Books by Joyce Carol Oates

The Falls: A Novel

by Joyce Carol Oates

It is 1950 and, after a disastrous honeymoon night, Ariah Erskine's young husband throws himself into the roaring waters of Niagara Falls. Ariah, "the Widow Bride of the Falls," begins a relentless seven-day vigil in the mist, waiting for his body to be found. At her side is confirmed bachelor and pillar of the community Dirk Burnaby, who is unexpectedly drawn to her. What follows is a passionate love affair, marriage, and family -- a seemingly perfect existence. But tragedy soon takes over their lives, poisoning their halcyon years with distrust, greed, and murder.
Set against the mythic-historic backdrop of Niagara Falls in the mid-twentieth century, this haunting exploration of the American family in crisis is a stunning achievement from "one of the great artistic forces of our time" (The Nation). This P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more.

The Falls: A Novel

by Joyce Carol Oates

A stunning, major achievement from Joyce Carol Oates, "one of the great artistic forces of our time" (The Nation). A haunting story of the powerful spell Niagara Falls casts upon two generations of a family, leading to tragedy, love, loss, and, ultimately, redemption.
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. As Ariah's children learn that their past is enmeshed with a hushed-up scandal involving radioactive waste, they must confront not only their personal history but America's murky past: the despoiling of the landscape, and the corruption and greed of the massive industrial expansion of the 1950s and 1960s.
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. As in We Were the Mulvaneys, a "darkly engrossing novel" (Washington Post Book World), she examines what happens when the richly interwoven relationships of parents and their children are challenged by circumstances outside the family.
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.

High Lonesome: Stories 1966-2006

by Joyce Carol Oates

An unprecedented collection of the best of Joyce Carol Oates's short stories combined with eleven new stories
No other writer can match the impressive oeuvre of Joyce Carol Oates, and High Lonesome: Selected Stories, 1966-2006 gathers stories from Oates's seminal collections, including The Wheel of Love (1970), Marriages and Infidelities (1972), and Heat (1991), arranged by decade. All demonstrate what the Chicago Tribune has praised: "the fierce originality of Oates's voice and vision, but also how she has imbued the American short story with an edgy vitality and raw social surfaces."

Missing Mom: A Novel

by Joyce Carol Oates

last time
Last time you see someone and you don't
know it will be the last time. And all that
you know now, if only you'd known then.
But you didn't know, and now it's too late.
And you tell yourself How could I have
known, I could not have known. You tell yourself.
This is my story of missing my mother. One
day, in a way unique to you, it will be your
story, too.
From Joyce Carol Oates comes this candid, intimate, engaging, and personal new novel.
Nikki Eaton, single, thirty-one, sexually liberated, and economically self-supporting, has never particularly thought of herself as a daughter. Yet, following the unexpected loss of her mother, she undergoes a remarkable transformation during a tumultuous year that brings stunning horror, sorrow, illumination, wisdom, and even—from an unexpected source—a nurturing love.

Missing Mom: A Novel

by Joyce Carol Oates

Nikki Eaton, single, thirty-one, sexually liberated, and economically self-supporting, has never particularly thought of herself as a daughter. Yet, following the unexpected loss of her mother, she undergoes a remarkable transformation during a tumultuous year that brings stunning horror, sorrow, illumination, wisdom, and even—from an unexpected source—a nurturing love.

Big Mouth & Ugly Girl

by Joyce Carol Oates

Big Mouth
No I did not. I did not, I did not. I did not say those things, and I did not plan those things. Won't It anyone believe me? Ugly Girl
All right, Ugly Girl made a mistake. I'd told my mom what I'd heard in the cafeteria, and she'd told Dad. Evidently. I'd thought for sure they would want me to speak up for the truth.

Little Bird Of Heaven: A Novel

by Joyce Carol Oates

A searing exploration of the mysterious conjunction of erotic romance and tragic violence in late-twentieth-century America, Little Bird of Heaven returns to the emotional and geographical terrain of acclaimed author Joyce Carol Oates's previous bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys and The Gravedigger's Daughter.
When young wife and mother Zoe Kruller is found brutally murdered, the police target two suspects: her estranged husband, Delray Kruller, and her longtime lover, Eddy Diehl. In turn, the Krullers' son, Aaron, and Diehl's daughter, Krista, become obsessed with each other, each believing the other's father guilty. By novel's end, the fated lovers are at last ready to exorcise the ghosts of the past and come to terms with their legacy of guilt, misplaced love, and redemptive yearning.
Told in halves in the very different voices of Krista and Aaron, Little Bird of Heaven is classic Oates—where the lyricism of intense sexual love is intertwined with the anguish of loss, and tenderness is barely distinguishable from cruelty.

Transgressions: Ten Brand-New Novellas

by Walter Mosley, Stephen King, Joyce Carol Oates, Lawrence Block, Anne Perry, Donald E. Westlake, Jeffery Deaver, John Farris, Sharyn McCrumb

Forge Books is proud to present an amazing collection of novellas, compiled by New York Times bestselling author Ed McBain. Transgressions is a quintessential classic of never-before-published tales from today's very best novelists. Faeturing:

"Walking Around Money" by Donald E. Westlake: The master of the comic mystery is back with an all-new novella featuring hapless crook John Dortmunder, who gets involved in a crime that supposedly no one will ever know happened. Naturally, when something it too good to be true, it usually is, and Dortmunder is going to get to the bottom of this caper before he's left holding the bag.

"Hostages" by Anne Perry: The bestselling historical mystery author has written a tale of beautiful yet still savage Ireland today. In their eternal struggle for freedom, there is about to be a changing of the guard in the Irish Republican Army. Yet for some, old habits-and honor-still die hard, even at gunpoint.

"The Corn Maiden" by Joyce Carol Oates: When a fourteen-year-old girl is abducted in a small New York town, the crime starts a spiral of destruction and despair as only this master of psychological suspense could write it.

"Archibald Lawless, Anarchist at Large: Walking the Line" by Walter Mosley: Felix Orlean is a New York City journalism student who needs a job to cover his rent. An ad in the paper leads him to Archibald Lawless, and a descent into a shadow world where no one and nothing is as it first seems.

"The Resurrection Man" by Sharyn McCrumb": During America's first century, doctors used any means necessary to advance their craft-including dissecting corpses. Sharyn McCrumb brings the South of the 1850s to life in this story of a man who is assigned to dig up bodies to help those that are still alive.

"Merely Hate" by Ed McBain: When a string of Muslim cabdrivers are killed, and the evidence points to another ethnic group, the detectives of the 87th Precinct must hunt down a killer before the city explodes in violence.

"The Things They Left Behind" by Stephen King: In the wake of the worst disaster on American soil, one man is coming to terms with the aftermath of the Twin Towers-when he begins finding the things they left behind.

"The Ransome Women" by John Farris: A young and beautiful starving artist is looking to catch a break when her idol, the reclusive portraitist John Ransome offers her a lucrative year-long modeling contract. But how long will her excitement last when she discovers the fate shared by all Ransome's past subjects?

"Forever" by Jeffery Deaver: Talbot Simms is an unusual cop-he's a statistician with the Westbrook County Sheriff Department. When two wealthy couples in the county commit suicide one right after the other, he thinks that it isn't suicide-it's murder, and he's going to find how who was behind it, and how the did it.

"Keller's Adjustment" by Lawrence Block: Everyone's favorite hit man is back in MWA Grand Master Lawrence Block's novella, where the philosophical Keller deals out philosophy and murder on a meandering road trip from one end of the America to the other.

The Best American Mystery Stories 2005 (The Best American Series)

by Joyce Carol Oates, Otto Penzler

The Best American series has been the premier annual showcase for the country's finest short fiction and nonfiction since 1915. Each volume's series editor selects notable works from hundreds of periodicals. A special guest editor, a leading writer in the field, then chooses the very best twenty or so pieces to publish. This unique system has made the Best American series the most respected--and most popular--of its kind.

The Best American Mystery Stories 2005 includes

Scott Turow • Edward P. Jones • Louise Erdrich • Dennis Lehane • Daniel Handler • Laura Lippman • George V. Higgins • David Means • Richard Burgin • Scott Wolven • Stuart M. Kaminsky • and others

Joyce Carol Oates, guest editor, is a highly respected novelist, critic, playwright, poet, and short story writer. She is the author of numerous books, including the National Book Award winner Them and most recently the novel The Falls.

Rape: A Love Story (Otto Penzler Books)

by Joyce Carol Oates

Teena Maguire should not have tried to shortcut her way home that Fourth of July. Not after midnight, not through Rocky Point Park. Not the way she was dressed: tank top, denim cut-offs, high-heeled sandals. Not with her twelve-year-old daughter, Bethie. Not with packs of local guys running loose on hormones, rage, and alcohol. A victim of gang rape, left for dead in the park boathouse, the once vital and sexy Teena Maguire can now only regret that she has survived. And Bethie can barely remember a childhood uncolored by fear. For they're not even a neighborhood away, the men that she identified for the Niagara Falls Police Department: the wide-browed, sandy-haired Pick brothers; the sneering Jimmy DeLucca; Fritz Haaber with his moustache and stubbled jaw. They've killed her grandmother's longhaired orange cat. At a relentless, compelling pace punctuated by lonely cries in the night and the whisper of terror in the afternoon, National Book Award-winner Joyce Carol Oates unfolds the story of Teena and Bethie, their assailants, and their unexpected, silent champion, a man who knows the meaning of justice. And love.

Rape: A Love Story (Otto Penzler Books)

by Joyce Carol Oates

Teena Maguire should not have tried to shortcut her way home that Fourth of July. Not after midnight, not through Rocky Point Park. Not the way she was dressed: tank top, denim cut-offs, high-heeled sandals. Not with her twelve-year-old daughter, Bethie. Not with packs of local guys running loose on hormones, rage, and alcohol. A victim of gang rape, left for dead in the park boathouse, the once vital and sexy Teena Maguire can now only regret that she has survived. And Bethie can barely remember a childhood uncolored by fear. For they're not even a neighborhood away, the men that she identified for the Niagara Falls Police Department: the wide-browed, sandy-haired Pick brothers; the sneering Jimmy DeLucca; Fritz Haaber with his moustache and stubbled jaw. They've killed her grandmother's longhaired orange cat. At a relentless, compelling pace punctuated by lonely cries in the night and the whisper of terror in the afternoon, National Book Award-winner Joyce Carol Oates unfolds the story of Teena and Bethie, their assailants, and their unexpected, silent champion, a man who knows the meaning of justice. And love.

Dear Husband,: Stories

by Joyce Carol Oates

Replete with the emotional intensity and pathos for which Joyce Carol Oates is lauded, these fourteen stories explore the intimate lives of contemporary American families: the tangled relationship between generations, the desperation of loving more than one is loved in return. In "Cutty Sark" and "Landfill," the bond between adolescent son and mother reverberates with the force of an unspoken passion. The gripping title story finds Oates boldly reimagining the true-crime story of Andrea Yates, the Texas mother who drowned her children in 2001. Several stories offer a more lighthearted reprieve, examining with dark humor the shadowy intersection between self-awareness and delusion.

American Melancholy: Poems

by Joyce Carol Oates

A new collection of poetry from an American literary legend, her first in twenty-five years
Joyce Carol Oates is one of our most insightful observers of the human heart and mind, and, with her acute social consciousness, one of the most insistent and inspired witnesses of a shared American history.
Oates is perhaps best known for her prodigious output of novels and short stories, many of which have become contemporary classics. However, Oates has also always been a faithful writer of poetry. American Melancholy showcases some of her finest work of the last few decades.
Covering subjects big and small, and written in an immediate and engaging style, this collection touches on both the personal and political. Loss, love, and memory are investigated, along with the upheavals of our modern age, the reality of our current predicaments, and the ravages of poverty, racism, and social unrest. Oates skillfully writes characters ranging from a former doctor at a Chinese People’s Liberation Army hospital to Little Albert, a six-month-old infant who took part in a famous study that revealed evidence of classical conditioning in human beings.

High Lonesome: New and Selected Stories 1966-2006

by Joyce Carol Oates

No other writer can match the impressive oeuvre of Joyce Carol Oates. High Lonesome: New and Selected Stories 1966-2006 gathers short fiction from the acclaimed author's seminal collections and includes eleven new tales that further demonstrate the breathtaking artistry and striking originality of an incomparable talent who "has imbued the American short story with an edgy vitality and raw social surfaces" (Chicago Tribune).

Sexy

by Joyce Carol Oates

It was in November, a Thursday after swim practice. The thing with Mr. Tracy, Darren's English teacher.
The thing was how Darren would think of it, afterward.
The thing that was vague and not-named.
The thing that hadn’t happened, anyway.
Darren Flynn has the perfect life -- until that day in November.
After that day, after what happened (did it happen?), life is different. Darren is different. Nothing is as it was –– before. 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?
This compelling, masterfully written novel by acclaimed author Joyce Carol Oates explores one teenager's search for identity in a complex, deceiving world, and the answers he finds in the most unexpected places.

Uncensored: Views & (Re)views

by Joyce Carol Oates

Uncensored: Views & (Re)views is Joyce Carol Oates's most candid gathering of prose pieces since (Woman) Writer: Occasions & Opportunities. Her ninth book of nonfiction, it brings together thirty-eight diverse and provocative pieces from the New York Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, and the New York Times Book Review.
Oates states in her preface, "In the essay or review, the dynamic of storytelling is hidden but not absent," and indeed, the voice of these "conversations" echoes the voice of her fiction in its dramatic directness, ethical perspective, and willingness to engage the reader in making critical judgments. Under the heading "Not a Nice Person," such controversial figures as Sylvia Plath, Patricia Highsmith, and Muriel Spark are considered without sentimentality or hyperbole; under "Our Contemporaries, Ourselves," such diversely talented figures as William Trevor, E. L. Doctorow, Kazuo Ishiguro, Michael Connelly, Alice Sebold, Mary Karr, Anne Tyler, and Ann Patchett are examined. In sections of "homages" and "revisits," Oates writes with enthusiasm and clarity of such cultural icons as Emily Brontë, Ernest Hemingway, Carson McCullers, Robert Lowell, Balthus, and Muhammad Ali ("The Greatest"); after a lapse of decades, she (re)considers the first film version of Bram Stoker's Dracula, and Americana, Don DeLillo's first novel, as well as the morality of selling private letters and the nostalgic significance of making a pilgrimage to Henry David Thoreau's Walden Pond.
Through these balanced and illuminating essays we see Oates at the top of her form, engaged with forebears and contemporaries, providing clues to her own creative process: "For prose is a kind of music: music creates 'mood.' What is argued on the surface may be but ripples rising from a deeper, subtextual urgency."

Uncensored: Views & (Re)views

by Joyce Carol Oates

Uncensored: Views & (Re)views is Joyce Carol Oates's most candid gathering of prose pieces since (Woman) Writer: Occasions & Opportunities. Her ninth book of nonfiction, it brings together thirty-eight diverse and provocative pieces from the New York Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, and the New York Times Book Review.
Oates states in her preface, "In the essay or review, the dynamic of storytelling is hidden but not absent," and indeed, the voice of these "conversations" echoes the voice of her fiction in its dramatic directness, ethical perspective, and willingness to engage the reader in making critical judgments. Under the heading "Not a Nice Person," such controversial figures as Sylvia Plath, Patricia Highsmith, and Muriel Spark are considered without sentimentality or hyperbole; under "Our Contemporaries, Ourselves," such diversely talented figures as William Trevor, E. L. Doctorow, Kazuo Ishiguro, Michael Connelly, Alice Sebold, Mary Karr, Anne Tyler, and Ann Patchett are examined. In sections of "homages" and "revisits," Oates writes with enthusiasm and clarity of such cultural icons as Emily Brontë, Ernest Hemingway, Carson McCullers, Robert Lowell, Balthus, and Muhammad Ali ("The Greatest"); after a lapse of decades, she (re)considers the first film version of Bram Stoker's Dracula, and Americana, Don DeLillo's first novel, as well as the morality of selling private letters and the nostalgic significance of making a pilgrimage to Henry David Thoreau's Walden Pond.
Through these balanced and illuminating essays we see Oates at the top of her form, engaged with forebears and contemporaries, providing clues to her own creative process: "For prose is a kind of music: music creates 'mood.' What is argued on the surface may be but ripples rising from a deeper, subtextual urgency."

