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"An American masterpiece...Oates' sprawling novel in the definitive history of an era... ."--James Atlas, Vanity Fair
In addition to many prize-winning and bestselling novels, including We Were the Mulvaneys, Black Water, and Because It Is Bitter and Because It Is My Heart (available in Plume editions), Joyce Carol Oates is the author of a number of works of gothic fiction including Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque (Plume), a 1995 World Fantasy Award nominee; and Zombie (Plume), winner of the 1996 Bram Stoker Award for Best Horror Novel, awarded by the Horror Writers' Association. In 1994, Oates received the Bram Stoker Lifetime Achievement Award in Horror Fiction. She is the editor of American Gothic Tales and her latest novel is Broke Heart Blues (Dutton). She lives in Princeton, New Jersey.
A born storyteller, Oates has been spinning yarns since she was a little girl too young to even write. Instead, she would communicate her stories through drawings and paintings. When she received her very first typewriter at the age of 14, her creative floodgates opened with a torrent. She says she wrote "novel after novel" throughout high school and college -- a prolificacy that has continued unabated throughout a professional career that began in 1963 with her first short story collection, By the North Gate.
Oates's breakthrough occurred in 1969 with the publication of them, a National Book Award winner that established her as a force to be reckoned with. Since that auspicious beginning, she has been nominated for nearly every major literary honor -- from the PEN/Faulkner Award to the Pulitzer Prize -- and her fiction turns up with regularity on The New York Times annual list of Notable Books.
On average Oates publishes at least one novel, essay anthology, or story collection a year (during the 1970s, she produced at the astonishing rate of two or three books a year!). And although her fiction often exposes the darker side of America's brightest facades – familial unrest, sexual violence, the death of innocence – she has also made successful forays into Gothic novels, suspense, fantasy, and children's literature. As novelist John Barth once remarked, "Joyce Carol Oates writes all over the aesthetical map."
Where she finds the time for it no one knows, but Oates manages to combine her ambitious, prolific writing career with teaching: first at the University of Windsor in Canada, then (from 1978 on), at Princeton University in New Jersey. For all her success and fame, her daily routine of teaching and writing has changed very little, and her commitment to literature as a transcendent human activity remains steadfast.
Oates's Black Water, which is a thinly veiled account of Ted Kennedy's car crash in Chappaquiddick, was produced as an opera in the 1990s.
In 2001, Oprah Winfrey selected Oates's novel We Were the Mulvaneys for her Book Club.
Anonymous
Posted April 28, 2009
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The book seemed to me to be typical Joyce Carol Oates. Her characters are so richly drawn that you feel they are neighbors. In this particular book, the characters are not likeable but I still cared about what happened to them. The different twists in plot that she takes and the suspense she builds kept me turning the pages eager to find out what the outcome would be but at the end I still felt there was more story to be told.
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Posted February 15, 2008
I found this book to be extremely boring. It starts off all right, but just seems to drag on and on without every getting anywhere. I would recommend reading The Falls instead. It is much better than this one.
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Posted March 11, 2003
A truly entertaining novel by Ms Oates! My first time reading one of her books and certainly not the last. The Stevicks are a very realistic family who will always keep you turning pages to find out what happens next. The relationship between Enid and her 'uncle' Felix is strange and enchanting, forbidden yet,secretly you want happiness for them. The political atmosphere reminds one of Tolstoy, strangly. A Must Read!
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Posted June 18, 2000
I have read many books by Joyce Carol Oates, but I love this one the most. It reads easily and truthfully, and I plan to read it again. Highly recommended.
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Posted July 16, 2009
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Overview
"An American masterpiece...Oates' sprawling novel in the definitive history of an era... ."--James Atlas, Vanity Fair