New Releases by Joyce Carol Oates

Part one : Hugh -- Part two : Yvonne -- Part three : Stephen.

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. The poems are grouped into four parts: "Broken Connections," "Forbidden Testimonies," "The Child-Martyr" and "A Posthumous Sketch," are prose poems which, though technically different from the others, are concerned with the same theme-the relationship between the individual and a larger, all-inclusive whole. Neither fatalistic nor rebellious, the poems convey the idea that as long as we live in time we must struggle, and that is this struggle that determines our humanity.

Twenty-five stories explore women''s struggles to achieve personal identity in a male dominated society despite the molds in which they are cast.

Seven stories of people whose "defense-structures are shattered by the rich recklessness of life."

Brings to life in Elena Howe the year''s most transfixing heroine.

Miss Oates examines the work of such writers as Chekhov, Melville, Yeats, and Toresco in this study.

"Here are stories that are intense, ironic, sinister, and violent, reflecting incisively the mores of a frightening world-- a world in whcih love is complex and difficult, in which evil is ordinary, in which senseless actions lead to even mor senseless non sequiturs, in which religion becomes antiseptic, in which families and societies exploit one another ... in which the enemy is imagined to be external, but is, in reality, within."--Dust jacket flap.