ON BOXING

by Joyce Carol Oates

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

After the Wreck, I Picked Myself Up, Spread My Wings, and Flew Away

by Joyce Carol Oates

In the raw was how the world felt now. My feelings were raw, my thoughts were raw and hurtful like knife blades. . . . In the blue had been my place to hide, now In the raw there was nowhere to hide.
Jenna Abbott separates her life into two categories: before the wreck and after the wreck. Before the wreck, she was leading a normal life with her mom in suburban New York. After the wreck, Jenna is alone, trying desperately to forget what happened that day on the bridge. She's determined not to let anyone get close to her -- she never wants to feel so broken and fragile again.
Then Jenna meets Crow. He is a powerfully seductive enigma, and Jenna is instantly drawn to him. Crow is able to break down the wall that Jenna has built around her emotions, and she surprises herself by telling him things she hasn't told anyone else. Can Jenna bring herself to face the memories she's tried so hard to erase?

The Faith of a Writer: Life, Craft, Art

by Joyce Carol Oates

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.

I Am No One You Know: Stories

by Joyce Carol Oates, Joyce Carol Carol Oates

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 at 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.

I Am No One You Know: Stories

by Joyce Carol Oates, Joyce Carol Carol Oates

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 at 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.

Black Girl / White Girl

by Joyce Carol Oates

Fifteen years ago, in 1975, Genna Hewett-Meade's college roommate died a mysterious, violent, terrible death. Minette Swift had been a fiercely individualistic scholarship student, an assertive—even prickly—personality, and one of the few black girls at an exclusive women's liberal arts college near Philadelphia. By contrast, Genna was a quiet, self-effacing teenager from a privileged upper-class home, self-consciously struggling to make amends for her own elite upbringing. When, partway through their freshman year, Minette suddenly fell victim to an increasing torrent of racist harassment and vicious slurs—from within the apparent safety of their tolerant, "enlightened" campus—Genna felt it her duty to protect her roommate at all costs.
Now, as Genna reconstructs the months, weeks, and hours leading up to Minette's tragic death, she is also forced to confront her own identity within the social framework of that time. Her father was a prominent civil defense lawyer whose radical politics—including defending anti-war terrorists wanted by the FBI—would deeply affect his daughter's outlook on life, and later challenge her deepest beliefs about social obligation in a morally gray world.
Black Girl / White Girl is a searing double portrait of "black" and "white," of race and civil rights in post-Vietnam America, captured by one of the most important literary voices of our time.

Black Girl/White Girl

by Joyce Carol Oates

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 and identity...and her deepest beliefs about social obligation in a morally gray world.
Black Girl / White Girl is a searing double portrait of race and civil rights in post–Vietnam America, captured by one of the most important literary voices of our time.

The Tattooed Girl: A Novel

by Joyce Carol Oates

Celebrated author Joshua Seigl, an idiosyncratic bachelor and confirmed recluse—young but in failing health—reluctantly admits to himself that he must hire a live-in assistant to help him with his increasingly complicated professional and personal affairs. Then one day at the bookstore he encounters Alma, a young woman covered with bizarre tattoos, who stirs something inside him. Unaware of her torturous past—the abuses she's suffered, the wrongs she's committed, the virulent hatred that seethes within her—Seigl decides that she is the one, and he has no idea that he is bringing an enemy into his home.
With her unique, masterful balance of dark suspense and surprising tenderness, Joyce Carol Oates probes the tragedy of ethnic hatred and challenges the accepted limits of desire.

Middle Age: A Romance

by Joyce Carol Oates

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?

Faithless: Tales of Transgression

by Joyce Carol Oates

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.

Tales of H.P. Lovecraft

by Joyce Carol Oates, Howard Phillips Lovecraft

“H. P. Lovecraft has yet to be surpassed as the 20th century’s greatest practitioner of the classic horror tale.”―Stephen King

The most important tales of the godfather of the modern horror genre―a master who influenced the works of a generation of writers including Stephen King and Anne Rice―are gathered in one volume by National Book Award-winning author Joyce Carol Oates.
Combining the 19th-century gothic sensibility of Edgar Allan Poe with a daring internal vision, Lovecraft’s tales foretold a psychically troubled world to come. Set in a meticulously wrought, historically grounded New England landscape, his harrowing stories explore the collapse of sanity beneath the weight of chaotic events. Lovecraft’s universe is a frightening shadow world were reality and nightmare intertwine, and redemption can come only from below. For aficionados and a new generation of 21st-century readers , Tales of H. P. Lovecraft is a classic not to be missed.

The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates: 1973-1982

by Joyce Carol Oates

The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates, edited by Greg Johnson, offers a rare glimpse into the private thoughts of this extraordinary writer, focusing on excerpts written during one of the most productive decades of Oates's long career. Far more than just a daily account of a writer's writing life, these intimate, unrevised pages candidly explore her friendship with other writers, including John Updike, Donald Barthelme, Susan Sontag, Gail Godwin, and Philip Roth. It presents a fascinating portrait of the artist as a young woman, fully engaged with her world and her culture, on her way to becoming one of the most respected, honored, discussed, and controversial figures in American letters.

The Gravedigger's Daughter: A Novel (P.S.)

by Joyce Carol Oates

Fleeing Nazi Germany in 1936, the Schwarts immigrate to a small town in upstate New York. Here the father—a former high school teacher—is demeaned by the only job he can get: gravedigger and cemetery caretaker. When local prejudice and the family's own emotional frailty give rise to an unthinkable tragedy, the gravedigger's daughter, Rebecca heads out into America. Embarking upon an extraordinary odyssey of erotic risk and ingenious self-invention, she seeks renewal, redemption, and peace—on the road to a bittersweet and distinctly “American” triumph.

The Gravedigger's Daughter

by Joyce Carol Oates

In 1936 the Schwarts, an immigrant family desperate to escape Nazi Germany, settle in a small town in upstate New York, where the father, a former high school teacher, is demeaned by the only job he can get: gravedigger and cemetery caretaker. After local prejudice and the family's own emotional frailty result in unspeakable tragedy, the gravedigger's daughter, Rebecca, begins her astonishing pilgrimage into America, an odyssey of erotic risk and imaginative daring, ingenious self-invention, and, in the end, a bittersweet—but very "American"—triumph. "You are born here, they will not hurt you"—so the gravedigger has predicted for his daughter, which will turn out to be true.
In The Gravedigger's Daughter, Oates has created a masterpiece of domestic yet mythic realism, at once emotionally engaging and intellectually provocative: an intimately observed testimony to the resilience of the individual to set beside such predecessors as The Falls, Blonde, and We Were the Mulvaneys.

The Man Without a Shadow: A Novel

by Joyce Carol Oates

In this taut and fascinating novel, the bestselling, New York Times bestselling and National Book Award-winning author of The Sacrifice, The Accursed, and Lovely, Dark, Deep examines the mysteries of memory, personality, and identity and pierces the enigmatic force that drives human lives—love.
In 1965, neuroscientist Margot Sharpe meets the attractive, charismatic Elihu Hoopes—the “man without a shadow”—whose devastated memory, unable to store new experiences or to retrieve the old, will make him the most famous and most studied amnesiac in history. Over the course of the next thirty years, Margot herself becomes famous for her experiments with E. H.—and inadvertently falls in love with him, despite the ethical ambiguity of their affair, and though he remains forever elusive and mysterious to her, haunted by mysteries of the past.
The Man Without a Shadow tracks the intimate, illicit relationship between Margot and Eli, as scientist and subject embark upon an exploration of the labyrinthine mysteries of the human brain. Where does “memory” reside? Where is “love”? Is it possible to love an individual who cannot love you, who cannot “remember” you from one meeting to the next?
Made vivid by her exceptional eye for detail and her keen insight into the human psyche, The Man Without A Shadow is a unique story of forbidden love, a kind of secret, evolving marriage, depicted in Joyce Carol Oates’s tight, impassioned prose. It is an uncanny, ambitious, and structurally complex novel that penetrates the mind and illuminates the heart.

Soul at the White Heat: Inspiration, Obsession, and the Writing Life

by Joyce Carol Oates

A new collection of critical and personal essays on writing, obsession, and inspiration from National Book Award-winning and New York Times bestselling author Joyce Carol Oates.
"Why do we write?"
With this question, Joyce Carol Oates begins an imaginative exploration of the writing life, and all its attendant anxieties, joys, and futilities, in this collection of seminal essays and criticism. Leading her quest is a desire to understand the source of the writer’s inspiration—do subjects haunt those that might bring them back to life until the writer submits? Or does something "happen" to us, a sudden ignition of a burning flame? Can the appearance of a muse-like Other bring about a writer’s best work?
In Soul at the White Heat, Oates deploys her keenest critical faculties, conjuring contemporary and past voices whose work she deftly and creatively dissects for clues to these elusive questions. Virginia Woolf, John Updike, Emily Dickinson, Henry James, J. M. Coetzee, Margaret Atwood, Joan Didion, Zadie Smith, and many others appear as predecessors and peers—material through which Oates sifts in acting as literary detective, philosopher, and student. The book is at its most thrilling when watching the writer herself at work, and Oates provides rare insight into her own process, in candid, self-aware dispatches from the author’s own writing room. The New York Times Book Review has raved, "who better than Joyce Carol Oates . . . to explicate the craft of writing?" Longtime admirers of Joyce Carol Oates’s novels as well as her prose will discover much to be inspired by and obsess upon themselves in this inventive collection from an American master.

Soul at the White Heat: Inspiration, Obsession, and the Writing Life

by Joyce Carol Oates

A new collection of critical and personal essays on writing, obsession, and inspiration from National Book Award-winning and New York Times bestselling author Joyce Carol Oates, now in paperback.
"Why do we write?"
With this question, Joyce Carol Oates begins an imaginative exploration of the writing life, and all its attendant anxieties, joys, and futilities, in this collection of seminal essays and criticism. Leading her quest is a desire to understand the source of the writer’s inspiration—do subjects haunt those that might bring them back to life until the writer submits? Or does something "happen" to us, a sudden ignition of a burning flame? Can the appearance of a muse-like Other bring about a writer’s best work?
In Soul at the White Heat, Oates deploys her keenest critical faculties, conjuring contemporary and past voices whose work she deftly and creatively dissects for clues to these elusive questions. Virginia Woolf, John Updike, Emily Dickinson, Henry James, J. M. Coetzee, Margaret Atwood, Joan Didion, Zadie Smith, and many others appear as predecessors and peers—material through which Oates sifts in acting as literary detective, philosopher, and student. The book is at its most thrilling when watching the writer herself at work, and Oates provides rare insight into her own process, in candid, self-aware dispatches from the author’s own writing room.
Longtime admirers of Joyce Carol Oates’ novels as well as her prose will discover much to be inspired by and obsess upon themselves in this inventive collection from an American master. As the New York Times has said of her essays, “Oates’s writing has always seemed effortless: urgent, unafraid, torrential. She writes like a woman who walks into rough country and doesn’t look back.”

A Book of American Martyrs: A Novel

by Joyce Carol Oates

“Oates’ American saga captivates because it exists within an actual drama playing out across the country...Martyrs is a graceful and excruciating story of two families who do not live very far apart, but exist in different realities. ” --USA Today, 4-star review
“Successful because [Oates] refuses to satirize or dehumanize anyone, even murderous foes of abortion...With its wrath and violence, A Book of American Martyrs offers this teaspoon of warmth in these troubled times: that it is possible to be wrong without surrendering your humanity.” --Los Angeles Times
“The most relevant book of Oates’s half-century-long career, a powerful reminder that fiction can be as timely as this morning’s tweets but infinitely more illuminating.” --Washington Post
A powerfully resonant and provocative novel from American master and New York Times bestselling author Joyce Carol Oates
In this striking, enormously affecting novel, Joyce Carol Oates tells the story of two very different and yet intimately linked American families. Luther Dunphy is an ardent Evangelical who envisions himself as acting out God’s will when he assassinates an abortion provider in his small Ohio town while Augustus Voorhees, the idealistic but self-regarding doctor who is killed, leaves behind a wife and children scarred and embittered by grief.
In her moving, insightful portrait, Joyce Carol Oates fully inhabits the perspectives of two interwoven families whose destinies are defined by their warring convictions and squarely-but with great empathy-confronts an intractable, abiding rift in American society.
A Book of American Martyrs is a stunning, timely depiction of an issue hotly debated on a national stage but which makes itself felt most lastingly in communities torn apart by violence and hatred.

A Book of American Martyrs: A Novel

by Joyce Carol Oates

“Oates’ American saga captivates because it exists within an actual drama playing out across the country...Martyrs is a graceful and excruciating story of two families who do not live very far apart, but exist in different realities. ” --USA Today, 4-star review

“Successful because [Oates] refuses to satirize or dehumanize anyone, even murderous foes of abortion...With its wrath and violence, A Book of American Martyrs offers this teaspoon of warmth in these troubled times: that it is possible to be wrong without surrendering your humanity.” --Los Angeles Times

“The most relevant book of Oates’s half-century-long career, a powerful reminder that fiction can be as timely as this morning’s tweets but infinitely more illuminating.” --Washington Post

A powerfully resonant and provocative novel from American master and New York Times bestselling author Joyce Carol Oates

In this striking, enormously affecting novel, Joyce Carol Oates tells the story of two very different and yet intimately linked American families. Luther Dunphy is an ardent Evangelical who envisions himself as acting out God’s will when he assassinates an abortion provider in his small Ohio town while Augustus Voorhees, the idealistic but self-regarding doctor who is killed, leaves behind a wife and children scarred and embittered by grief.

In her moving, insightful portrait, Joyce Carol Oates fully inhabits the perspectives of two interwoven families whose destinies are defined by their warring convictions and squarely-but with great empathy-confronts an intractable, abiding rift in American society.

A Book of American Martyrs is a stunning, timely depiction of an issue hotly debated on a national stage but which makes itself felt most lastingly in communities torn apart by violence and hatred.

Tales of H. P. Lovecraft

by Joyce Carol Oates

“H. P. Lovecraft has yet to be surpassed as the 20th century’s greatest practitioner of the classic horror tale.”―Stephen King

The most important tales of the godfather of the modern horror genre―a master who influenced the works of a generation of writers including Stephen King and Anne Rice―are gathered in one volume by National Book Award-winning author Joyce Carol Oates.
Combining the 19th-century gothic sensibility of Edgar Allan Poe with a daring internal vision, Lovecraft’s tales foretold a psychically troubled world to come. Set in a meticulously wrought, historically grounded New England landscape, his harrowing stories explore the collapse of sanity beneath the weight of chaotic events. Lovecraft’s universe is a frightening shadow world were reality and nightmare intertwine, and redemption can come only from below. For aficionados and a new generation of 21st-century readers , Tales of H. P. Lovecraft is a classic not to be missed.

Wild Nights!: Stories About the Last Days of Poe, Dickinson, Twain, James, and Hemingway

by Joyce Carol Oates

Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson, Samuel Clemens ("Mark Twain"), Henry James, Ernest Hemingway—Joyce Carol Oates evokes each of these American literary icons in her newest work of prose 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"—for Edgar Allan Poe, a belated encounter with bizarre life‑forms utterly alien to the poet's exalted Romantic aesthetics; for Emily Dickinson, resurrected in the twenty-first century in a "distilled" state, a belated encounter with blundering humanity and brute passion of a kind excluded from the poet's verse; for the elderly, renowned Samuel Clemens, a belated encounter with impassioned innocence, in the form of "the little girl who loves you"; for Henry James, an aging volunteer in a London hospital during World War I, a belated encounter with the physicality of desire and the raw yearning of love long absent from the master's fiction; and, for Ernest Hemingway, the most tragic of these figures, a belated encounter with the "profound mysteries of the world outside him, and the profound mysteries of the world inside him."
Wild Nights! is Joyce Carol Oates's most original and haunting work of the imagination, a writer's memoirist work in the form of fiction.

Wild Nights! Deluxe Edition: Stories About the Last Days of Poe, Dickinson, Twain, James, and Hemingway (Art of the Story)

by Joyce Carol Oates

New York Times bestselling author Joyce Carol Oates’ imaginative look at the last days of five giants of American literature, now available in a deluxe paperback edition in Ecco’s The Art of the Story Series.
Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson, Samuel Clemens (“Mark Twain”), Henry James, Ernest Hemingway—Joyce Carol Oates evokes each of these American literary icons in this work of prose 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.”
Darkly hilarious, brilliant, and brazen, Wild Nights! is an original and haunting work of the imagination.

Night. Sleep. Death. The Stars.: A Novel

by Joyce Carol Oates

“Timely, monumental. . . . Yet another piercing examination of American culture by the writer this reviewer considers our country's greatest living novelist. . . . It is brilliant. How blessed we are to have her as a novelist in our chaotic, confusing times. Night is spot on for these times of racial divide, as well as in portraying the fractious family dynamic that many of us know all too well. . . . Night deserves the top spot on your quarantine nightstand. Here's a fervent salute to Oates, our finest American novelist, for this one.” -- Star Tribune
The bonds of family are tested in the wake of a profound tragedy, providing a look at the darker side of our society by one of our most enduringly popular and important writers
Night Sleep Death The Stars is a gripping examination of contemporary America through the prism of a family tragedy: when a powerful parent dies, each of his adult children reacts in startling and unexpected ways, and his grieving widow in the most surprising way of all.
Stark and penetrating, Joyce Carol Oates’s latest novel is a vivid exploration of race, psychological trauma, class warfare, grief, and eventual healing, as well as an intimate family novel in the tradition of the author’s bestselling We Were the Mulvaneys.

