Most Popular Books by Joyce Carol Oates

“If the phrase ‘woman of letters’ existed, [Joyce Carol Oates] would be, foremost in this country, entitled to it.”—John Updike, The New Yorker As powerful and relevant today as it was on its initial publication, them chronicles the tumultuous lives of a family living on the edge of ruin in the Detroit slums, from the 1930s to the 1967 race riots. Praised by The Nation for her “potent, life-gripping imagination,” Joyce Carol Oates traces the aspirations and struggles of Loretta Wendall, a dreamy young mother who is filled with regret by the age of sixteen, and the subsequent destinies of her children, Maureen and Jules, who must fight to survive in a world of violence and danger. Winner of the National Book Award, them is an enthralling novel about love, class, race, and the inhumanity of urban life. It is, raves The New York Times, “a superbly accomplished vision.” Them is the third novel in the Wonderland Quartet. The books that complete this acclaimed series, A Garden of Earthly Delights, Expensive People, and Wonderland, are also available from the Modern Library. [Oates is] a superb storyteller. For sheer readability, them is unsurpassed.”—The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

An epic novel of an American family in the 1950s proves the tender division between what is permissible and what is taboo, between ordinary life and the secret places of the heart.

The stunning, classic portrait of a powerful man''s downward spiral to moral ruin Jerome "Corky" Corcorn. 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 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.

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

The National Book Award finalist and national bestseller exploring the life and legend of Marilyn Monroe Now 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 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 20th-century American star.

A tribute to the brilliant craftsmanship of one of our most distinguished writers, providing valuable insight into her inspiration and her method Joyce Carol Oates is widely regarded as one of America''s greatest contemporary literary figures. Having written in a number of genres -- prose, poetry, personal and critical essays, as well as plays -- she 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, Oates discusses the subjects most important to the narrative craft, touching on topics such as inspiration, memory, self-criticism, and "the unique power of the unconscious." On a more personal note, she speaks of childhood inspirations, offers advice to young writers, and discusses the wildly varying states of mind of a writer at work. Oates also pays homage to those she calls her "significant predecessors" and discusses the importance of reading in the life of a writer. Oates claims, "Inspiration and energy and even genius are rarely enough to make ''art'': for prose fiction is also a craft, and craft must be learned, whether by accident or design." In fourteen succinct chapters, The Faith of a Writer provides valuable lessons on how language, ideas, and experience are assembled to create art.

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.

Zombie is a classic novel of dark obsession from the extraordinary Joyce Carol Oates. A brilliant, unflinching journey into the mind of a serial killer, Zombie views the world through the eyes of Quentin P., newly paroled sex offender, as he chillingly evolves from rapist to mass murderer. Joyce Carol Oates—the prolific author of so many extraordinary bestsellers, including The Gravediggers Daughter, Blonde, and The Falls—demonstrates why she ranks among America’s most respected and accomplished literary artists with this provocative, breathtaking, and disturbing masterwork.

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.

A “sinister, edgy, delectably creepy” story of mistaken identity, murder, and madness from a #1 New York Times–bestselling author (San Francisco Chronicle). Tristram Heade is a reclusive, repressed Virginia bachelor and antiquarian book collector who has traveled to Philadelphia to keep an appointment with a fellow dealer. But when he arrives, his life takes an unexpected and dizzying turn. A train porter returns his lost wallet, but the identification inside belongs to a man named Angus Markham, a gambler and real estate prospector. When Tristram returns to his hotel, he’s greeted by staff as Markham, and in his room, he finds Markham’s suitcase and clothes—as well as Fleur Grunwald, a woman who certainly knows her lover, Markham, when she sees him. And she seems to desperately need his help. At first baffled, then intrigued, Tristram decides to play along—only to discover that he’s not in control of the game. Especially when he takes on Fleur and her sadistic husband and finds himself lost in a conspiracy of madness and murder. If only Tristram could be certain whether he’s to be the killer—or the victim. From a winner of countless awards, the author of such bestsellers as We Were the Mulvaneys and Black Water, You Can’t Catch Me is “a tense psychological suspense novel filled with dual identities, double crosses, and duplicity. It is also filled with philosophical and literary allusions suggesting that this is less about the mystery of Markham than about the fragile mystery of identity. It’s just what one would expect from the celebrated Joyce Carol Oates, who uses the pseudonym ‘Rosamond Smith’ for her psychological thrillers” (Library Journal).

