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.

ââ?¬Ë? My husband died, my life collapsed. ââ?¬â?¢

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.

The need for love--obsessive, self-destructive, unpredictable--takes us to forbidden places, as in the chilling world of Give Me Your Heart, a new collection of stories by the inimitable Joyce Carol Oates. In the suspenseful "Strip Poker," a reckless adolescent girl must find a way of turning the tables on a gathering of increasingly threatening young men--Can she "outplay" them? In the award-winning "Smother " a young woman's nightmare memory of childhood brings trouble on her professor-mother--Which of them will "win"? In "Split/Brain" a woman who has blundered into a lethal situation confronts the possibility of saving herself--Will she take it? In "The First Husband," a jealous man discovers that his wife seems to have lied about her first marriage, and exacts a cruel revenge, years after the fact. In these and other powerful tales, children veer beyond their parents' control, wives and husbands wake up to find that they hardly know each other, haunted pasts intrude upon uncertain futures, and those who bring us the most harm may be the nearest at hand. In ten razor-sharp stories, National Book Award winner Joyce Carol Oates shows that the most deadly mysteries often begin at home.

Joyce Carol Oates is not only one of our most important novelists and literary critics, she is also an unparalleled master of the short story. In "Sourland" she maps the surprising contours of ordinary life, exploring how the power of violence, loss, and grief shape both the psyche and the soul. From a desperate man who dons a jack-o'-lantern head as a prelude to a most curious sort of courtship, to a story of a stabbing many times recounted in the life of a lonely girl; from a beguiling young woman librarian whose amputee state attracts a married man and father, to a girl hopelessly in love with her renegade, incarcerated cousin; from a professor's wife who finds herself tragically isolated at a party in her own house, to the concluding title story of an unexpectedly redemptive love rooted in radical aloneness and isolation, each story in "Sourland" resonates beautifully with Oates' trademark fascination for the unpredictable amid the prosaic-the commingling of sexual love and violence, the tumult of family life-and shines with her predilection for dark humor and her gift for voice.

BLOND er en uforglemmelig roman om en av de store amerikanske legendene: Marilyn Monroe. Vi følger den forsømte farløse Norma Jeane Baker, som allerede som ungjente øver en magisk tiltrekning på menn, gjennom perioder som prektig ung husmor og pin-up, fra bånn til topp i Hollywood som den feterte skuespillerinnen Marilyn Monroe, og fram til sammenbruddet og oppløsningen. Joyce Carol Oates viser kompleksiteten hos et sårbart og intelligent menneske. Hun skriver hett og suggererende, med en grenseløs innlevelse. Samtidig gir romanen et skarpt bilde av en myteomspunnet epoke i USAS kulturhistorie.

Den hvite jenta Genna Meade kommer fra en gammel familie med historie som antislaveri-aktivister. Som student på midten av 70-tallet delte hun rom med den svarte prestedatteren Minette Swift som dør på mystisk vis. Femten år etter hennes død tar Genna inn over seg tiden på nytt, og det nøstes opp en historie om to sterke jenter med kompliserte familiebånd og totalt forskjellige sosiale forhold.

"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 WorldSixteen-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.

A short, gripping suspense novel in which an elderly aristocrat becomes obsessed with a young girl.

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.

Acclaimed for her novels and short stories, Joyce Carol Oates is also an unparalleled literary critic whose insights and commentary have graced the pages of such publications as the "New York Review of Books", the "Times Literary Supplement", and the "New York Times Book Review". This new collection brings together some of her most brilliant and provocative pieces, covering a diverse range of subjects and ideas. The rough country is both the treacherous geographical/psychological terrains of the writers she analyses - Flannery O'Connor, Shirley Jackson, Cormac McCarthy, Annie Proulx, and Margaret Atwood among others-and also the emotional terrain of Oates's own life following the unexpected death of her husband, Raymond Smith, after 48 years of marriage. As literature is a traditional solace to the bereft, so writing about literature can be a solace to the bereft as it was to me during the days, weeks, and months when the effort of writing fiction often seemed beyond me, as if belonging to another lifetime when I'd been younger, more resilient and reckless, Oates writes. Reading and taking notes, especially late at night when I can't sleep, has been the solace, for me, that saying the rosary or reading "The Book of Common Prayer" might be for another. The result of those meditations are the pieces of In Rough Country-balanced and illuminating essays that demonstrate an artist working at the top of her form. As she engages with forebears and contemporaries, Oates provides 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.