Beautiful Days: Stories

by Joyce Carol Oates, Zach Williams

A new collection of thirteen mesmerizing stories by American master Joyce Carol Oates, including the 2017 Pushcart Prize–winning “Undocumented Alien”
The diverse stories of Beautiful Days, Joyce Carol Oates explore the most secret, intimate, and unacknowledged interior lives of characters not unlike ourselves, who assert their independence in acts of bold and often irrevocable defiance.
“Fleuve Bleu” exemplifies the rich sensuousness of Oates’s prose as lovers married to other persons vow to establish, in their intimacy, a ruthlessly honest, truth-telling authenticity missing elsewhere in their complicated lives, with unexpected results.
In “Big Burnt,” set on lushly rendered Lake George, in the Adirondacks, a cunningly manipulative university professor exploits a too-trusting woman in a way she could never have anticipated. In a more experimental but no less intimate mode, “Les beaux jours” examines the ambiguities of an intensely erotic, exploitative relationship between a “master” artist and his adoring young female model. And the tragic “Undocumented Alien” depicts a young African student enrolled in an American university who is suddenly stripped of his student visa and forced to undergo a terrifying test of courage.
In these stories, as elsewhere in her fiction, Joyce Carol Oates exhibits her fascination with the social, psychological, and moral boundaries that govern our behavior—until the hour when they do not.

Beautiful Days: Stories

by Joyce Carol Oates, Zach Williams

From New Yorker and Paris Review contributor Zach Williams comes a striking and savage debut story collection that confronts parenthood, mortality, and life’s broken promises.

A couple awakens in a home in the woods to find themselves rapidly aging as their toddler remains unchanged. A work-worn employee navigates conspiracy theories and the threat of violence in an abandoned office. A tour guide leads a troublesome group to an ancient structure, apparently nonhuman in origin, discovering along the way that the most mysterious creatures of all are right beside him.

These ten stories show the fallibility of time and how reality reveals itself behind the gauze of a dream—or a nightmare. Throughout, Williams illustrates how quickly we come to the edges of our patience and endurance, the hidden damages lurking in the shadows of the everyday, the distances we must travel to protect our families, and the tenuousness of even our deepest relationships. Williams sees the perversity in the mundane and dares readers to confront the power—and beauty—of time’s relentless movement.

With exquisite prose and a lacerating wit, Beautiful Days holds a mirror to the many absurdities of being human and refuses to let us look away.

The Lost Landscape: A Writer's Coming of Age

by Joyce Carol Oates

Written with the raw honesty and poignant insight that were the hallmarks of her acclaimed bestseller A Widow’s Story, an affecting and observant memoir of growing up from one of our finest and most beloved literary masters.
The Lost Landscape is Joyce Carol Oates’ vivid chronicle of her hardscrabble childhood in rural western New York State. From memories of her relatives, to those of a charming bond with a special red hen on her family farm; from her first friendships to her earliest experiences with death, The Lost Landscape is a powerful evocation of the romance of childhood, and its indelible influence on the woman and the writer she would become.
In this exceptionally candid, moving, and richly reflective account, Oates explores the world through the eyes of her younger self, an imaginative girl eager to tell stories about the world and the people she meets. While reading Alice in Wonderland changed a young Joyce forever and inspired her to view life as a series of endless adventures, growing up on a farm taught her harsh lessons about sacrifice, hard work, and loss. With searing detail and an acutely perceptive eye, Oates renders her memories and emotions with exquisite precision, transporting us to a forgotten place and time—the lost landscape of her youth, reminding us of the forgotten landscapes of our own earliest lives.

A Bloodsmoor Romance

by Joyce Carol Oates

Finally returned to print in a beautiful new trade paperback edition, comes Joyce Carol Oates’ lost classic: a satirical, often surreal, and beautifully plotted Gothic Romance that follows the exploits of the audacious Zinn sisters, whose 19th century pursuit of adventurous lives turns a lens on contemporary American culture.

Set in a nineteenth century similar to our own, A Bloodsmoor Romance follows the beautiful Zinn sisters, five young women who refuse―for the most part―”the obligations of Christian marriage.”
Full of Oates’s mordant wit and breathlessly told in the Victorian style by an unnamed narrator shocked by the Zinn sisters’ sexuality, impulsivity, and rude rejection of the mores of their time, A Bloodsmoor Romance is a delicious filigree of literary conventions, “a novel of manners” in the tradition of Austen, Dickens, and Alcott which Oates turns on its head.
Oates’s dark romp interweaves murder and mayhem, ghosts, and abductions, substance abuse and gender identity, women’s suffrage, the American spiritualist movement, and sexual aberration, as the Zinn sisters come into contact with some of the 19th century’s greatest characters, from Mark Twain to Oscar Wilde.
A biting assessment of the American landscape and a virtuosic transformation of a literary genre, A Bloodsmoor Romance is a compelling, hilarious, and magical anti-romance―Little Women by way of Stephen King.

Hazards of Time Travel: A Novel

by Joyce Carol Oates

A recklessly idealistic girl tests the limits of her oppressively controlled, dystopian world and is punished by being sent back in time to Wainscotia, Wisconsin, eighty years in the past, only to fall fatefully in love with a fellow exile.

The Sacrifice: A Novel

by Joyce Carol Oates

New York Times bestselling author Joyce Carol Oates returns with an incendiary novel that illuminates the tragic impact of sexual violence, racism, brutality, and power on innocent lives and probes the persistence of stereotypes, the nature of revenge, the complexities of truth, and our insatiable hunger for sensationalism.
When a fourteen-year-old girl is the alleged victim of a terrible act of racial violence, the incident shocks and galvanizes her community, exacerbating the racial tension that has been simmering in this New Jersey town for decades. In this magisterial work of fiction, Joyce Carol Oates explores the uneasy fault lines in a racially troubled society. In such a tense, charged atmosphere, Oates reveals that there must always be a sacrifice—of innocence, truth, trust, and, ultimately, of lives. Unfolding in a succession of multiracial voices, in a community transfixed by this alleged crime and the spectacle unfolding around it, this profound novel exposes what—and who—the “sacrifice” actually is, and what consequences these kind of events hold for us all.
Working at the height of her powers, Oates offers a sympathetic portrait of the young girl and her mother, and challenges our expectations and beliefs about our society, our biases, and ourselves. As the chorus of its voices—from the police to the media to the victim and her family—reaches a crescendo, The Sacrifice offers a shocking new understanding of power and oppression, innocence and guilt, truth and sensationalism, justice and retribution.
A chilling exploration of complex social, political, and moral themes—the enduring trauma of the past, modern racial and class tensions, the power of secrets, and the primal decisions we all make to protect those we love—The Sacrifice is a major work of fiction from one of our most revered literary masters.

Carthage: A Novel

by Joyce Carol Oates

New York Times Bestselling Author
A young girl’s disappearance rocks a community and a family, in this stirring examination of grief, faith, justice, and the atrocities of war, the latest from literary legend Joyce Carol Oates

Zeno Mayfield’s daughter has disappeared into the night, gone missing in the wilds of the Adirondacks. But when the community of Carthage joins a father’s frantic search for the girl, they discover instead the unlikeliest of suspects—a decorated Iraq War veteran with close ties to the Mayfield family. As grisly evidence mounts against the troubled war hero, the family must wrestle with the possibility of having lost a daughter forever.

Carthage plunges us deep into the psyche of a wounded young Corporal, haunted by unspeakable acts of wartime aggression, while unraveling the story of a disaffected young girl whose exile from her family may have come long before her disappearance.

Dark and riveting, Carthage is a powerful addition to the Joyce Carol Oates canon, one that explores the human capacity for violence, love, and forgiveness, and asks if it’s ever truly possible to come home again.

Carthage: A Novel

by Joyce Carol Oates

New York Times Bestselling Author
A young girl’s disappearance rocks a community and a family, in this stirring examination of grief, faith, justice, and the atrocities of war, the latest from literary legend Joyce Carol Oates

Zeno Mayfield’s daughter has disappeared into the night, gone missing in the wilds of the Adirondacks. But when the community of Carthage joins a father’s frantic search for the girl, they discover instead the unlikeliest of suspects—a decorated Iraq War veteran with close ties to the Mayfield family. As grisly evidence mounts against the troubled war hero, the family must wrestle with the possibility of having lost a daughter forever.

Carthage plunges us deep into the psyche of a wounded young Corporal, haunted by unspeakable acts of wartime aggression, while unraveling the story of a disaffected young girl whose exile from her family may have come long before her disappearance.

Dark and riveting, Carthage is a powerful addition to the Joyce Carol Oates canon, one that explores the human capacity for violence, love, and forgiveness, and asks if it’s ever truly possible to come home again.

Lovely, Dark, Deep: Stories

by Joyce Carol Oates

A collection of thirteen spellbinding stories that maps the eerie darkness within us all.

The Accursed

by Joyce Carol Oates

"Joyce Carol Oates has written what may be the world’s finest postmodern Gothic novel: E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime set in Dracula’s castle. It’s dense, challenging, problematic, horrifying, funny, prolix and full of crazy people. You should read it.” —Stephen King, New York Times Book Review
Princeton, New Jersey at the turn of the 20th century: a tranquil place to raise a family, a genteel town for genteel souls. But something dark and dangerous lurks at the edges of the town, corrupting and infecting its residents. Vampires and ghosts haunt the dreams of the innocent. A powerful curse besets the elite families of Princeton—their daughters begin disappearing. A young bride on the verge of the altar is seduced and abducted by a dangerously compelling man—a shape-shifting, vaguely European prince who might just be the devil, and who spreads his curse upon a richly deserving community of white Anglo-Saxon privilege. And in the Pine Barrens that border the town, a lush and terrifying underworld opens up.
When the bride’s brother sets out against all odds to find her, his path will cross those of Princeton’s most formidable people, from Grover Cleveland, fresh out of his second term in the White House and retired to town for a quieter life, to soon-to-be commander in chief Woodrow Wilson, president of the University, and a complex individual obsessed to the point of madness with his need to retain power; from the young Socialist idealist Upton Sinclair, to his charismatic comrade Jack London, and the most famous writer of the era, Samuel Clemens/ Mark Twain—all plagued by “accursed” visions.
Narrated with Oates's unmistakable psychological insight, The Accursed combines beautifully transporting historical detail with chilling supernatural elements to stunning effect.

Mudwoman: A Novel

by Joyce Carol Oates

“Oates is just a fearless writer…with her brave heart and her impossibly lush and dead-on imaginative powers.”
—Los Angeles Times

“[An] extraordinarily intense, racking, and resonant novel.”
—Booklist (starred review)
One of the most acclaimed writers in the world today, the inimitable Joyce Carol Oates follows up her searing, New York Times bestselling memoir, A Widow’s Story, with an extraordinary new work of fiction. Mudwoman is a riveting psychological thriller, taut with dark suspense, that explores the high price of repression in the life of a respected university president teetering on the precipice of a nervous breakdown. Like Daphne DuMaurier’s gothic masterwork, Rebecca, and the classic ghost story, The Turn of the Screw, by Henry James, Oates’s Mudwoman is a chilling page-turner that hinges on the power of the imagination and the blurry lines between the real and the invented—and it stands tall among the author’s most powerful and beloved works, including The Falls, The Gravedigger’s Daughter, and We Were the Mulvaneys.

Mudwoman: A Novel

by Joyce Carol Oates

One of the most acclaimed writers in the world today, the inimitable Joyce Carol Oates follows up her searing, New York Times bestselling memoir, A Widow’s Story, with an extraordinary new work of fiction. Mudwoman is a riveting psychological thriller, taut with dark suspense, that explores the high price of repression in the life of a respected university president teetering on the precipice of a nervous breakdown. Like Daphne DuMaurier’s gothic masterwork, Rebecca, and the classic ghost story, The Turn of the Screw, by Henry James, Oates’s Mudwoman is a chilling page-turner that hinges on the power of the imagination and the blurry lines between the real and the invented—and it stands tall among the author’s most powerful and beloved works, including The Falls, The Gravedigger’s Daughter, and We Were the Mulvaneys.

The Accursed: A Novel

by Joyce Carol Oates

"Joyce Carol Oates has written what may be the world’s finest postmodern Gothic novel: E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime set in Dracula’s castle. It’s dense, challenging, problematic, horrifying, funny, prolix and full of crazy people. You should read it.” —Stephen King, New York Times Book Review
Princeton, New Jersey at the turn of the 20th century: a tranquil place to raise a family, a genteel town for genteel souls. But something dark and dangerous lurks at the edges of the town, corrupting and infecting its residents. Vampires and ghosts haunt the dreams of the innocent. A powerful curse besets the elite families of Princeton—their daughters begin disappearing. A young bride on the verge of the altar is seduced and abducted by a dangerously compelling man—a shape-shifting, vaguely European prince who might just be the devil, and who spreads his curse upon a richly deserving community of white Anglo-Saxon privilege. And in the Pine Barrens that border the town, a lush and terrifying underworld opens up.
When the bride’s brother sets out against all odds to find her, his path will cross those of Princeton’s most formidable people, from Grover Cleveland, fresh out of his second term in the White House and retired to town for a quieter life, to soon-to-be commander in chief Woodrow Wilson, president of the University, and a complex individual obsessed to the point of madness with his need to retain power; from the young Socialist idealist Upton Sinclair, to his charismatic comrade Jack London, and the most famous writer of the era, Samuel Clemens/ Mark Twain—all plagued by “accursed” visions.
Narrated with Oates's unmistakable psychological insight, The Accursed combines beautifully transporting historical detail with chilling supernatural elements to stunning effect.

A Widow's Story: A Memoir

by Joyce Carol Oates

Unlike anything Joyce Carol Oates has written before, A Widow’s Story is the universally acclaimed author’s poignant, intimate memoir about the unexpected death of Raymond Smith, her husband of forty-six years, and its wrenching, surprising aftermath. A recent recipient of National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, Oates, whose novels (Blonde, The Gravedigger’s Daughter, Little Bird of Heaven, etc.) rank among the very finest in contemporary American fiction, offers an achingly personal story of love and loss. A Widow’s Story is a literary memoir on a par with The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion and Calvin Trillin’s About Alice.

A Widow's Story: A Memoir

by Joyce Carol Oates

Unlike anything Joyce Carol Oates has written before, A Widow’s Story is the universally acclaimed author’s poignant, intimate memoir about the unexpected death of Raymond Smith, her husband of forty-six years, and its wrenching, surprising aftermath. A recent recipient of National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, Oates, whose novels (Blonde, The Gravedigger’s Daughter, Little Bird of Heaven, etc.) rank among the very finest in contemporary American fiction, offers an achingly personal story of love and loss. A Widow’s Story is a literary memoir on a par with The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion and Calvin Trillin’s About Alice.

Two or Three Things I Forgot to Tell You

by Joyce Carol Oates

Two or Three Things I Forgot to Tell You is renowned author Joyce Carol Oates's newest novel for teens. Laurie Halse Anderson, bestselling author of Wintergirls and Speak, said that "the painful honesty of this book will crack open your heart."
Senior year, their last year together, Merissa and Nadia need their best friend Tink more than they ever did before. They have secrets they can share with no one but her, toxic secrets that threaten to unravel their friendship—and themselves. Tink had a secret, too, a big one, but no one knows what it was. And now she's gone. . . .
In a starred review, Kirkus Reviews described Joyce Carol Oates as "a master at portraying the inner lives of teens." In Two or Three Things I Forgot to Tell You, she's created a powerful portrayal of a friendship strong enough to transcend death.

Black Dahlia & White Rose: Stories

by Joyce Carol Oates

“A mesmerizing storyteller who seems almost unnaturally able to enter the tormented inner lives of her characters.”
—Denver Post
Black Dahlia & White Rose is a brilliant collection of short fiction from National Book Award winner and New York Times bestselling author Joyce Carol Oates, one of the most acclaimed writers of our time. These stores, at once lyrical and unsettling, shine with the author’s trademark fascination with finding the unpredictable amidst the prosaic—from her imaginative recreation of friendship between two tragically doomed young women (Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Short), to the tale of an infidelity as deeply human as it is otherworldly. Black Dahlia & White Rose is a major offering from one of the most important artists in contemporary American literature; a superb collection that showcases Joyce Carol Oates’s ferocious energy and darkly imaginative storytelling power.