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

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.

A lonely widow is romanced by a “brilliantly portrayed” pathological killer in this novel by the National Book Award–winning author of them (The New York Times). Dorothea Deverell is a New England art historian working for a Boston museum, resigned to entering middle age alone—until she’s swept off her feet by the flattery of a charming younger man who calls her his soul mate. Colin Asch is swept away too. He admires Dorothea’s gentle nature, innate goodness, decency, and acceptance of others without judgment. She’s nothing at all like the people Colin has met before—and murdered. A self-appointed “Angel of Death,” Colin is determined to keep Dorothea happy—by eliminating anyone who gets in the way of his plan. They’ll be clever kills, untraceable and fast as a knife-slash to the throat. Each one will bring him closer to the woman he loves. And by the time Dorothea discovers what horrors passion has wrought, she’ll be in so deep, so dark, that giving in might be her only chance of survival. This novel, called “a hair-raiser” by Elmore Leonard, comes from the #1 New York Times–bestselling author of We Were the Mulvaneys, a four-time Pulitzer Prize finalist and recipient of the O. Henry Award, the National Book Award, and the Bram Stoker Award. In Soul/Mate, “it is clear from the start that we are in Joyce Carol Oates territory, for the book is stamped with her hallmarks—her complex, detailed prose; her fascination with violence; her obsessive concern with rendering not so much action as the way action haunts the hidden consciousness of her characters” (The New York Times).

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.

A book lover’s lust for acquisition drives him to murder in this short tale from the New York Times–bestselling author of Beautiful Days. 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 of such a fine shop wouldn’t easily part with it. Brockden forms a plan to acquire the store in such a way that no one would ever suspect foul play: untraceable murder. And he knows he will be successful—because he has done it before. The Bibliomysteries are a series of short tales about deadly books, by top mystery authors.

A reissue of bestselling, award-winning author Joyce Carol Oates'' classic collection of essays on boxing.

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.

"For 40 years, Joyce Carol Oates has maintained a creative dialogue with the roiling cauldron of contemporary American culture, writing unflinchingly about the oddities that bubble up into the headlines." -Washington Post Book World 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 name, a sort of gentle joke. His beautiful home, the children’s books he’s written, his classical music, the marvelous art in his study, his lavish presents to her — Mr. Kidder’s life couldn’t be more different from Katya’s drab working-class existence back home in South Jersey, or more enticing. But by degrees, almost imperceptibly, something changes, and posing for Mr. Kidder’s new painting isn’t the lighthearted endeavor it once was. What does he really want from her? And how far will he go to get it? In the tradition of Oates’s classic story "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" A Fair Maiden is an unsettling, ambiguous tale of desire and control.

The most provocative young adult novel yet from New York Times best–selling author Joyce Carol Oates. Darren Flynn is popular, good–looking, and has a spot on the varsity swim team. But after what happened that day in November (did it happen?), life is different for Darren. Now his friends, his family, even the people who are supposed to be in charge are no longer who Darren thought they were. Who can he trust now? In her third novel for young adults, the author of the acclaimed Big Mouth & Ugly Girl leads readers on an internal journey of self–discovery, moral complexity, and sexuality.

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

Maurice Halleck, Director of the Commission for the Ministry of Justice, is accused of wrongdoing and then dies in a suspicious car accident. A suicide note and confession are found. But are they legitimate, or was he coerced into writing them before he was taken out to be killed?

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.

Eight stories from the author of A Book of American Martyrs that display her “mastery of imagery and stream of consciousness” (Kirkus Reviews). Joyce Carol Oates is an unparalleled investigator of human personality. In these eight stories, she deftly tests the bonds between damaged individuals—brother and sister. teacher and student, two lonesome strangers on a subway—in the beautiful, bracing prose that has become her signature. In the title story, a white, aspiring professor in Detroit tries to shake a black, male shadow during the summer of the city’s 1967 race riots. In “The Rescuer,” a promising graduate student detours to inner-city Trenton, New Jersey, to save her brother from a downward spiral, only to find herself entranced by his dangerous new world. Meanwhile, a young woman prowls the New York City subways in search of her perfect man in “Lorelei.” In each of these short stories, Oates portrays a desperate confrontation with the demons inside us. Sometimes it’s the human who wins, and sometimes it’s the demon. “Oates offers unexpected glimmers of redemption amid the grotesquerie, degradation, and exploitation that fill this collection’s eight tales.” —Publishers Weekly

“[Oates] has once again held a haunting mirror up to America, revealing who we are.” —Boston Globe The inimitable Joyce Carol Oates returns with Dear Husband—a gripping and moving story collection that powerfully re-imagines the meaning of family in America, often through violent means. Oates, a former recipient of the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction—as well as the National Book Award, Prix Femina, and numerous other literary honors—dazzles and disturbs with an outstanding compilation the Washington Post calls, “Savage, poetic and ruthless...among the best things she’s ever done.” Dear Husband is another triumph for the author of The Gravedigger’s Daughter, We Were the Mulvaneys, and Blonde.

