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...
A powerful reckoning over the people we might have been if we'd chosen a different path, from a master of the short story
In this stirring, reflective collection of short stories, Joyce Carol Oates ponders alternate destinies: the other lives we might have led if we'd made different choices. An accomplished writer returns to her childhood home of Yewville, but the homecoming stirs troubled thoughts about the person she might
...Robbie Whitcomb is five years old when he’s taken from his mother in a mall parking lot. In her attempt to chase the kidnapper, she’s left badly injured and permanently disfigured. Such are the methods of the man who calls himself Daddy...
With the novella and six stories collected here, Joyce Carol Oates reaffirms her singular reputation for portraying the dark complexities of the human psyche. The title novella tells the story of Marissa, an eleven-year-old girl with hair the color of corn silk....
8) Mystery, Inc
Identified only by the hastily—and clumsily—chosen alias Charles Brockden, the narrator of this story finds a bookstore that instantly piques his desire. He must call it his own; he must add it to his already-extensive collection of bookstores. But surely the owner...
14) Babysitter
15) Blonde
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 doctor who is killed, leaves behind a wife and children scarred and embittered by grief.
In her moving,
...17) The sacrifice
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
...18) Breathe: A Novel
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
...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
...20) The Accursed
A major historical novel from "one of the great artistic forces of our time" (The Nation)--an eerie, unforgettable story of possession, power, and loss in early-twentieth-century Princeton, a cultural crossroads of the powerful and the damned
Princeton, New Jersey, at the turn of the twentieth 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,