce Carol Oates

In these gripping and disturbing tales, women are confronted by the evil around them and surprised by the evil they find within themselves. With wicked insight, Oates demonstrates why the females of the species are by nature more deadly than the males.

When his failing health prompts him to hire an assistant, reclusive author Joshua Siegl recruits Alma, unaware of her tortured past and the hatred stirring within her that incites her to commit anti-Semitic acts

Gillian Brauer strives to realise more than a poet''s craft in her workshop with the charismatic, anti-establishment professor Andre Harrow. For Gillian has fallen in love with Harrow and soon surrenders to his rarefied world.

Matt Donaghy is the class joker, and Ursula Riggs is the misfit loner. Neither knows the other. But when Matt is arrested on a charge of threatening to blow up the school and massacre the students, Ursula is the only one who sees through the hysteria and hypocrisy, and corroborates Matt''s story.

Fifteen-year-old Frankie relates the events of the year leading up to her mother''s mysterious disappearance and her own struggle to discover and accept the truth about her parents'' relationship.

A masterly work from a writer with “the uncanny ability to give us a cinemascopic vision of her America” (National Review), A Garden of Earthly Delights is the opening stanza in what would become one of the most powerful and engrossing story arcs in literature. Joyce Carol Oates’s Wonderland Quartet comprises four remarkable novels that explore social class in America and the inner lives of young Americans. In A Garden of Earthly Delights, Oates presents one of her most memorable heroines, Clara Walpole, the beautiful daughter of Kentucky-born migrant farmworkers. Desperate to rise above her haphazard existence of violence and poverty, determined not to repeat her mother’s life, Clara struggles for independence by way of her relationships with four very different men: her father, a family man turned itinerant laborer, smoldering with resentment; the mysterious Lowry, who rescues Clara as a teenager and offers her the possibility of love; Revere, a wealthy landowner who provides Clara with stability; and Swan, Clara’s son, who bears the psychological and spiritual burden of his mother’s ambition. A Garden of Earthly Delights is the first novel in the Wonderland Quartet. The books that complete this acclaimed series, Expensive People, them, and Wonderland, are also available from the Modern Library.

When sixteen-year-old Matt is falsely accused of threatening to blow up his high school and his friends turn against him, an unlikely classmate comes to his aid.

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. 75,000 first printing.

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.

In her novel, set against the mythic-historic backdrop of Niagara Falls in the mid-20th century, Oates explores the American family in crisis.

Chronicles the lives of the Wendalls, a family on the steep edge of poverty in the windy, riotous Detroit slums.

Blonde es una dramática novela sobre el ambiguo magnetismo de una mujer, al mismo tiempo que el perdurable legado de una estrella y el ocaso del más sugerente ícono femenino del siglo XX.

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.

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.

Fresh from the triumph of the bestselling We Were the Mulvaneys, Joyce Carol Oates continues her exploration of family love and the possibilities of human redemption. At five, Ingrid Boone loves her father with all the innocence and blind trust of childhood—until he abandons her and her beautiful young mother in the wake of a violent crime. Desperate to recapture his lost love and hungry for any kind of mercy at a man’s hand, Ingrid allows boys and men to abuse her as she searches for affection in the alcohol, drugs, and sex they offer. When she is targeted as prey by a charismatic leader of a violent cult, Ingrid falls to her blackest moment of despair—yet it is here that she finds unexpected salvation and the will to reclaim her life and heart from the men who have taken it.

New York Times bestselling author Joyce Carol Oates’s strongest and most unsparing novel yet—an always engrossing, often shocking evocation of female rage, gallantry, and grit. The time is the 1950s. The place is a blue-collar town in upstate New York, where five high school girls join a gang dedicated to pride, power, and vengeance on a world that seems made to denigrate and destroy them. Here is the secret history of a sisterhood of blood, a haven from a world of male oppressors, marked by a liberating fury that burns too hot to last. Above all, it is the story of Legs Sadovsky, with her lean, on-the-edge, icy beauty, whose nerve, muscle, hate, and hurt make her the spark of Foxfire: its guiding spirit, its burning core. At once brutal and lyrical, this is a careening joyride of a novel—charged with outlaw energy and lit by intense emotion. Amid scenes of violence and vengeance lies this novel’s greatest power: the exquisite, astonishing rendering of the bonds that link the Foxfire girls together. Foxfire reaffirms Joyce Carol Oates’s place at the very summit of American writing.

One of American''s foremost authors ventures into dark, uncharted territories of the human psyche in a collection of stories that rival the work of Edgar Allan Poe. Oates is the 1994 recipient of the Bram Stoker Award for Lifetime Achievement given by the Horror Writers of America.

