Joyce Carol Oates
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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. The Mulvaneys of High Point Farm in Mt. Ephraim, New York, are a large and fortunate clan, blessed with good looks, abundant charisma, and boundless promise. But over the twenty-five...
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"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 man returns from the dead to haunt his grieving wife; a young mother finds herself captivated by her own motherhood. In the collection's longest story, a much-praised writer cruelly experiments with "drafts" of his...
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"From literary icon Joyce Carol Oates comes a brand-new collection of haunting and, at times, darkly humorous mystery and suspense stories. These are tales of psyches pushed to their limits by the expectations of everyday life--from a woman who gets lost on her drive home to her plush suburban home and ends up breaking into a stranger's house, to a first-person account of a cloned 1940s magazine pinup girl being sold at auction and embodying America's...
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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....
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"From one of the most important contemporary American writers, Cardiff, by the Sea is a bold, haunting collection of four previously unpublished novellas. Starting with the title novella-in which a romantic-minded young art historian is led to (re)discover a terrifying trauma after inheriting property in faraway Cardiff, Maine-through to "The Surviving Child"-which finds the young new wife of a famous poet's widow haunted by the dead poet's voice...
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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.
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Joyce Carol Oates is an unparalleled investigator of human personality. In these eight stories, she deftly tests the bonds between damaged individuals-brother and sister. teacher and student, two lonesome strangers on a subway-in the beautiful, bracing prose that has become her signature. In the title story, a white, aspiring professor in Detroit tries to shake a black, male shadow during the summer of the city's 1967 race riots. In "The Rescuer,"...
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"In the 1840s, a young man named Silas Weir begins practicing medicine in Pennsylvania. Though he is considered inept by family, neighbors, and even his mentor, Dr. Weir discovers he has a gift for phlebotomy, treating patients by bleeding them to purify their bodies. But when an experimental procedure goes horribly wrong, Dr. Weir is forced to start over, relocating his family to Trenton, New Jersey, and taking a position at the New Jersey State...