Joyce Carol Oates er et stort internasjonalt forfatternavn, som ofte nevnes i sammenheng med Nobels litteraturpris. I sin nyeste roman tar hun leseren med til Niagara Falls - et sted som på samme tid er både konkret og mytisk. Det berømte fossefallet er beryktet for å tiltrekke seg nygifte par, selvmordere - og i den senere tid også miljøforbrytere. I denne romanen blander Oates på mesterlig vis disse elementene. Akkurat som i Marilyn Monroe-filmen med samme navn, møter vi i "Niagara" et ungt, nygift ektepar. Morgenen etter bryllupet står brudgommen opp, går bort til fossen - og hopper over gjerdet. Den unge, etterlatte Ariah blir kjent som "enkebruden av fossen", men blir snart beilet til - og gift med - den rike, lokale advokaten Dirk. Og lykken synes lenge å være sikret. Oates viser igjen sin særegne evne til å samle store temaer i en skikkelig og intelligent pageturner av en roman.

With the unflinching candour and sympathy for which Joyce Carol Oates is celebrated, the 14 stories of "Dear Husband", examine the intimate lives of contemporary: the tangled ties between generations, the desperation - and the covert, radiant happiness - of loving more than one is loved in return. A passionate bond between an adolescent son and mother has unexpected consequences. A woman is forced to realise, decades later, her childhood role in the destruction of a famous, beloved grandfather's life. A man tries to break free of the enthralling and dangerous erotic obsession of his life. In the gripping title story, Oates boldly reimagines the true-crime story of Andrea Yates, the Texas mother who drowned her children in 2001. Several stories take a less tragic turn, exploring with mordant humour the shadowy interstices between self-awareness and delusion. Dramatic, intensely rendered, and always provocative, "Dear Husband", provides an unsettling and fascinating look into the mysterious heart of America.

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.

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.

A tender, hilarious novel about contemporary America. With ââ?¬Ë? Middle Ageââ?¬â?¢ Joyce Carol Oates has been acclaimed as one of the most important writers of her time.

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 expos of upper-middle-class American pretensions--and an unexpectedly subtle and sympathetic exploration of those who dwell in "Tabloid Hell."

Joyce Carol Oates tillhör vår tids stora författare. Det här är hennes dagböcker från åren 1973 till 1982, en mycket händelserik period i Oates liv, där hon på ett personligt sätt återger både inre och yttre skeenden. 1973 hade tio år gått sedan Oates debuterade litterärt och hon var en etablerad författare. Dagboksskrivandet var viktigt för henne och hon skrev ofta, mycket och personligt. I dagböckerna möter vi en ständigt arbetande konstnär, som även tar sig tid att drömma, spela piano, umgås med vänner och fundera kring sitt skrivande. Oates skriver om den mycket disciplinerade skrivarprocessen och om det nästintill symbiotiska förhållandet med maken Ray Smith. Vi får under den här oerhört produktiva tiden följa tillblivelsen av stora romaner som Bellefleur, Morgonstjärnan och Ljusets ängel, liksom otaliga pjäser, dikter och noveller, essäer och litteraturkritik. Hon skriver om sin vardag och nöjet hon finner i den, samt om svårigheterna med konstnärskapet, om ätstörningar, hjärtproblem och åldrande. Om njutningen hon finner i att undervisa. Om kraven på att uppträda som "Joyce Carol Oates" och avståndet mellan den offentliga och den privata Joyce. Oates många vänner och bekanta omnämns ofta i dagböckerna, liksom olika litterära miljöer och debatter. Bland vännerna återfinns bland andra John Updike, Susan Sontag, Philip Roth, Joan Didion, John Gardner och Gail Godwin. Hennes dagböcker beskriver en mycket händelserik tid i såväl kulturkretsar som för Oates själv, och ger en ovanligt personlig bild av denna verkligt mångbottnade författare. Illustrerad med privata foton. "Hon är öppen beträffande sitt "intensivt" intima äktenskap med Raymond Smith, bristen på modersinstinkt och timmarna hon tillbringar vid pianot, en besatthet som närmar sig den som gäller skrivandet. I denna dagbok får läsaren fördjupa sig i en komplex, utforskande, fantasifull personlighet - en konstnär som fortsätter att förfina sitt sökande efter litterära uttryck." Publishers Weekly starred review

Through the words of his own 'diary', we watch as Poe succumbs to existential loneliness during a sociological experiment in an isolated lighthouse, stranded for a year with no companion but his faithful dog... Dickinson is brought back to life in an imagined future era, when a husband and wife buy her as a servant-robot/clone, eager for her to write her charming verses while she does the chores... Samuel Clemens (Twain) dotes on his 'Angelfish', a group of young girls aged 10-15 who he insists should call him Grandpa and on whom he lavishes endless gifts... Henry James volunteers in a British hospital during WWI and struggles to overcome his revulsion at the wreckage of the soldiers' bodies only to discover something new and dangerously beautiful in himself... And in the final story, with Papa Hemingway hunched over a table late at night with a shotgun to his chin, we trace back over his angry, chaotic life, his tumultuous relationship with his father and his wives...