In Rough Country: Essays and Reviews

by Joyce Carol Oates

“A poignant, nostalgic collection of literary criticism by one of America’s premier authors.”
—Kirkus Reviews

In Rough Country is a sterling collection of essays, reviews, and criticism from Joyce Carol Oates that focuses on a wide array of books and writers—from Poe to Nabokov, from Flannery O’Connor to Phillip Roth. One of our foremost novelists, National Book Award and PEN/Malamud Award winner Oates demonstrates an unparalleled understanding and appreciation of great works of literature with In Rough Country, and offers unique and breathtaking insights into the writer’s art.

My Sister, My Love: The Intimate Story of Skyler Rampike

by Joyce Carol Oates

Herein is the unexpurgated first-person narrative of nineteen-year-old Skyler Rampike, the only surviving child of an "infamous" American family destroyed a decade ago by the murder of Skyler’s six-year-old ice-skating champion sister, Bliss, and the media scrutiny that followed. Part investigation into the unsolved murder, part elegy for the lost Bliss and for his own lost childhood, Skyler’s narrative is an alternately harrowing and corrosively funny exposé of upper-middle-class American pretensions—and an unexpectedly subtle and sympathetic exploration of those who dwell in "Tabloid Hell."

My Sister, My Love: The Intimate Story of Skyler Rampike

by Joyce Carol Oates

New York Times bestselling author of The Falls, Blonde, and We Were the Mulvaneys, Joyce Carol Oates returns with a dark, wry, satirical tale—inspired by an unsolved American true-crime mystery.
"Dysfunctional families are all alike. Ditto 'survivors.'"
So begins the unexpurgated first-person narrative of nineteen-year-old Skyler Rampike, the only surviving child of an "infamous" American family. A decade ago the Rampikes were destroyed by the murder of Skyler's six-year-old ice-skating champion sister, Bliss, and the media scrutiny that followed. Part investigation into the unsolved murder; part elegy for the lost Bliss and for Skyler's own lost childhood; and part corrosively funny exposé of the pretensions of upper-middle-class American suburbia, this captivating novel explores with unexpected sympathy and subtlety the intimate lives of those who dwell in Tabloid Hell.
Likely to be Joyce Carol Oates's most controversial novel to date, as well as her most boldly satirical, this unconventional work of fiction is sure to be recognized as a classic exploration of the tragic interface between private life and the perilous life of "celebrity." In My Sister, My Love: The Intimate Story of Skyler Rampike, the incomparable Oates once again mines the depths of the sinister yet comic malaise at the heart of our contemporary culture.

Zombie: A Novel

by Joyce Carol Oates

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.

Sourland: Stories

by Joyce Carol Oates

“Oates is a fearless writer.”

—Los Angeles Times

“Oates is a master of the dark tale—stories of the hunted and the hunter, of violence, trauma, and deep psychic wounds.”

—Booklist (starred review)

Sourland is a gripping, haunting, and intensely moving collection of short stories by Joyce Carol Oates, one of America’s preeminent authors. Unforgettable tales that re-imagine the meaning of loss—often through violent means—Sourland is yet another extraordinary read from the literary icon who has previously brought us The Gravedigger’s Daughter, Blonde, We Were the Mulvaneys, and numerous other classic works of contemporary fiction.

Sourland: Stories

by Joyce Carol Oates

“Oates is a fearless writer.”
—Los Angeles Times

“Oates is a master of the dark tale—stories of the hunted and the hunter, of violence, trauma, and deep psychic wounds.”
—Booklist (starred review)

Sourland is a gripping, haunting, and intensely moving collection of short stories by Joyce Carol Oates, one of America’s preeminent authors. Unforgettable tales that re-imagine the meaning of loss—often through violent means—Sourland is yet another extraordinary read from the literary icon who has previously brought us The Gravedigger’s Daughter, Blonde, We Were the Mulvaneys, and numerous other classic works of contemporary fiction.

Little Bird of Heaven: A Novel

by Joyce Carol Oates

Little Bird of Heaven by Joyce Carol Oates is a riveting story of love violently lost and found in late 20th century America. In this novel, Oates returns to the Buffalo, New York, region to brilliantly explore the dangerous intersections of romance and eroticism, guilt and obsession, desire and murder. Little Bird of Heaven, a soaring work by the New York Times bestselling author and a nominee for the 2009 Man Booker Prize—one of the world’s most prestigious literary awards—is as powerful and unforgettable as Joyce Carol Oates’s previous acclaimed novels The Gravedigger’s Daughter and We Were the Mulvaneys.

The Ecco Anthology of Contemporary American Short Fiction

by Joyce Carol Oates, Christopher R. Beha

A definitive collection of the very best short stories by contemporary American masters
Edited by Joyce Carol Oates, "the living master of the short story" (Buffalo News), and Christopher R. Beha, this volume provides an important overview of the contemporary short story and a selection of the very best that American short fiction has to offer.

Blonde: A Novel

by Joyce Carol Oates

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.

My Life as a Rat: A Novel

by Joyce Carol Oates

“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.

My Life as a Rat: A Novel

by Joyce Carol Oates

“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.

Breathe: A Novel

by Joyce Carol Oates

A NOVEL OF LOVE AND LOSS FROM BESTSELLING AND PRIZEWINNING AUTHOR JOYCE CAROL OATES
Amid a starkly beautiful but uncanny landscape in New Mexico, a married couple from Cambridge, MA takes residency at a distinguished academic institute. When the husband is stricken with a mysterious illness, misdiagnosed at first, their lives are uprooted and husband and wife each embarks upon a nightmare journey. At thirty-seven, Michaela faces the terrifying prospect of widowhood - and the loss of Gerard, whose identity has greatly shaped her own.
In vividly depicted scenes of escalating suspense, Michaela cares desperately for Gerard in his final days as she comes to realize that her love for her husband, however fierce and selfless, is not enough to save him and that his death is beyond her comprehension. A love that refuses to be surrendered at death—is this the blessing of a unique married love, or a curse that must be exorcized?
Part intimately detailed love story, part horror story rooted in real life, BREATHE is an exploration of hauntedness rooted in the domesticity of marital love, as well as our determination both to be faithful to the beloved and to survive the trauma of loss.

Freaky Green Eyes

by Joyce Carol Oates

"Later, I would think of it as crossing over. From a known territory into an unknown. From a place where people know you to a place where people only think they know you."
Sometimes Franky Pierson has a hard time dealing with life. Like when her parents separate and her mother vanishes, Franky wants to believe that her mom has simply pulled a disappearing act. Yet deep within herself, a secret part of her she calls Freaky Green Eyes knows that something is terribly wrong. And only Freaky can open Franky's eyes to the truth.

A Fair Maiden

by Joyce Carol Oates

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 Museum of Dr. Moses: Tales of Mystery and Suspense

by Joyce Carol Oates

In "The Man Who Fought Roland LaStarza" a woman’s world is upended when she learns the brutal truth about a family friend’s death—and what her father is capable of. Meanwhile, a businessman desperate to find his missing two-year-old grandson in "Suicide Watch" must determine whether the horrifying tale his junky son tells him about the boy’s whereabouts is a confession or a sick test. In "Valentine, July Heat Wave" a man prepares a gruesome surprise for the wife determined to leave him. And the children of a BTK-style serial killer struggle to decode the patterns behind their father’s seemingly random bad acts, as well as their own, in "Bad Habits."

In these and other stories, Joyce Carol Oates explores with bloodcurdling insight the ties that bind—or worse. The Museum of Dr. Moses is another chilling masterpiece from "one of the great artistic forces of our time" (The Nation).

The Oxford Book of American Short Stories

by Joyce Carol Oates

In The Oxford Book of American Short Stories, Joyce Carol Oates offers a sweeping survey of American short fiction, in a collection of nearly sixty tales that combines classic works with many "different, unexpected" gems, and that invites readers to explore a wealth of important pieces by women and minority writers.

Some selections simply can't be improved on, Oates admits, and she happily includes such time-honored works as Irving's "Rip Van Winkle" and Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart." But alongside these often-anthologized tales, Oates introduces such little-known stories as Mark Twain's "Cannibalism in the Cars," a work that reveals a darker side to his humor. From Melville come the juxtaposed tales "The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids," of which Oates says, "only Melville could have fashioned out of 'real' events...such harrowing and dreamlike allegorical fiction." The reader will also delight in the range of authors found here, from Charles W. Chesnutt, Jean Toomer, and Sarah Orne Jewett, to William Carlos Williams, Kate Chopin, and Langston Hughes, to Ray Bradbury, H.P. Lovecraft, and Stephen King.

For the second edition, Oates has introduced a wide range of new stories from writers who represent the state of American literature today. These new works include Lorrie Moore's "How to Become a Writer," Richard Ford's "Under the Radar," Junot Diaz's "Edison, New Jersey," David Foster Wallace's "Good People," Philip Roth's "Defender of the Faith," and Amy Hempel's "Today Will Be a Quiet Day." As in the original volume, Oates provides fascinating introductions to each writer, blending biographical information with her own trenchant observations about their work. In addition, she has written a new preface that contemplates our shifting literary culture, and has revised her introductory essay to the first edition, in which she offers the fruit of years of reflection on a genre in which she herself is a master.

Them (Modern Library)

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

Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang

by Joyce Carol Oates

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.

We Were the Mulvaneys (Oprah's Book Club)

by Joyce Carol Oates

An Oprah Book Club® selection

A New York Times Notable Book

The Mulvaneys are blessed by all that makes life sweet. 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...with tragic consequences. Years later, the youngest son attempts to piece together the fragments of the Mulvaneys’ former glory, seeking to uncover and understand the secret violation that brought about the family’s tragic downfall.

Profoundly cathartic, this extraordinary novel unfolds as if Oates, in plumbing the darkness of the human spirit, has come upon a source of light at its core. Moving away from the dark tone of her more recent masterpieces, Joyce Carol Oates turns the tale of a family struggling to cope with its fall from grace into a deeply moving and unforgettable account of the vigor of hope and the power of love to prevail over suffering.

“It’s the novel closest to my heart....I’m deeply moved that Oprah Winfrey has selected this novel for Oprah’s Book Club, a family novel presented to Oprah’s vast American family.”—Joyce Carol Oates

A Fair Maiden (Otto Penzler Books)

by Joyce Carol Oates

"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.

Babysitter: A novel

by Joyce Carol Oates

From one of America’s most renowned storytellers—the bestselling author of Blonde—comes a novel about love and deceit, and lust and redemption, against a backdrop of shocking murders in the affluent suburbs of Detroit.

"Hannah’s unreliable, elliptical narrative is seductive and compelling, like following someone into a fever dream ... [Oates] is in no hurry to trigger the action, dropping tiny morsels of foreshadowing to keep us on our toes." —The New York Times Book Review

“Unsettling, mysterious, deft, sinister, eerily plausible.” —Margaret Atwood, best-selling author of The Handmaid's Tale and The Testaments, via Twitter

In the waning days of the turbulent 1970s, in the wake of unsolved child-killings that have shocked Detroit, the lives of several residents are drawn together with tragic consequences.

There is Hannah, wife of a prominent local businessman, who has begun an affair with a darkly charismatic stranger whose identity remains elusive; Mikey, a canny street hustler who finds himself on a chilling mission to rectify injustice; and the serial killer known as Babysitter, an enigmatic and terrifying figure at the periphery of elite Detroit. As Babysitter continues his rampage of abductions and killings, these individuals intersect with one another in startling and unexpected ways.

Suspenseful, brilliantly orchestrated, and engrossing, Babysitter is a starkly narrated exploration of the riskiness of pursuing alternate lives, calling into question how far we are willing to go to protect those whom we cherish most. In its scathing indictment of corrupt politics, unexamined racism, and the enabling of sexual predation in America, Babysitter is a thrilling work of contemporary fiction.

Babysitter: A novel

by Joyce Carol Oates

From one of America’s most renowned storytellers—the bestselling author of Blonde—comes a novel about love and deceit, and lust and redemption, against a backdrop of shocking murders in the affluent suburbs of Detroit.

"Hannah’s unreliable, elliptical narrative is seductive and compelling, like following someone into a fever dream ... [Oates] is in no hurry to trigger the action, dropping tiny morsels of foreshadowing to keep us on our toes." —The New York Times Book Review

“Unsettling, mysterious, deft, sinister, eerily plausible.” —Margaret Atwood, best-selling author of The Handmaid's Tale and The Testaments, via Twitter

In the waning days of the turbulent 1970s, in the wake of unsolved child-killings that have shocked Detroit, the lives of several residents are drawn together with tragic consequences.

There is Hannah, wife of a prominent local businessman, who has begun an affair with a darkly charismatic stranger whose identity remains elusive; Mikey, a canny street hustler who finds himself on a chilling mission to rectify injustice; and the serial killer known as Babysitter, an enigmatic and terrifying figure at the periphery of elite Detroit. As Babysitter continues his rampage of abductions and killings, these individuals intersect with one another in startling and unexpected ways.

Suspenseful, brilliantly orchestrated, and engrossing, Babysitter is a starkly narrated exploration of the riskiness of pursuing alternate lives, calling into question how far we are willing to go to protect those whom we cherish most. In its scathing indictment of corrupt politics, unexamined racism, and the enabling of sexual predation in America, Babysitter is a thrilling work of contemporary fiction.

Butcher: A novel

by Joyce Carol Oates

From one of our most accomplished storytellers, an extraordinary and arresting novel about a women’s asylum in the nineteenth century, and a terrifying doctor who wants to change the world

In this harrowing story based on authentic historical documents, we follow the career of Dr. Silas Weir, “Father of Gyno-Psychiatry,” as he ascends from professional anonymity to national renown. Humiliated by a procedure gone terribly wrong, Weir is forced to take a position at the New Jersey Asylum for Female Lunatics, where he reigns. There, he is allowed to continue his practice, unchecked for decades, making a name for himself by focusing on women who have been neglected by the state—women he subjects to the most grotesque modes of experimentation. As he begins to establish himself as a pioneer of nineteenth-century surgery, Weir’s ambition is fueled by his obsessive fascination with a young Irish indentured servant named Brigit, who becomes not only Weir’s primary experimental subject, but also the agent of his destruction.

Narrated by Silas Weir’s eldest son, who has repudiated his father’s brutal legacy, Butcher is a unique blend of fiction and fact, a nightmare voyage through the darkest regions of the American psyche conjoined, in its startling conclusion, with unexpected romance. Once again, Joyce Carol Oates has written a spellbinding novel confirming her position as one of our celebrated American visionaries of the imagination.

Zero-Sum: Stories

by Joyce Carol Oates

Zero-sum games are played for lethal stakes in these arresting stories by one of America’s most acclaimed writers, the award-winning, best-selling author of Blonde

A brilliant young philosophy student bent on seducing her famous philosopher-mentor finds herself outmaneuvered; diabolically clever high school girls wreak a particularly apt sort of vengeance on sexual predators in their community; a woman stalked by a would-be killer may be confiding in the wrong former lover; a young woman is morbidly obsessed by her unfamiliar new role as “mother.” In the collection’s longest story, a much-praised cutting-edge writer cruelly experiments with “drafts” of his own suicide.

In these powerfully wrought stories that hold a mirror up to our time, Joyce Carol Oates has created a world of erotic obsession, thwarted idealism, and ever-shifting identities. Provocative and stunning, Zero-Sum reinforces Oates’s standing as a literary treasure and an artist of the mysterious interior life.

Fox: A Novel

by Joyce Carol Oates

A spellbinding novel of literary and psychological suspenseabout the dark secrets that surface after the shocking disappearance of a charismatic, mercurial teacher at an elite boarding school—by the legendary author "who is surely on any shortlist of America’s greatest living writers” (The New York Times Magazine)

"Eerie, shocking, provoking, and beautifully written, Fox is yet further proof Oates is one of the greatest writers among us today."—Gillian Flynn

Who is Francis Fox? A charming English teacher new to the idyllic Langhorne Academy, Fox beguiles many of his students, their parents, and his colleagues at the elite boarding school, while leaving others wondering where he came from and why his biography is so enigmatic. When two brothers discover Fox’s car half-submerged in a pond in a local nature preserve and parts of an unidentified body strewn about the nearby woods, the entire community, including Detective Horace Zwender and his deputy, begins to ask disturbing questions about Francis Fox and who he might really be.