Joyce Carol Oates’s Wonderland Quartet comprises four remarkable novels that explore social class in America and the inner lives of young Americans. In Expensive People, Oates takes a provocative and suspenseful look at the roiling secrets of America’s affluent suburbs. Set in the late 1960s, this first-person confession is narrated by Richard Everett, a precocious and obese boy who sees himself as a minor character in the alarming drama unfolding around him. Fascinated by yet alienated from his attractive, self-absorbed parents and the privileged world they inhabit, Richard incisively analyzes his own mismanaged childhood, his pretentious private schooling, his “successful-executive” father, and his elusive mother. In an act of defiance and desperation, eleven-year-old Richard strikes out in a way that presages the violence of ever-younger Americans in the turbulent decades to come. A National Book Award finalist, Expensive People is a stunning combination of social satire and gothic horror. “You cannot put this novel away after you have opened it,” said The Detroit News. “This is that kind of book–hypnotic, fascinating, and electrifying.” Expensive People is the second novel in the Wonderland Quartet. The books that complete this acclaimed series, A Garden of Earthly Delights, them, and Wonderland, are also available from the Modern Library.

Joyce Carol Oates’s Wonderland Quartet comprises four remarkable novels that explore social class in America and the inner lives of young Americans. Spanning from the Great Depression to the turbulent Vietnam War era, Wonderland is the epic account of Jesse Vogel, a boy who emerged from a family tragedy with his life spared but his world torn apart. Orphaned after watching his father murder his entire family, Jesse embarks on a personal odyssey that takes him from a Dickensian foster home to college and graduate school to the pinnacle of the medical profession. As an adult, Jesse must summon the strength to reach across the “generation gap” and rescue his endangered teenaged daughter, who has fallen into the drug-infused 1960s counterculture. Hailed by Library Journal as “the greatest of Oates’s novels,” Wonderland is the capstone of a magnificent literary excursion that plunges beneath the glossy surface of American life. Wonderland is the final novel in Joyce Carol Oates’s Wonderland Quartet. The books that complete this acclaimed series, A Garden of Earthly Delights, Expensive People, and them, are also available from the Modern Library.

This rich compilation of Joyce Carol Oates''s letters across four decades displays her warmth and generosity, her droll and sometimes wicked sense of humor, her phenomenal energy, and most of all, her mastery of the lost art of letter writing. "It''s hard to think of another writer with as fecund and protean an imagination as the eighty-five-year-old Joyce Carol Oates, who is surely on any short list of America''s greatest living writers." —New York Times Magazine In this generous selection of Joyce Carol Oates’s letters to her biographer and friend Greg Johnson, readers will discover a never-before-seen dimension of her phenomenal talent. In 1975, when Johnson was a graduate student, he first wrote to Oates, already a world-famous author, and drew an appreciative, empathetic response. Soon the two began a fairly intense, largely epistolary friendship that would last until the present day. As time passed, letters became faxes, and faxes became emails, but the energy and vividness of Oates’s writing never abated. Her letters were often sprinkled with the names of well-known public figures, from John Updike and Toni Morrison to Steve Martin and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. There are also descriptions of far-flung travels she undertook with her first husband, the scholar and editor Raymond Smith, and with her second, the distinguished Princeton neuroscientist Charlie Gross. But much of Oates’s prose centered on the pleasures of her home life, including her pet cats and the wildlife outside her study window. Whereas her academic essays and book reviews are eloquent in a formal manner, in these letters she is wholly relaxed, even when she is serious in her concerns. Like Johnson, she was always engaged in work, whether a long novel or a brief essay, and the letters give a fascinating glimpse into Oates’s writing practice.