The Pulitzer Prize-nominated novel from the author of the New York Times bestselling novel We Were the Mulvaneys “Its power of evocation is remarkable.” —The New Yorker In the midst of a long summer on Grayling Island, Maine, twenty-six-year-old Kelly Kelleher longs for something interesting to happen to her—something that will make her finally feel some of what she imagines other people must feel when they watch the fireworks explode off the beach. So when Kelly meets The Senator at an exclusive party and he asks her to go back to a hotel room on the main island with him, she says yes. Even though the senator is old enough to be her father, even though he has perhaps been drinking too heavily to get behind the wheel, the danger of saying yes is an inevitable and even exciting part of the adventure Kelly is finally going to have. However, as The Senator’s car whips around the island’s roads and eventually crashes through a guardrail, it becomes clear to Kelly and the reader that this man embodies a wholly different and more sinister type of danger, one much larger and harder to contain than the horrible events that unfold as Kelly is left in the sinking car. Black Water is a chilling meditation on power, trust, and violation and a timeless classic from one of America’s foremost storytellers.

Joyce Carol Oates adds to her extraordinary body of work with this stunning National Book Award Finalist filled with violence, love, racism, and a shared secret in mid-century New York. In the early 1950s in an industrial town, racial boundaries may keep people apart—or bring them together explosively. Iris Courtney, who is white, is the only witness when handsome Jinx Fairchild, a black basketball player, kills a white man in order to protect her. The secret link between Iris and Jinx is not only their attraction to each other, but a bond of passion and guilt that has formed between them. This one irrevocable, tragic act shapes their lives and alters their destinies in Joyce Carol Oates’s finest, emotion-packed novel—a work critics call a masterpiece, the best work of America’s best writer of contemporary realism.

Poet, novelist, critic, and the winner of the PEN/Malamud Award for lifetime achievement in the short story as an art form, Joyce Carol Oates in this collection offers readers 25 rich, hard-edged stories stamped with her inimitable touch: tales of violence ... or uncertainty ... or with the macabre running like lifeblood through them. In the O. Henry Award-winning title story, "Heat," young twin sisters are murdered, and both they and their killer are remembered by a woman who was their contemporary and, in a way, a victim as well. ... In "Leila Lee," a young woman who marries an older man tries to develop a relationship with her husband''s angry teenage son. ... In "House Hunting," a husband perplexed by his disintegrating marriage goes house- hunting without his wife, and embarks on a quest-not only for a house, but for his future. From small towns to big cities, from the working class to the upper class, there is scarcely an aspect of the American experience that Joyce Carol Oates has not magically made her own. Her stories shock, provoke, and astound us with their commentary on the human condition.

Oates displays her amazing versatility with these emotionally charged, powerful plays with contemporary themes. "Greensleeves" portrays a girl''s grief after her friend dies of AIDS. "Ballad of Love Canal" shows the effects of toxic waste on one family. Feminism is the theme of "I Stand Before You Naked," a collage play in which 12 different women expose their souls to the audience. Many of the plays deal with the difficulties of relationships. In "Black" a man, his ex-wife, and her new black lover form a strange triangle. In "Tone Clusters" the amplified voice actually becomes a character in the play. "The Eclipse" is dominated by a shadow falling across the stage. Many of the plays are experimental and surreal, and are meant to be performed before an audience. ISBN 0-525-93376-X: $19.95.

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.

Set in an affluent upper-class suburb in the late 1980s, this chilling tale by master storyteller Joyce Carol Oates reveals the dark side of the American Dream. A close-knit group of friends draws closer, and then apart, when scandal and tragedy erupt among them.

These twenty-five interviews with Joyce Carol Oates from early in her career to the present are the first such collection to be published. In these conversations from sources as diverse as major news magazines and small scholarly journals, Oates candidly talks about her work, her concepts of literature, her methods of writing, and many other topics. Throughout this anthology, Oates discusses how her writing paints a modern panorama of American life. Oates described her vast canvas to an interviewer: ""I could not take the time to write about a group of people who did not represent, in their various struggles, fantasies, unusual experiences, hopes, etc., our society in miniature."" She also comments upon her responsibility as an artist ""to bear witness"" to certain aspects of society. In this light, she responds to criticisms that violence seems to dominate her work by noting that ""one simply cannot know strengths unless suffering, misfortune, and violence are explored quite frankly by the writer.""In addition to discussing her works---from her first book By the North Gate (1963) to her most popular novel You Must Remember This (1987)---this prolific writer also answers questions about her writing habits. These interviews, spanning nineteen years, reveal a vivid portrait of Joyce Carol Oates writing as the conscience of society, as the creator of memorable prose and poetry, and as the artist deeply committed to a unique vision.

Unpublished printer''s proof of the title: (Woman writer): occasions and opportunities.

Under the respectable surface of an ordinary white-collar family in the conformist 1950s, an obsessive love breaks every convention as it seeks fulfillment

Unpublished printer''s proofs of the title: Raven''s wing.

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