A hypnotic, galloping tale of crime and complicity, revenge and restitution, victim vs. predator, Joyce Carol Oates’s Fox illuminates the darkest corners of the human psyche while asking profound moral questions about justice and the response evil demands. A character as magnetically diabolical as Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley and Vladimir Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert, Francis Fox enchants and manipulates nearly everyone around him, until at last he meets someone he can’t outfox. Written in Oates’s trademark intimate, sweeping style, and interweaving multiple points of view, Fox is a triumph of craftsmanship and artistry, a novel as profound as it is propulsive, as moving as it is full of mystery.

Fox: A Novel

by Joyce Carol Oates

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • An “enthralling” (Los Angeles Times) and “remarkably engrossing” (The New York Times Book Review, Editors’ Choice) novel of literary and psychological suspense about the dark secrets that surface after the shocking disappearance of a charismatic, mercurial teacher at an elite boarding school—by legendary author Joyce Carol Oates

“Eerie, shocking, provoking, and beautifully written.”—Gillian Flynn
“I found it mesmerizing front to back.”—Michael Connelly
“I can’t remember the last time I read something so (darkly, disconcertingly) addictive.”—Rebecca Makkai
“An extraordinary novel . . . unlike any other mystery I’ve read.”—Joseph Finder
“Tom Ripley, eat your heart out.”—NPR
“A classic psychological suspense.”—People
“A dark, daring plunge into literary suspense . . . Oates dissects the predator-prey dynamic with merciless precision.”—The Seattle Times

A HARPER’S BAZAAR AND PUBLISHERS WEEKLY BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR

Who is Francis Fox? A charming English teacher new to the idyllic Langhorne Academy, Fox beguiles many of his students, their parents, and his colleagues at the elite boarding school, while leaving others wondering where he came from and why his biography is so enigmatic. When two brothers discover Fox’s car half-submerged in a pond in a local nature preserve and parts of an unidentified body strewn about the nearby woods, the entire community, including Detective Horace Zwender and his deputy, begins to ask disturbing questions about Francis Fox and who he might really be.

A hypnotic, galloping tale of crime and complicity, revenge and restitution, victim vs. predator, Joyce Carol Oates’s Fox illuminates the darkest corners of the human psyche while asking profound moral questions about justice and the response evil demands. A character as magnetically diabolical as Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley and Vladimir Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert, Francis Fox enchants and manipulates nearly everyone around him, until at last he meets someone he can’t outfox. Written in Oates’s trademark intimate, sweeping style, and interweaving multiple points of view, Fox is a triumph of craftsmanship and artistry, a novel as profound as it is propulsive, as moving as it is full of mystery.

Transgressions Vol. 4: The Resurrection Man, The Corn Maiden, and Hostages

by Joyce Carol Oates, Anne Perry, Sharyn McCrumb

New York Times bestsellers Sharyn McCrumb, Joyce Carol Oates, and Anne Perry each provided a brand-new, never-before-published tale for this unique collection of stories edited by New York Times bestselling author and mystery legend Ed McBain.
"The Resurrection Man" by Sharyn McCrumb: During America's first century, doctors used any means necessary to advance their craft―including dissecting corpses. Sharyn McCrumb brings the South of the 1850s to life in this story of a man who is assigned to dig up bodies to help those that are still alive.
"The Corn Maiden" by Joyce Carol Oates: When a twelve-year-old girl is abducted in a small New York town, the crime starts a spiral of destruction and despair as only this master of psychological suspense could write it.
"Hostages" by Anne Perry: The bestselling historical mystery author has written a tale of beautiful yet still savage Ireland today. In their eternal struggle for freedom, there is about to be a changing of the guard in the Irish Republican Army. Yet for some, old habits―and honor―still die hard, even at gunpoint.

Evil Eye: Four Novellas of Love Gone Wrong

by Joyce Carol Oates

In Evil Eye, Oates offers four chilling tales about love so powerful that people might die—or kill—for it.
In the title story, we meet Mariana, the young fourth wife of a prominent intellectual. When her husband’s first wife comes to visit, Mariana learns a terrible secret that threatens her marriage and sanity. In “So Near Any Times Always,” shy teenager Lizbeth meets Desmond, a charming older boy who offers the first spark of romance. Yet as their relationship blossoms, Lizbeth realizes that a menacing soul lies beneath Desmond’s perfect façade. In “The Execution,” spoiled college student Bart Hansen has planned the perfect crime to get back at his condescending parents. What he didn’t plan on was the resilience of his mother’s love, even in the face of death. And in “The Flatbed,” childhood trauma has prevented Cecelia from enjoying physical intimacy with a man. But when she meets the love of her life, Cecelia must confront the demon who stole her innocence long ago.
With the razor-sharp prose that has made Joyce Carol Oates a living legend, Evil Eye shows love as sporadically magical, mysterious, and murderous.

Evil Eye: Four Novellas of Love Gone Wrong

by Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates is one of the most prominent writers of her generation, and she is fearless when exploring the most disturbing corners of human nature. In Evil Eye, Oates offers four chilling tales of love gone horribly wrong, showing the lengths people will go to find love, keep it, and sometimes end it.

In "Evil Eye," we meet Mariana, the young 4th wife of a prominent intellectual. When her husband's brazen first wife visits one night, Mariana learns a terrible secret that threatens her marriage and sanity. In "So Near, Anytime, Always," shy teenager Lizbeth meets Desmond, a charming boy who offers this introverted girl the first sparks of young romance. Yet just as their relationship begins to blossom, Lizbeth realizes that beneath Desmond's perfect façade lies a dark soul that could wreak havoc on Lizbeth and her loved ones. In "The Execution," spoiled college student Bart Hansen has planned the perfect, brutal crime to get back at his parents for their years of condescension. Yet what he didn't plan for is a mother whose love is more resilent than he could have ever imagined, who threatens to derail his carefully laid-out plans.

High Crime Area: Tales of Darkness and Dread

by Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates is an unparalleled investigator of human flaws. In these eight stories, she deftly tests the bonds between damaged individuals—a brother and sister, a teacher and student, two strangers on a subway—in the fearless prose for which she’s become so celebrated.

In the title story “High Crime Area,” a white, aspiring professor is convinced she is being followed. No need to panic, she has a handgun stowed away in her purse—just in case. But when she turns to confront her black, male shadow, the situation isn’t what she expects. In “The Rescuer,” a promising graduate student detours to inner city Trenton, New Jersey to save her brother from a downward spiral. But she soon finds out there may be more to his world than to hers. And in “The Last Man of Letters,” the world-renowned author X embarks on a final grand tour of Europe. He has money, fame, but not a whole lot of manners. A little thing like etiquette couldn’t bring a man like X down, could it?

In these biting and beautiful stories, Oates confronts, one by one, the demons within us. Sometimes it’s the human who wins, and sometimes it’s the demon.

The Doll-Master and Other Tales of Terror

by Joyce Carol Oates

From one of our most important contemporary writers, The Doll-Master and Other Tales of Terror is a bold, haunting collection of six stories.

In the title story, a young boy becomes obsessed with his cousin’s doll after she tragically passes away from leukemia. As he grows older, he begins to collect “found dolls” from the surrounding neighborhoods and stores his treasures in the abandoned carriage house on his family's estate. But just what kind of dolls are they? In “Gun Accident,” a teenage girl is thrilled when her favorite teacher asks her to house-sit, even on short notice. But when an intruder forces his way into the house while the girl is there, the fate of more than one life is changed forever. In “Equatorial,” set in the exotic Galapagos, an affluent American wife experiences disorienting assaults upon her sense of who her charismatic husband really is, and what his plans may be for her.

In The Doll-Master and Other Tales of Terror, Joyce Carol Oates evokes the “fascination of the abomination” that is at the core of the most profound, the most unsettling, and the most memorable of dark mystery fiction.

The Doll-Master and Other Tales of Terror

by Joyce Carol Oates

Bold and haunting, The Doll-Master and Other Tales is a collection of six psychologically daring stories from Joyce Carol Oates.
In the title story, a boy becomes obsessed with his cousin’s doll after she tragically passes away, and as he grows older, he begins to collect “found dolls” from surrounding neighborhoods. But just what kind of dolls are they? In “Gun Accident,” a teenage girl is delighted to house-sit for her favorite teacher, until an intruder forces his way inside the old Colonial—changing more than one life forever. The Doll-Master closes with a taut bibliomystery, about the owner of a middling chain of mystery bookstores whose plan to take over a rare bookshop in scenic New Hampshire derails into a game of verbal cat-and-mouse that threatens to have real-life consequences.
Throughout the collection, Oates evokes “the fascination of the abomination” that is at the core of the most profound, the most unsettling, and the most memorable of dark mystery fiction.

The Corn Maiden

by Joyce Carol Oates

An incomparable master storyteller in all forms, in The Corn Maiden and Other Nightmares Joyce Carol Oates spins six imaginative tales of suspense. “The Corn Maiden” is the gut-wrenching story of Marissa, a beautiful and sweet eleven-year-old girl with hair the color of corn silk. Taken by an older girl from her school who has told two friends in her thrall of the Indian legend of the Corn Maiden, in which a girl is sacrificed to ensure a good crop, Marissa is kept in a secluded basement and convinced that the world has ended. Marissa’s seemingly inevitable fate becomes ever more terrifying as the older girl relishes her power, giving the tale unbearable tension with a shocking conclusion. In “Helping Hands,” published here for the first time, a lonely woman meets a man in the unlikely clutter of a dingy charity shop and extends friendship. She has no idea what kinds of doors she may be opening. The powerful stories in this extraordinary collection further enhance Joyce Carol Oates’s standing as one of the world’s greatest writers of suspense.

The Corn Maiden

by Joyce Carol Oates

An incomparable master storyteller in all forms, in The Corn Maiden and Other Nightmares Joyce Carol Oates spins six imaginative tales of suspense.

"The Corn Maiden" is the gut-wrenching story of Marissa, a beautiful and sweet, but somewhat slow, eleven-year-old girl with hair the color of corn silk. Her single mother comes home one night to find her missing and panics, frantically knocking on the doors of her neighbors. She finally calls the police, who want to know why she left her young daughter alone until 8 o’clock.
Suspicion falls on a computer teacher at her school with no alibi for the time of the abduction. Obvious clues—perhaps too obvious—point directly to him. Unsuspected is Judah (born Judith), an older girl from the same school who has told two friends in her thrall of the Indian legend of the Corn Maiden, a girl sacrificed to ensure a good crop.
The trusting Marissa happily went to a secluded basement with the older girls, pleased to be included, and is convinced that the world has ended and that they are the last survivors. Remaining an unaware hostage for days, she grows weaker on a sparse diet as Judah prepares her for sacrifice.
The seemingly inevitable fate of Marissa becomes ever more terrifying as Judah relishes her power, leading to unbearable tension with a shocking conclusion.
“Helping Hands,” published here for the first time, begins with an apparently optimistic line: “He came into her life when it had seemed to her that her life was finished.”
A lonely woman meets a man in the unlikely clutter of a dingy charity shop and extends friendliness, which soon turns to quiet and unacknowledged desire. With the mindset of a victim, struggling to overcome her shyness and fears, she has no idea what kinds of doors she may be opening.
The powerful stories in this extraordinary collection further enhance Joyce Carol Oates’s standing as one of the world’s greatest writers of suspense.

Daddy Love

by Joyce Carol Oates

Daddy Love [hardcover] Oates, Joyce Carol [Jan 08, 2013]

Daddy Love

by Joyce Carol Oates

"It's hard to tear your eyes away from her grimly detailed portrait of Daddy Love . . . Oates has more knives to throw before bringing this harrowing tale to a close--but she saves the sharpest one for the very last page." --The New York Times Book Review

Dinah Whitcomb seemingly has everything. A loving and successful husband, and a smart, precocious young son named Robbie. One day, their worlds are shattered when Dinah is attacked and Robbie is taken in a mall parking lot. Dinah, injured, attempts to follow, but is run over by the kidnapper's van, mangling her body nearly beyond repair.

The kidnapper, a part-time Preacher named Chester Cash, calls himself Daddy Love, as he has abducted, tortured, and raped several young boys. He renames Robbie "Gideon." Daddy Love slowly brainwashes "Gideon" into believing that he is Daddy Love's real son, and any time the boy resists or rebels it is met with punishment beyond his wildest nightmares.

As Robbie grows older, he becomes aware of just how monstrous Daddy Love is. Though as a small boy he as terrified of what might happen if he disobeyed Daddy Daddy Love, Robbie begins to realize that the longer he stays in the home of this demon, the greater chance he'll end up like Daddy Love's other "sons" who were never heard from again. Somewhere within this tortured young boy lies a spark of rebellion, and he will soon discover just what lengths he'll go to to survive.

Joyce Carol Oates is peerless when writing about the terrors that lurk right next door, and in Daddy Love she delivers a terrifying novel about every parent's worst nightmare come to life.

Cardiff, by the Sea: Four Novellas of Suspense

by Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates, the “grand mistress of ghoulishness” (Publishers Weekly), showcases her mastery in four deeply disturbing novellas that will leave the reader both quaking and pining for more
In the titular novella, an academic in Pennsylvania discovers a terrifying trauma from her past after inheriting a house in Cardiff, Maine from someone she has never heard of. Mia, the protagonist of “Miao Dao,” is a pubescent girl overcome with loneliness, who befriends a feral cat that becomes her protector from the increasingly aggressive males that surround her.
A brilliant but shy college sophomore realizes that she is pregnant in “Phan-tomwise: 1972.” Distraught, she allows a distinguished visiting professor to take her under his wing, though it quickly becomes evident that he is interested in more than an academic mentorship. Lastly, “The Surviving Child” is Stefan, who was spared when his mother, a famous poet, killed his sister and herself. Stefan’s father remarries, but his young wife is haunted by dead poet’s voice dancing in the wind, an inexplicably befouled well, and a compulsive draw to the same gar-age that took two lives.
In these psychologically daring, chillingly suspenseful pieces, Joyce Carol Oates writes about women facing threats past and present.

Pursuit

by Joyce Carol Oates, Thomas Perry

As a child, Abby had the same recurring nightmare night after night, in which she wandered through a field ridden with human skulls and bones. Now an adult, Abby thinks she’s outgrown her demons, until, the evening before her wedding, the terrible dream returns and forces her to confront the dark secrets from her past she has kept from her new husband, Willem. The following day―less than 24 hours after exchanging vows―Abby steps out into traffic. As his wife lies in her hospital bed, sleeping in fits and starts, Willem tries to determine whether this was an absentminded accident or a premeditated plunge, and he quickly discovers a mysterious set of clues about what his wife might be hiding. Why, for example is there a rash-like red mark circling her wrist? What does she dream about that causes her to wake from the sound of her own screams?

Slowly, Abby begins to open up to her husband, revealing to him what she has never shared with anyone before―the story of a terrified mother; a jealous, drug addled father; and a daughter’s terrifying captivity.

With a suspenseful, alternating narrative that travels between the present and Abby's tortured childhood, The Pursuit is a meticulously crafted, deeply disquieting tale that showcases Oates’s masterful storytelling.

Pursuit

by Joyce Carol Oates, Thomas Perry

“Perry is the best suspense writer in the business. . . . Pursuit is relentless, filled with twists and turns, that rare page-turner that keeps one reading late into the night to finish.”
–The Boston Globe

Thirteen bodies are found in a Louisville restaurant. When the police can find no suspect or motive, a victim’s family seeks the services of the enigmatic and solitary specialist Roy Prescott, known for his ability to find people who don’t want to be found. Working outside the law and willing to do what the police can’t, Prescott hunts the killer, an elusive adversary who is as smart, as methodical, as deadly as he is. The only way to conduct this pursuit is to goad the killer into believing that he must kill Roy Prescott. It is a contest fought from one end of the country to the other, and both men understand that when it’s over, only one of them will be alive.

Wonderland (The Wonderland Quartet)

by Joyce Carol Oates

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.

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Joyce Carol Oates: Conversations

by Joyce Carol Oates, Greg Johnson

An incisive collection of interviews with one of the leading lights of American writing.

Joyce Carol Oates has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the national bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys and Blonde, which was nominated for the National Book Award.

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 interviews range from Robert Phillip's in The Paris Review to Lawrence Grobel's in Playboy. Though previously published, often in literary magazines, the majority have never appeared in book form.

From the Interviews:
"If art is, as I believe it to be, a genuinely transcendental function—a means by which we rise out of limited, parochial states of mind—then it should not matter very much what states of mind or emotion we are in. Generally I've found this to be true: I have forced myself to begin writing when I've been utterly exhausted, when I've felt my soul as thin as a playing card, when nothing has seemed worth enduring for another five minutes…and somehow the activity of writing changes everything."
"I take my writing seriously, but I don't take myself seriously…that is, I don't feel pontifical or dogmatic. Writing is an absolutely fascinating activity, an immersion in drama, language, and vision."