The Stoker Award-winning chilling anthology of 18 short stories in tribute to the genius of Shirley Jackson, collecting today’s best horror writers. Featuring Joyce Carol Oates, Josh Malerman, Paul Tremblay, Richard Kadrey, Stephen Graham Jones, Elizabeth Hand and more. A collection of new and exclusive short stories inspired by, and in tribute to, Shirley Jackson. Shirley Jackson is a seminal writer of horror and mystery fiction, whose legacy resonates globally today. Chilling, human, poignant and strange, her stories have inspired a generation of writers and readers. This anthology, edited by legendary horror editor Ellen Datlow, will bring together today’s leading horror writers to offer their own personal tribute to the work of Shirley Jackson. Featuring Joyce Carol Oates, Josh Malerman, Carmen Maria Machado, Paul Tremblay, Richard Kadrey, Stephen Graham Jones, Elizabeth Hand, Kelly Link, Cassandra Khaw, Karen Heuler, Benjamin Percy, John Langan, Laird Barron, Jeffrey Ford, M. Rickert, Seanan McGuire, Gemma Files, and Genevieve Valentine.

Kasch is a lonely eccentric man in his forties who has survived a bitterly disappointing marriage only to fall in love, against his will, with a fourteen-year-old named Laney. An inhabitant of a distant, improverished region--Childwold--Laney embodies all that Kasch finds fatally irresistible. As Kasch succumbs to the beauty and mystery of Childwold and Laney''s family, his control over his destiny loosens and he is plunged into personal catastrophe, even as Laney and her family are freed.

“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 as a Rat follows Violet Rue Kerrigan, a young woman who looks back upon her life in exile from her family following her testimony, at age twelve, concerning what she knew to be the racist murder of an African-American boy by her older brothers. In a succession of vividly recalled episodes Violet contemplates the circumstances of her life as the initially beloved youngest child of seven Kerrigan children who inadvertently “informs” on her brothers, setting into motion their arrests and convictions and her own long estrangement. Arresting and poignant, My Life as a Rat traces a life of banishment from a family—banishment from parents, siblings, and the Church—that forces Violet to discover her own identity, to break the powerful spell of family, and to emerge from her long exile as a “rat” into a transformed life.

Seven feverishly unsettling works, confronting the dangers that surround us and the dangers that lurk within.

A wealthy and notorious clan, the Bellefleurs live in a region not unlike the Adirondacks, in an enormous mansion on the shores of mythic Lake Noir. They own vast lands and profitable businesses, they employ their neighbors, and they influence the government. A prolific and eccentric group, they include several millionaires, a mass murderer, a spiritual seeker who climbs into the mountains looking for God, a wealthy noctambulist who dies of a chicken scratch. Bellefleur traces the lives of several generations of this unusual family. At its center is Gideon Bellefleur and his imperious, somewhat psychic, very beautiful wife, Leah, their three children (one with frightening psychic abilities), and the servants and relatives, living and dead, who inhabit the mansion and its environs. Their story offers a profound look at the world''s changeableness, time and eternity, space and soul, pride and physicality versus love. Bellefleur is an allegory of caritas versus cupiditas, love and selflessness versus pride and selfishness. It is a novel of change, baffling complexity, mystery. Written with a voluptuousness and startling immediacy that transcends Joyce Carol Oates''s early works, Bellefleur is widely regarded as a masterwork—a feat of literary genius that forces us "to ask again how anyone can possibly write such books, such absolutely convincing scenes, rousing in us, again and again, the familiar Oates effect, the point of all her art: joyful terror gradually ebbing toward wonder" (John Gardner).

When he died in 1937, destitute and emotionally as well as physically ruined, H. P. Lovecraft had no idea that he would one day be celebrated as the godfather of modern horror. A dark visionary, his work would influence an entire generation of writers, including Stephen King, Clive Barker, Neil Gaiman, and Anne Rice. Now, the most important tales of this distinctive American storyteller have been collected in a single volume by National Book Award-winning author Joyce Carol Oates. In tales that combine the nineteenth-century gothic sensibility of Edgar Allan Poe with a uniquely daring internal vision, Lovecraft fuses the supernatural and mundane into a terrifying, complex, and exquisitely realized vision, foretelling a psychically troubled century to come. Set in a meticulously described New England landscape, here are harrowing stories that explore the total collapse of sanity beneath the weight of chaotic events—stories of myth and madness that release monsters into our world. Lovecraft''s universe is a frightening shadow world where reality and nightmare intertwine, and redemption can come only from below.

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.