Mysteries of Winterthurn

by Joyce Carol Oates

The first paperback reprint since 1986 of the author's favorite among her several acclaimed and controversial Gothic novels.

In Mysteries of Winterthurn, the brilliant young detective-hero Xavier Kilgarvan is confronted with three baffling cases—"The Virgin in the Rose-Bower," "The Devil's Half-Acre," and "The Blood-Stained Gown"—that tax his genius for detection to the utmost, just as his forbidden passion for his cousin Perdita becomes an obsession that shapes his life.

"Exactly why Mysteries of Winterthurn, or more specifically, the youthful detective hero Xavier Kilgarvan remains so close to my heart is something of a mystery to me. It must be that Xavier, the painstaking, often frustrated, balked, discouraged and depressed amateur detective so misunderstood by his public, is a self-portrait of a kind: after Xavier has achieved a modicum of fame, or notoriety, in his 'hazardous' profession, he comes to feel that his public image is terribly misleading, since the public can have no awareness of the 'painstaking labor, the daily and hourly "grind," of the detective's work: and is woefully misled as to the glamorous ease with which mysteries are solved' as novels may appear, at a distance, to be 'easily' written if the novelist has a reputation for being prolific."—Joyce Carol Oates, from the Afterword

Expensive People: A Novel

by Joyce Carol Oates

Beautifully redesigned, Joyce Carol Oates's most popular earlier novel, which explores the psyche of a preadolescent killer, is now back in print, with an afterword by the author.

It Occurs to Me That I Am America: New Stories and Art

by Lee Child, Neil Gaiman, Joyce Carol Oates, Richard Russo, Mary Higgins Clark

In time for the one-year anniversary of the Trump Inauguration and the Women’s March, this provocative, unprecedented anthology features original short stories from thirty bestselling and award-winning authors—including Alice Walker, Richard Russo, Walter Mosley, Joyce Carol Oates, Alice Hoffman, Neil Gaiman, Michael Cunningham, Mary Higgins Clark, and Lee Child—with an introduction by Pulitzer Prize–winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen.

When Donald Trump claimed victory last November, the US literary world erupted in indignation. Many of America’s leading writers and artists openly resist the current administration’s dogma and earliest policy moves, and they’re not about to go gently into that good night. In It Occurs to Me That I Am America: New Stories and Art, more than thirty of the most acclaimed modern writers consider the fundamental ideals of a free, just, and compassionate democracy—through fiction.

Featuring artwork by some of today’s best known artists, cartoonists, and graphic novelists—including Art Spiegelman, Roz Chast, Marilyn Minter, and Eric Fischl—who cover political, social, and cultural issues, this anthology is a beautiful, enduring collection that will resonate with anyone concerned with the contest for our American soul.

Cutting Edge: New Stories of Mystery and Crime by Women Writers

by Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates pulls out all the stops in this chilling female-centric noir collection featuring brand-new writing from Margaret Atwood, Aimee Bender, Edwidge Danticat, and more.
“Each voice is different, each story providing its own appeal, its own approach to the nature of crime, and in most instances, what it means to live in a female body in a largely hostile world.” ―Brooklyn Rail
Joyce Carol Oates, a queenpin of the noir genre, has brought her keen and discerning eye to the curation of an outstanding anthology of brand-new top-shelf short stories (and poems by Margaret Atwood!). While bad men are not always the victims in these tales, they get their due often enough to satisfy readers who are sick and tired of the gendered status quo, or who just want to have a little bit of fun at the expense of a crumbling patriarchal society. This stylistically diverse collection will make you squirm in your seat, stay up at night, laugh out loud, and inevitably wish for more.
Featuring brand-new stories by: Joyce Carol Oates, Margaret Atwood (poems), Valerie Martin, Aimee Bender, Edwidge Danticat, Sheila Kohler, S.A. Solomon, S.J. Rozan, Lucy Taylor, Cassandra Khaw, Bernice L. McFadden, Jennifer Morales, Elizabeth McCracken, Livia Llewellyn, Lisa Lim, and Steph Cha.

Extenuating Circumstances

by Joyce Carol Oates

Twenty-two disturbing tales of crime and suspense from "America's preeminent fiction writer" (New Yorker)
Two hitmen in a depressed rust belt town struggle with a job gone wrong. A girl witnesses a horrifying accident and carries it with her for the rest of her life. Medical students bring a severed foot to a college party. Five-time Pulitzer Prize finalist Joyce Carol Oates has made a career of exploring the forbidden corners of human experience, and the stories collected here, spanning her first three decades as a writer, are among her most unsettling and unforgettable works to date.
Originally published in long out-of-print volumes, these tales have not appeared in any form this century―until now; formally fresh and endlessly experimental, they show a writer boldly engaging with disturbing truths and terrifying possibilities, and deconstructing the tropes and expectations of traditional prose writing as she does so. But beyond their stylistic ingenuity, these are creepy, suspenseful stories that cut straight to the bone; their darkness will linger long after the final page is turned.
A must-read for long-time fans of Joyce Carol Oates and an excellent introduction for the uninitiated, the twenty-two tales included in Extenuating Circumstances exemplify the author’s idiosyncratic spookiness, “visceral, psychologically involving, and socially astute" (Booklist).

Extenuating Circumstances

by Joyce Carol Oates

Twenty-two disturbing tales of crime and suspense from "America's preeminent fiction writer" (New Yorker)

Two hitmen in a depressed rust belt town struggle with a job gone wrong. A girl witnesses a horrifying accident and carries it with her for the rest of her life. Medical students bring a severed foot to a college party. Five-time Pulitzer Prize finalist Joyce Carol Oates has made a career of exploring the forbidden corners of human experience, and the stories collected here, spanning her first three decades as a writer, are among her most unsettling and unforgettable works to date.

Originally published in long out-of-print volumes, these tales have not appeared in any form this century--until now; formally fresh and endlessly experimental, they show a writer boldly engaging with disturbing truths and terrifying possibilities, and deconstructing the tropes and expectations of traditional prose writing as she does so. But beyond their stylistic ingenuity, these are creepy, suspenseful stories that cut straight to the bone; their darkness will linger long after the final page is turned.

A must-read for long-time fans of Joyce Carol Oates and an excellent introduction for the uninitiated, the twenty-two tales included in Extenuating Circumstances exemplify the author's idiosyncratic spookiness, "visceral, psychologically involving, and socially astute" (Booklist).

A Darker Shade of Noir: New Stories of Body Horror by Women Writers

by Joyce Carol Oates, Akashic Books

Joyce Carol Oates assembles an outstanding cast of authors―including Margaret Atwood, Tananarive Due, and Megan Abbott―to explore, subvert, and reinvent one of the most vital subgenres of horror
"In this haunting new collection, edited by Oates, fifteen women writers explore the manifold horrors of living (and dying) in a patriarchal society . . . this collection may initially appeal to readers eager for tales filled with vampires and werewolves, influences from beyond the grave, and gore, guts, and ooze. They will not be disappointed. However, the stories not only bleed across the categorical boundaries they have been assigned, but also expand the scope of what is terrifying about the body―living or dead, human or nonhuman―in the first place . . . A bold collection of horror stories that flies in the face of both gender and genre conventions." ―Kirkus Reviews
While the common belief is that "body horror" as a subgenre of horror fiction dates back to the 1970s, Joyce Carol Oates suggests that Medusa, the snake-haired gorgon in Greek mythology, is the "quintessential emblem of female body horror." In A Darker Shade of Noir: New Stories of Body Horror by Women Writers, Oates has assembled a spectacular cast to explore this subgenre focusing on distortions to the human body in the most fascinating of ways.

"Should we know nothing of the female monsters of antiquity," Oates writes in her introduction to the volume, "still we would know that body horror in its myriad manifestations speaks most powerfully to women and girls. To be female is to inhabit a body that is by nature vulnerable to forcible invasion, susceptible to impregnation and repeated pregnancies, condemned to suffer childbirth, often in the past early deaths in childbirth and in the aftermath of childbirth."
Featuring brand-new stories by: Margaret Atwood, Tananarive Due, Joyce Carol Oates, Megan Abbott, Raven Leilani, Aimee Bender, Lisa Lim, Cassandra Khaw, Elizabeth Hand, Valerie Martin, Sheila Kohler, Joanna Margaret, Lisa Tuttle, Aimee LaBrie, and Yumi Dineen Shiroma.

Joyce Carol Oates: Letters to a Biographer

by Joyce Carol Oates

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.

Triumph of the Spider Monkey (Hard Case Crime)

by Joyce Carol Oates

Unavailable for 40 years, this seminal novel of madness and murder is acclaimed author Joyce Carol Oates' powerful trip into the mind of a maniac.

Abandoned as a baby in a bus station locker, shuttled from one abusive foster home and detention center to another, Bobbie Gotteson grew up angry, hurting, damaged. His hunger to succeed as a musician brought him across the country to Hollywood, but along with it came his seething rage, his paranoid delusions, and his capacity for acts of shocking violence.

Unavailable for 40 years, The Triumph of the Spider Monkey is an eloquent, terrifying, heartbreaking exploration of madness by one of the most acclaimed authors of the past century. This definitive edition for the first time pairs the original novel with a never-before-collected companion novella by Joyce Carol Oates, unseen since its sole publication in a literary journal nearly half a century ago, which examines the impact of Gotteson's killing spree on a woman who survived it, as seen through the eyes of the troubled young man hired by a private detective to surveil her...

When Things Get Dark

by Carmen Maria Machado, Josh Malerman, Paul Tremblay, Joyce Carol Oates

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.

The Lost Landscape A Writer's Coming of Age

by Joyce Carol Oates

Written with the raw honesty and poignant insight that were the hallmarks of her acclaimed bestseller A Widow’s Story, an affecting and observant memoir of growing up from one of our finest and most beloved literary masters.

The Lost Landscape is Joyce Carol Oates’ vivid chronicle of her hardscrabble childhood in rural western New York State. From memories of her relatives, to those of a charming bond with a special red hen on her family farm; from her first friendships to her earliest experiences with death, The Lost Landscape is a powerful evocation of the romance of childhood, and its indelible influence on the woman and the writer she would become.

In this exceptionally candid, moving, and richly reflective account, Oates explores the world through the eyes of her younger self, an imaginative girl eager to tell stories about the world and the people she meets. While reading Alice in Wonderland changed a young Joyce forever and inspired her to view life as a series of endless adventures, growing up on a farm taught her harsh lessons about sacrifice, hard work, and loss. With searing detail and an acutely perceptive eye, Oates renders her memories and emotions with exquisite precision, transporting us to a forgotten place and time—the lost landscape of her youth, reminding us of the forgotten landscapes of our own earliest lives. 

Echoes: The Saga Anthology of Ghost Stories

by Stephen Graham Jones, Seanan McGuire, Paul Tremblay, Nathan Ballingrud, Richard Kadrey, Joyce Carol Oates, Garth Nix, Ellen Datlow, Alice Hoffman, Ford Madox Ford, Pat Cadigan, Jeffrey Ford, Aliette de Bodard, Indrapramit Das, Brian Evenson, Nick Mamatas, Lee Thomas, Carole Johnstone, Bracken MacLeod, Alison Littlewood, Dale Bailey, Richard Bowes, Siobhan Carroll, F. Marion Crawford, Terry Dowling, Gemma Files, John Langan, Vincent J. Masterson, M. Rickert, M. L. Siemienowicz, A. C. Wise

The essential collection of beloved ghost stories, compiled by the editor who helped define the genre—including stories from award-winning, bestselling authors such as Joyce Carol Oates, Alice Hoffman, Seanan McGuire, and Paul Tremblay.

Everyone loves a good ghost story, especially Ellen Datlow—the most lauded editor in short works of supernatural suspense and dark fantasy. The Saga Anthology of Ghost Stories is her definitive collection of ghost stories.

These twenty-nine stories, including all new works from New York Times bestselling authors Joyce Carol Oates, Alice Hoffman, Seanan McGuire, and Paul Tremblay, span from the traditional to the eclectic, from the mainstream to the literary, from pure fantasy to the bizarrely supernatural. Whether you’re reading alone under the covers with a flashlight, or around a campfire with a circle of friends, there’s something here to please—and spook—everyone.

Contributors include: Joyce Carol Oates, Alice Hoffman, Vincent J. Masterson, A.C. Wise, M. Rickert, Seanan McGuire, Lee Thomas, Alison Littlewood, M.L. Siemienowicz, Richard Kadrey, Indrapramit Das, Richard Bowes, Nick Mamatas, Terry Dowling, Aliette de Bodard, Carole Johnstone, Dale Bailey, Stephen Graham Jones, Bracken MacLeod, Garth Nix, Brian Evenson, Jeffrey Ford, Gemma Files, Paul Tremblay, Nathan Ballingrud, Pat Cadigan, John Langan.

The New Kitten

by Joyce Carol Oates

From acclaimed author (and cat lover!) Joyce Carol Oates comes a charming, heartwarming picture book.
As the only cat in her house, Cherie is accustomed to being showered with treats and affection. So when her family brings home a new kitten named Cleopatra, Cherie resents that she’s no longer the center of attention—and she can’t believe all the trouble that the kitten gets away with! Is one home big enough for two kitties?
Beautifully illustrated by Dave Mottram, this picture book will resonate for any reader who has—eventually!—found the joy in sharing the spotlight with a new family addition.

HAZARDS TIME TRAVEL

by Joyce Carol Oates

An ingenious, dystopian novel of one young woman’s resistance against the constraints of an oppressive society, from the inventive imagination of Joyce Carol Oates
“Time travel” — and its hazards—are made literal in this astonishing new novel in which a recklessly idealistic girl dares to test the perimeters of her tightly controlled (future) world and is punished by being sent back in time to a region of North America — “Wainscotia, Wisconsin”—that existed eighty years before. Cast adrift in time in this idyllic Midwestern town she is set upon a course of “rehabilitation”—but cannot resist falling in love with a fellow exile and questioning the constrains of the Wainscotia world with results that are both devastating and liberating.
Arresting and visionary, Hazards of Time Travel is both a novel of harrowing discovery and an exquisitely wrought love story that may be Joyce Carol Oates’s most unexpected novel so far.

Solstice

by Joyce Carol Oates

An engrossing early novel from Joyce Carol Oates’s earlier novels explores a fraught and perilous 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 find themselves irresistibly drawn to each other. Monica is a shy, modest, and recently divorced school teacher while Sheila is a worldly, sophisticated, and nocturnal painter driven by the needs of her art. Over the months, their friendship deepens, first to love and then to a near-fatal obsession.

Engaging, dark, and mysterious, Solstice is Joyce Carol Oates’s psychological masterpiece of friendship and fixation. 

BEAUTIFUL DAYS

by Joyce Carol Oates

A new collection of thirteen mesmerizing stories by American master Joyce Carol Oates, including the 2017 Pushcart Prize–winning “Undocumented Alien”
The diverse stories of Beautiful Days, Joyce Carol Oates explore the most secret, intimate, and unacknowledged interior lives of characters not unlike ourselves, who assert their independence in acts of bold and often irrevocable defiance.
“Fleuve Bleu” exemplifies the rich sensuousness of Oates’s prose as lovers married to other persons vow to establish, in their intimacy, a ruthlessly honest, truth-telling authenticity missing elsewhere in their complicated lives, with unexpected results.
In “Big Burnt,” set on lushly rendered Lake George, in the Adirondacks, a cunningly manipulative university professor exploits a too-trusting woman in a way she could never have anticipated. In a more experimental but no less intimate mode, “Les beaux jours” examines the ambiguities of an intensely erotic, exploitative relationship between a “master” artist and his adoring young female model. And the tragic “Undocumented Alien” depicts a young African student enrolled in an American university who is suddenly stripped of his student visa and forced to undergo a terrifying test of courage.
In these stories, as elsewhere in her fiction, Joyce Carol Oates exhibits her fascination with the social, psychological, and moral boundaries that govern our behavior—until the hour when they do not.

It Occurs to Me That I Am America New Stories and Art

by Lee Child, Neil Gaiman, Joyce Carol Oates, Richard Russo, Mary Higgins Clark

A provocative, unprecedented anthology featuring original short stories on what it means to be an American from thirty bestselling and award-winning authors with an introduction by Pulitzer Prize–winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen: “This chorus of brilliant voices articulating the shape and texture of contemporary America makes for necessary reading” (Lauren Groff, author of Fates and Furies).

When Donald Trump claimed victory in the November 2016 election, the US literary and art world erupted in indignation. Many of America’s preeminent writers and artists are stridently opposed to the administration’s agenda and executive orders—and they’re not about to go gentle into that good night. In this “masterful literary achievement” (Kurt Eichenwald, author of Conspiracy of Fools), more than thirty of the most acclaimed writers at work today consider the fundamental ideals of a free, just, and compassionate democracy through fiction in an anthology that “promises to be both a powerful tool in the fight to uphold our values and a tribute to the remarkable voices behind it” (Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the ACLU).

With an introduction by Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Viet Thanh Nguyen, and edited by bestselling author Jonathan Santlofer, this powerful anthology includes original, striking art from fourteen of the country’s most celebrated artists, cartoonists, and graphic novelists, including Art Spiegelman, Roz Chast, Marilyn Minter, and Eric Fischl.

Transcendent, urgent, and ultimately hopeful, It Occurs to Me That I Am America takes back the narrative of what it means to be an American in the 21st century.

With Shuddering Fall: A Novel

by Joyce Carol Oates

The first novel from New York Times-bestselling author Joyce Carol Oates, a thrilling, dark tale of family, revenge, and two souls intertwined by love and violence—now back in print for fans of America’s most prolific storyteller.
Written when Joyce Carol Oates was in her early twenties, and first published in 1964, With Shuddering Fall is her powerful debut novel, the first of five new Oates reprints from Ecco.
Following the turbulent story of two lovers who discover themselves mortal enemies, the author explores the struggle for dominance in erotic relationships that has become a predominant theme in her work, as well as the perils of patriarchal inheritance, and the ripple-effects of emotional loss in adolescence. The result is an unsentimental yet sympathetic rendering of a disastrous love affair in which hatred is nearly as powerful as love, and a yearning for destruction is an abiding and insatiable passion.
Discover what prompted the New York Times to compare this young writer’s debut to Shirley Jackson’s famous short story, “The Lottery.” Readers looking for a place to start in Joyce Carol Oates’s vast catalogue will be intrigued by the sheer narrative force of the young author, and her willingness to anatomize the darkest recesses of humanity in a search for redemption and resolution.

Prison Noir (Akashic Noir)

by Joyce Carol Oates

A completely new, fresh, and frightening take on "prison literature."
“Reading the fifteen stories in Prison Noir is a sobering experience. Unlike most claimants to that much-abused term, this is the real thing . . . The power of this collection comes from the voices of these authors, voices suffused with rage (“3 Block From Hell,” by Bryan K. Palmer), despair (“There Will Be Seeds for Next Year,” by Zeke Caligiuri), and madness (“Shuffle,” by Christopher M. Stephen).” ―New York Times Book Review

“These are stories that resonate with authenticity and verve and pain and truth. Any collection edited by the National Book Award–winning author Oates (them; Blonde, Rape: A Love Story) deserves attention, but the contributors are deft and confident, and great writers without her imprimatur. . . . Authentic, powerful, visceral, moving, great writing.” ―Library Journal, Starred Review
Akashic Books continues its groundbreaking series of original noir anthologies, launched in 2004 with Brooklyn Noir. Each story is set in a distinct neighborhood or location within the city of the book.

Brand-new stories by: Christopher M. Stephen, Sin Soracco, Scott Gutches, Eric Boyd, Ali F. Sareini, Stephen Geez, B.M. Dolarman, Zeke Caligiuri, Marco Verdoni, Kenneth R. Brydon, Linda Michelle Marquardt, Andre White, Timothy Pauley, Bryan K. Palmer, and William Van Poyck.

From the introduction by Joyce Carol Oates:

“The blood jet is poetry―these words of Sylvia Plath have reverberated through my experience of reading and rereading the fifteen stories of Prison Noir. In this case the blood jet is prose, though sometimes poetic prose; if we go a little deeper, in some chilling instances, the blood jet is exactly that: blood.

"For these stories are not “literary” exercises―though some are exceptionally well-written by any formalist standards, and artfully structured as narratives; with a single exception the stories are stark, somber, emotionally driven cris de coeur . . . We may feel revulsion for some of the acts described in these stories, but we are likely to feel a startled, even stunned sympathy for the perpetrators. And in several stories, including even murderers’ confessions, we are likely to feel a profound and unsettling identification . . .

"There is no need for fantasy-horror in a place in which matter-of-fact horror is the norm, and mental illness is epidemic. Vividly rendered realism is the predominant literary strategy, as in a riveting documentary film.”

DIS MEM BER and Other Stories of Mystery and Suspense

by Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates is renowned for her rare ability to “illuminate the mind’s most disturbing corners” (Seattle Times). That genius is on full display in her new collection of seven feverishly unsettling works, DIS MEM BER and Other Stories of Mystery and Suspense.

In the title story, a precocious eleven-year-old named Jill is in thrall to an older male relative, the mysterious, attractive black sheep of the family. Without telling her parents Jill climbs into his sky-blue Chevy to be driven to an uncertain, and unforgettable, fate. In “The Drowned Girl,” a university transfer student becomes increasingly obsessed with the drowning/murder of another female student, as her own sense of self begins to deteriorate. In “Great Blue Heron,” a recent widow grieves inside the confines of her lakefront home and fantasizes about transforming into that great flying predator—unerring and pitiless in the hunt. And in the final story, “Welcome to Friendly Skies,” a trusting group of bird-watchers is borne to a remote part of the globe, to a harrowing fate.

At the heart of this meticulously crafted, deeply disquieting collection are girls and women confronting the danger around them, and the danger hidden inside their turbulent selves.

Bellefleur

by Joyce Carol Oates

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).

MARYA LIFE

by Joyce Carol Oates

A deeply intimate psychological portrait of a young woman's tragic childhood, her reinvention as a successful young artist in the literary circles of 1950s New York City, and her struggle to understand and overcome the trauma of her past.
Growing up in the confines of Innisfail, a bleak town in upstate New York, bright and curious Marya endures abandonment, betrayal, and loneliness. A college scholarship offers escape, taking her to New York City, where she makes a name for herself in academic and literary circles. But success cannot overcome the damage of her childhood, pain that haunts Marya’s personal, professional, and romantic relationships, and has left her unmoored.
Psychologically nuanced, rich in insight and emotional complexity, told with the unsettling power of Joyce Carol Oates’s gothic novels, Marya: A Life is an intense look into the psyche of a young woman and an illuminating exploration of how the past reverberates throughout our lives.

American Appetites

by Joyce Carol Oates

Finally returned to print in a beautiful new trade paperback edition, American Appetites is classic Joyce Carol Oates—a suspenseful thriller in which the happy facade of an affluent suburban couple crumbles under the weight of tragedy and scandal.
For twenty-six years, Ian McCullough, a demographics researcher at a social science think tank, has been happily married to Glynnis, a successful cookbook writer and a brilliant hostess.
When a drunken argument about a suspected infidelity turns physical, Ian accidentally pushes Glynnis through a plate glass window—or did she fall? Now, Glynnis is dead, Ian is charged with murder, and their American dream is shattered. And soon, in a courtroom where guilt and responsibility become two very separate issues, Ian will stand trial, fighting for his life.
A sophisticated, witty, and chilling novel from the incomparable Joyce Carol Oates, American Appetites explores our insatiable hunger for power, love, and success, and how comfortable, privileged lives—and the course of fate—can be dramatically transformed in an instant.

The Sacrifice A Novel

by Joyce Carol Oates

New York Times bestselling author Joyce Carol Oates returns with an incendiary novel that illuminates the tragic impact of sexual violence, racism, brutality, and power on innocent lives and probes the persistence of stereotypes, the nature of revenge, the complexities of truth, and our insatiable hunger for sensationalism.

When a fourteen-year-old girl is the alleged victim of a terrible act of racial violence, the incident shocks and galvanizes her community, exacerbating the racial tension that has been simmering in this New Jersey town for decades. In this magisterial work of fiction, Joyce Carol Oates explores the uneasy fault lines in a racially troubled society. In such a tense, charged atmosphere, Oates reveals that there must always be a sacrifice—of innocence, truth, trust, and, ultimately, of lives. Unfolding in a succession of multiracial voices, in a community transfixed by this alleged crime and the spectacle unfolding around it, this profound novel exposes what—and who—the “sacrifice” actually is, and what consequences these kind of events hold for us all.

Working at the height of her powers, Oates offers a sympathetic portrait of the young girl and her mother, and challenges our expectations and beliefs about our society, our biases, and ourselves. As the chorus of its voices—from the police to the media to the victim and her family—reaches a crescendo, The Sacrifice offers a shocking new understanding of power and oppression, innocence and guilt, truth and sensationalism, justice and retribution.

A chilling exploration of complex social, political, and moral themes—the enduring trauma of the past, modern racial and class tensions, the power of secrets, and the primal decisions we all make to protect those we love—The Sacrifice is a major work of fiction from one of our most revered literary masters.

Night-Gaunts and Other Tales of Suspense

by Joyce Carol Oates

From a master “mind reader who writes psychological horror stories about seriously disturbed minds” (New York Times Book Review), this gorgeously eerie story collection explores the deepest entwinings of lust and repulsion, creation and dissolution, Eros and Thanatos.
In the title story of her taut new fiction collection, Night-Gaunts and Other Tales of Suspense, Joyce Carol Oates writes: Life was not of the surface like the glossy skin of an apple, but deep inside the fruit where seeds are harbored. There is no writer more capable of picking out those seeds and exposing all their secret tastes and poisons than Oates herself—as brilliantly demonstrated in these six stories.
The book opens with a woman, naked except for her high-heeled shoes, seated in front of the window in an apartment she cannot, on her own, afford. In this exquisitely tense narrative reimagining of Edward Hopper’s Eleven A.M., 1926, the reader enters the minds of both the woman and her married lover, each consumed by alternating thoughts of disgust and arousal, as he rushes, amorously, murderously, to her door. In “The Long-Legged Girl,” an aging, jealous wife crafts an unusual game of Russian roulette involving a pair of Wedgewood teacups, a strong Bengal brew, and a lethal concoction of medicine. Who will drink from the wrong cup, the wife or the dance student she believes to be her husband’s latest conquest? In “The Sign of the Beast,” when a former Sunday school teacher’s corpse turns up, the blighted adolescent she had by turns petted and ridiculed confesses to her murder—but is he really responsible? Another young outsider, Horace Phineas Love, Jr., is haunted by apparitions at the very edge of the spectrum of visibility after the death of his tortured father in “Night-Gaunts,” a fantastic ode to H.P. Lovecraft.
Reveling in the uncanny and richly in conversation with other creative minds, Night-Gaunts and Other Tales of Suspense stands at the crossroads of sex, violence, and longing—and asks us to interrogate the intersection of these impulses within ourselves.

My Heart Laid Bare

by Joyce Carol Oates

New York Times Bestselling Author
Finally returned to print in a beautiful trade paperback edition, a haunting gothic tale that illuminates the fortunes and misfortunes of a 19th-century immigrant family of confidence artists―a story of morality, duplicity, and retribution that explores the depths of human manipulation and vulnerability
“Oates . . . rarely falters throughout this epic. . . . An American tragedy.”―People
“My Heart Laid Bare shows Oates at her most playful, extravagant and inventive.”―The San Francisco Chronicle

The patriarch of the Licht family, Abraham has raised a brood of talented con artists, children molded in his image, and experts in The Game, his calling and philosophy of life. Traveling from one small town to the next across the continent, from the Northeast to the frontier West, they skillfully swindle unsuspecting victims, playing on their greed, lust, pride, and small-mindedness. Despite their success, Abraham cannot banish a past that haunts him: the ghost of his ancestor Sarah Licht, a former con woman who met with a gruesome fate.
As Abraham moves his family from town to town, involving them in more and more complex and impressive schemes, he finds himself caught between the specter of Sarah and the growing terrors of his present. As his carefully crafted lies and schemes begin to fracture and disintegrate before his eyes, Abraham discovers that the bond of family is as tenuous and treacherous as the tricks he perpetrates upon unsuspecting strangers.

Where I've Been, and Where I'm Going: Essays, Reviews, Prose

by Joyce Carol Oates

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.

The Best American Essays of the Century (The Best American Series)

by Joyce Carol Oates

This singular collection is nothing less than a political, spiritual, and intensely personal record of America’s tumultuous modern age, as experienced by our foremost critics, commentators, activists, and artists. Joyce Carol Oates has collected a group of works that are both intimate and important, essays that move from personal experience to larger significance without severing the connection between speaker and audience.
From Ernest Hemingway covering bullfights in Pamplona to Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” these essays fit, in the words of Joyce Carol Oates, “into a kind of mobile mosaic suggest[ing] where we’ve come from, and who we are, and where we are going.” Among those whose work is included are Mark Twain, John Muir, T. S. Eliot, Richard Wright, Vladimir Nabokov, James Baldwin, Tom Wolfe, Susan Sontag, Maya Angelou, Alice Walker, Joan Didion, Cynthia Ozick, Saul Bellow, Stephen Jay Gould, Edward Hoagland, and Annie Dillard.

Son of the Morning

by Joyce Carol Oates

The latest Ecco reissue of Joyce Carol Oates’ early classics: a fiery gothic tale of doomed fates and demons of biblical proportions in rural New York state

 Nathan Vickery came into the world amid unfortunate circumstances. His mother, Elsa Vickery, daughter of an agnostic small town doctor and his pious wife, was brutally assaulted at the age of seventeen. The son she gave birth to in the wake of this event is brought up by his grandmother as a devoted Christian. At the age of seven, Nathan begins to see visions of Christ and embarks on a path as a prodigy boy-preacher, hurtling toward enlightenment while increasingly falling under the dangerous spell of power.

Nathan becomes the leader of an evangelical church, accumulating vast riches from donation. Each year, his visions grow more elaborate and grandiose. When he suddenly feels that God has forsaken him, is it punishment for indulging in the sins of lust, pride, and greed that he has long preached against?

 Joyce Carol Oates’s talent for searing psychological inquiry and her eye for detail as well as her knack for indelible character portrayals and unflinching social commentary are fully on display in Son of the Morning. Fans of her work will be thrilled to see this early novel, the influences of which can be observed in later tour-de-force works like A Book of American Martyrs and The Sacrifice.

Lonely Planet Better than Fiction: True Travel Tales from Great Fiction Writers (Lonely Planet Travel Literature)

by Frances Mayes, Isabel Allende, Joyce Carol Oates, DBC Pierre, Marina Lewycka, Bryce Courtenay, Peter Matthiessen, Alexander McCall Smith, Jan Morris, Pico Iyer, Chris Pavone, Carol Birch, Don George, M. J. Hyland, Nikki Gemmell, Kurt Andersen, Keri Hulme, Steven Amsterdam, Charles Finch, Lloyd Jones, Téa Obreht, Peter Ho Davies, Stephen Kelman, Joe Yogerst, Steven Hall, Stefan Merrill Block, Suzanne Joinson, Sophie Cunningham, Keija Parssinen, Tom Carson, Mark Dapin, Aliya Whitely, Arnold Zable

"...a brilliant collection of travel stories...threaded with great warmth, as readers are invited to travel in the company of these famous authors and experience their passions and revelations." BOOKSELLER + PUBLISHER
We asked some of the world's most acclaimed fiction authors, including Isabel Allende, Peter Matthiessen, Alexander McCall Smith, Joyce Carol Oates, Tea Obreht and DBC Pierre, to describe their greatest non-fictional journeys. The 32 stories collected in Lonely Planet's Better than Fiction touch on everything from disorientation and revelation to disillusion and redemption.
However, these real-life tales all share one common characteristic: a passion for the precious gift that travel confers, from its unexpected but inevitably enriching lessons about other peoples and places, to the truths it reveals about ourselves. By turns funny, poignant and thought-provoking, you'll be transported from Azerbaijan to Vietnam, via Iceland, India, Samoa, Scotland, Antarctica, Alaska, Argentina, Nicaragua, Rome, Saudi Arabia, South Africa and beyond.
Edited by travel writer Don George.
Also available:
Lonely Planet Better than Fiction 2
About Lonely Planet: Lonely Planet is a leading travel media company and the world's number one travel guidebook brand, providing both inspiring and trustworthy information for every kind of traveller since 1973. Over the past four decades, we've printed over 145 million guidebooks and grown a dedicated, passionate global community of travellers. You'll also find our content online, on mobile, video and in 14 languages, 12 international magazines, armchair and lifestyle books, ebooks, and more.
TripAdvisor Travelers' Choice Awards 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015 and 2016 winner in Favorite Travel Guide category
'Lonely Planet guides are, quite simply, like no other.' - New York Times
'Lonely Planet. It's on everyone's bookshelves, it's in every traveller's hands. It's on mobile phones. It's on the Internet. It's everywhere, and it's telling entire generations of people how to travel the world.' - Fairfax Media (Australia)

Jack of Spades: A Tale of Suspense

by Joyce Carol Oates

From Joyce Carol Oates, an exquisite, psychologically complex thriller about opposing forces within the mind of one ambitious writer and the delicate line between genius and madness.

Andrew J. Rush has achieved the kind of critical and commercial success most authors only dream about: He has a top agent and publisher in New York, and his twenty-eight mystery novels have sold millions of copies. Only Stephen King, one of the few mystery writers whose fame exceeds his own, is capable of inspiring a twinge of envy in Rush. But Rush is hiding a dark secret. Under the pseudonym "Jack of Spades," he pens another string of novels—noir thrillers that are violent, lurid, masochistic. These are novels that the upstanding Rush wouldn't be caught reading, let alone writing. When his daughter comes across a Jack of Spades novel he has carelessly left out, she picks it up and begins to ask questions. Meanwhile, Rush receives a court summons in the mail explaining that a local woman has accused him of plagiarizing her own self-published fiction. Before long, Rush's reputation, career, and family life all come under threat—and in his mind he begins to hear the taunting voice of the Jack of Spades.

What I Lived For

by Joyce Carol Oates

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.

Lovely, Dark, Deep Stories

by Joyce Carol Oates

From the legendary literary master, winner of the National Book Award and New York Times bestselling author Joyce Carol Oates, a collection of thirteen mesmerizing stories that maps the eerie darkness within us all.

Insightful, disturbing, imaginative, and breathtaking in their lyrical precision, the stories in Lovely, Dark, Deep display Joyce Carol Oates’s magnificent ability to make visceral the terror, hurt, and uncertainty that lurks at the edges of ordinary lives.

In “Mastiff,” a woman and a man are joined in an erotic bond forged out of terror and gratitude. “Sex with Camel” explores how a sixteen-year-old boy realizes the depth of his love for his grandmother—and how vulnerable those feelings make him. Fearful that that her husband is “disappearing” from their life, a woman becomes obsessed with keeping him in her sight in “The Disappearing.” “A Book of Martyrs” reveals how the end of a pregnancy brings with it the end of a relationship. And in the title story, the elderly Robert Frost is visited by an interviewer, an unsettling young woman, who seems to know a good deal more about his life than she should.

A piercing and evocative collection, Lovely, Dark, Deep reveals an artist at the height of her creative power.

MAN W/O SHADOW

by Joyce Carol Oates

In this taut and fascinating novel, the bestselling, New York Times bestselling and National Book Award-winning author of The Sacrifice, The Accursed, and Lovely, Dark, Deep examines the mysteries of memory, personality, and identity and pierces the enigmatic force that drives human lives—love.
In 1965, neuroscientist Margot Sharpe meets the attractive, charismatic Elihu Hoopes—the “man without a shadow”—whose devastated memory, unable to store new experiences or to retrieve the old, will make him the most famous and most studied amnesiac in history. Over the course of the next thirty years, Margot herself becomes famous for her experiments with E. H.—and inadvertently falls in love with him, despite the ethical ambiguity of their affair, and though he remains forever elusive and mysterious to her, haunted by mysteries of the past.
The Man Without a Shadow tracks the intimate, illicit relationship between Margot and Eli, as scientist and subject embark upon an exploration of the labyrinthine mysteries of the human brain. Where does “memory” reside? Where is “love”? Is it possible to love an individual who cannot love you, who cannot “remember” you from one meeting to the next?
Made vivid by her exceptional eye for detail and her keen insight into the human psyche, The Man Without A Shadow is a unique story of forbidden love, a kind of secret, evolving marriage, depicted in Joyce Carol Oates’s tight, impassioned prose. It is an uncanny, ambitious, and structurally complex novel that penetrates the mind and illuminates the heart.

Taking Aim: Power and Pain, Teens and Guns

by Joyce Carol Oates, Chris Crutcher, Francesca Lia Block, Walter Dean Myers, Alex Flinn, Peter Johnson, Elizabeth Wein, Chris Lynch, Michael Cart, Ron Koertge, Eric Shanower, Marc Aronson, Will Weaver, Tim Wynne-Jones, Jenny Hubbard, Gregory Galloway, Edward Averett

Powerful, riveting, real. Sixteen celebrated authors bring us raw, insightful stories that explore guns and teens in a fiction collection that is thought provoking and emotionally gripping. For fans of Forgive Me, Leonard Peacock and Give a Boy a Gun, and with an array of YA talent like the late great Walter Dean Myers, the poetic Joyce Carol Oates, the prophetic Elizabeth Wein, and the gritty Chris Crutcher, these are evocative voices that each has a different perspective to give. Capturing the hurt and the healing, victims and perpetrators, these stories get to the heart of the matter.
From a boy whose low self-esteem is impacted when a gun comes into his possession to a student recalling a senseless tragedy that befell a favorite teacher, from a realistic look at hunting to a provocative look at a family that defies stereotypes, each emotional story stirs the debate to new levels. The juxtaposition of guns and their consequences offers moving tales, each a reminder of how crucial the question of guns in our society is, and the impact they have on all of us.
Other acclaimed contributors are Marc Aronson, Edward Averett, Francesca Lia Block, Alex Flinn, Gregory Galloway, Jenny Hubbard, Peter Johnson, Ron Koertge, Chris Lynch, Eric Shanower, Will Weaver, and Tim Wynne-Jones.

Double Trouble

by Joyce Carol Oates

A double dose of gripping psychological suspense, pairing two complete novels and two rare short stories, from six-time Pulitzer Prize finalist Joyce Carol Oates. Two serial killers – one female, one male – murder in the name of a higher cause. Ideal for fans of Alice Munro, Ann Patchett and Anne Tyler.

Celebrating 40 Years of pseudonymous suspense from JOYCE CAROL OATES

Four decades ago, acclaimed literary author Joyce Carol Oates penned her first novel of psychological suspense under the name “Rosamond Smith.” In the Smith books, Oates explored themes of betrayal and deception, lust and murder, through stories involving twins, doubles, and hidden second identities – initially, keeping her own double identity a secret.

Hard Case Crime is proud to bring these extraordinary works of crime fiction, long unavailable in bookstores, back into print in definitive double editions, each pairing two complete novels and two never-before-collected Oates short stories, all linked thematically, to weave a sinister web filled with dark reflections.

In This Volume…

A female serial killer seeks refuge in her twin sister’s home in STARR BRIGHT WILL BE WITH YOU SOON, while a male serial killer murders for the woman he craves in SOUL/MATE -- and the echoes continue in the rare short stories “The Murderess” and “An Unsolved Crime.”

“A brilliant writer.”
TIME

“Simply the most consistently inventive, brilliant, curious, and creative writer going.”
GILLIAN FLYNN

The Female of the Species Tales of Mystery and Suspense

by Joyce Carol Oates

A young wife is home alone when the phone rings in "So Help Me God." Is the strange voice flirting with her from the other end of the line her jealous husband laying a trap, or a stranger who knows entirely too much about her? In "Madison at Guignol" an unhappy fashionista discovers a secret door inside her favorite clothing store and insists the staff let her enter. But even her fevered imagination cannot anticipate the horror they have been hiding from her. In these and other gripping and disturbing tales, women are confronted by the evil around them and surprised by the evil they find within themselves.

With wicked insight, Joyce Carol Oates demonstrates why the females of the species--be they six-year-old girls, seemingly devoted wives, or aging mothers--are by nature more deadly than the males.

Flint Kill Creek Stories of Mystery and Suspense

by Joyce Carol Oates

These new, recent, and reformulated stories by Joyce Carol Oates, collected here for the first time, showcase a wide range of crime fiction and psychological suspense. A young, insecure woman finds her relationship changing as she grows more and more dependent on a man who likes to take her on long walks beside a dangerously roaring creek. Another woman, nervous around men, not quite knowing how to act when paid a compliment, becomes flustered when a doctor suggests they go out for coffee, or possibly a drink. She finally decides that she will join him when he suggests they meet at his home. A man is so forgetful that his wife panics and yells into his phone, asking where their daughter has gone. A young man is curious to see why sirens have filled the night and the police arrest him, beginning an unimaginable nightmare. A woman resents that a colleague has achieved greater success and thinks she ought to do something about it.



It is impossible to know where a story by the creative genius of Joyce Carol Oates will end and what frightening paths will lead to that end.

Flint Kill Creek Stories of Mystery and Suspense

by Joyce Carol Oates

A BBC and New Yorker Magazine Best Book of 2024

A new collection of stories by one of America's greatest writers

These new, recent, and reformulated stories by Joyce Carol Oates, collected here for the first time, showcase a wide range of crime fiction and psychological suspense. A young, insecure woman finds her relationship changing as she grows more and more dependent on a man who likes to take her on long walks beside a dangerously roaring creek. Another woman, nervous around men, not quite knowing how to act when paid a compliment, becomes flustered when a doctor suggests they go out for coffee, or possibly a drink. She finally decides that she will join him when he suggests they meet at his home. A man is so forgetful that his wife panics and yells into his phone, asking where their daughter has gone. A young man is curious to see why sirens have filled the night and the police arrest him, beginning an unimaginable nightmare. A woman resents that a colleague has achieved greater success and thinks she ought to do something about it.

It is impossible to know where a story by the creative genius of Joyce Carol Oates will end and what frightening paths will lead to that end.

A Darker Shade of Noir New Stories of Body Horror by Women Writers

by Joyce Carol Oates

"In this haunting new collection, edited by Oates, 15 women writers explore the manifold horrors of living (and dying) in a patriarchal society . . . this collection may initially appeal to readers eager for tales filled with vampires and werewolves, influences from beyond the grave, and gore, guts, and ooze. They will not be disappointed. However, the stories not only bleed across the categorical boundaries they have been assigned, but also expand the scope of what is terrifying about the body--living or dead, human or nonhuman--in the first place . . . A bold collection of horror stories that flies in the face of both gender and genre conventions." --Kirkus Reviews

Broke Heart Blues A Novel

by Joyce Carol Oates

IN THE HEART OF A LANGUID JULY, ELEVEN-YEAR-OLD JOHN REDDY HEART drives a traffic-stopping, salmon-colored Cadillac into the quiet upstate town of Willowsville, New York. His mother, Dahlia Heart, a blackjack dealer, has brought her family east from Las Vegas to claim the rambling mansion left to her by a wealthy suitor.

But it is John Reddy--already growing into a heartbreaking hybrid of James Dean, Marlon Brando, and Elvis Presley--who will claim the town itself. It is John Reddy who will arouse the desire of Willowsville's teenage girls and the worship of its boys, the fear and envy of its men, and the yearning of its women. And it is John Reddy who will capture the town's soul forever on the night a prominent citizen is shot dead in Dahlia Heart's bedroom--and a statewide manhunt sweeps Willowsville's rebel outlaw into the realm of living myth.

Over the course of thirty years, Broke Heart Blues charts the rise and fall--and the ultimate call to reckoning-- of John Reddy Heart, through the myriad voices of those who find him their whipping boy, savior, dream lover, and confessor. At once a scathing indictment of the cultlike nature of fame and celebrity in America and a deeply moving mediation on human need and longing, the novel explores loneliness, and the profound price we pay for our desires and dreams.

Butcher A Novel

by Joyce Carol Oates

From one of our most accomplished storytellers, an extraordinary and arresting novel about a women’s asylum in the 19th century, and a terrifying doctor who wants to change the world

In this harrowing story based on authentic historical documents, we follow the career of Dr. Silas Weir, “The Father of Gyno-Psychiatry,” as he ascends from professional anonymity to national renown. Humiliated by a disastrous procedure, Weir is forced to take a position at the New Jersey Asylum for Female Lunatics, where he reigns. There, he is allowed to continue his practice, unchecked for decades, making a name for himself by focusing on women who have been neglected by the state—women he subjects to the most grotesque modes of experimentation. As he begins to establish himself as a pioneer of 19th-century surgery, Weir’s ambition is fueled by his obsessive fascination with a young Irish indentured servant named Brigit, who becomes not only Weir’s primary experimental subject, but also the agent of his destruction.

Narrated by Silas Weir’s eldest son, who has repudiated his father’s brutal legacy, Butcher is a unique blend of fiction and fact, a nightmare voyage through the darkest regions of the American psyche conjoined, in its startling conclusion, with unexpected romance. Once again, Joyce Carol Oates has written a spellbinding novel confirming her position as one of our celebrated American visionaries of the imagination.

Zero-Sum Stories

by Joyce Carol Oates

Zero-sum games are played for lethal stakes in these arresting stories by one of America’s most acclaimed writers, the award-winning, best-selling author of Blonde

A brilliant young philosophy student bent on seducing her famous philosopher-mentor finds herself outmaneuvered; diabolically clever high school girls wreak a particularly apt sort of vengeance on sexual predators in their community; a woman stalked by a would-be killer may be confiding in the wrong former lover; a young woman is morbidly obsessed by her unfamiliar new role as “mother.” In the collection’s longest story, a much-praised cutting-edge writer cruelly experiments with “drafts” of his own suicide.

In these powerfully wrought stories that hold a mirror up to our time, Joyce Carol Oates has created a world of erotic obsession, thwarted idealism, and ever-shifting identities. Provocative and stunning, Zero-Sum reinforces Oates’s standing as a literary treasure and an artist of the mysterious interior life.

The Frenzy Stories

by Joyce Carol Oates

A gripping collection of propulsive, psychologically suspenseful stories by the legendary Joyce Carol Oates “who is surely on any shortlist of America’s greatest living writers” (The New York Times Magazine)

“A genius in the truest sense of the word.”—Rebecca Makkai
“One of the greatest writers among us today.”—Gillian Flynn

Frenzy (noun): a temporary madness; a violent mental or emotional agitation; intense usually wild and often disorderly compulsive or agitated activity

Joyce Carol Oates is a master of the short story and one of the legends of the form. Her collections of short fiction have twice been finalists for the Pulitzer Prize and have won numerous awards, including the O. Henry Award and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Art of the Short Story. In The Frenzy: Stories, Oates plunges us into the lives of her characters at moments of crisis and confusion, when much of what they understand about themselves and those they love comes undone.

A young woman on a supposedly romantic weekend trip to Cape May, New Jersey, turns the tables on her older, married lover. A freak bicycle accident on a bridge haunts one family for decades. A girl jealous of her popular cousin discovers she is the lucky one. A widow waits at her riverside house for her dead husband's return. A young man hiking in the woods comes upon a couple in a heated, possibly violent argument—should he intervene?

Suspenseful and psychologically astute, Oates's short stories enthrall and captivate as they dissect her character's deepest fears—revealing our own in turn. "Literature is a texture of words," says Oates of her short fiction, "evoking life in the most vivid ways—psychologically, physically." These new stories blazingly evoke life at its most vivid and perilous, when fate and free will intersect, and one ominous encounter or bad choice can be the difference between an ordinary day and the point of no return.

The Frenzy Stories

by Joyce Carol Oates

A gripping collection of propulsive, psychologically suspenseful stories by the legendary Joyce Carol Oates “who is surely on any shortlist of America’s greatest living writers” (The New York Times Magazine)

“A genius in the truest sense of the word.”—Rebecca Makkai
“One of the greatest writers among us today.”—Gillian Flynn

Frenzy (noun): a temporary madness; a violent mental or emotional agitation; intense usually wild and often disorderly compulsive or agitated activity

Joyce Carol Oates is a master of the short story and one of the legends of the form. Her collections of short fiction have twice been finalists for the Pulitzer Prize and have won numerous awards, including the O. Henry Award and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Art of the Short Story. In The Frenzy: Stories, Oates plunges us into the lives of her characters at moments of crisis and confusion, when much of what they understand about themselves and those they love comes undone.

A young woman on a supposedly romantic weekend trip to Cape May, New Jersey, turns the tables on her older, married lover. A freak bicycle accident on a bridge haunts one family for decades. A girl jealous of her popular cousin discovers she is the lucky one. A widow waits at her riverside house for her dead husband's return. A young man hiking in the woods comes upon a couple in a heated, possibly violent argument—should he intervene?

Suspenseful and psychologically astute, Oates's short stories enthrall and captivate as they dissect her character's deepest fears—revealing our own in turn. "Literature is a texture of words," says Oates of her short fiction, "evoking life in the most vivid ways—psychologically, physically." These new stories blazingly evoke life at its most vivid and perilous, when fate and free will intersect, and one ominous encounter or bad choice can be the difference between an ordinary day and the point of no return.

Second Nature

by Joyce Carol Oates

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The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Fiction

by Joyce Carol Oates, Ronald Verlin Cassill

With 45 stories, 23 new to this second edition, the popular NORTON ANTHOLOGY OF CONTEMPORARY FICTION provides an abundant selection of fiction from 1960 to the present. Readers will appreciate newly included stories from their favorite authors, as well as the addition of sixteen new writers. Biographical notes on all the writers provide a valuable resource for the reader.