Joyce Carol Oates Popular Books
Joyce Carol Oates Biography & Facts
Joyce Carol Oates (born June 16, 1938) is an American writer. Oates published her first book in 1963, and has since published 58 novels, a number of plays and novellas, and many volumes of short stories, poetry, and non-fiction. Her novels Black Water (1992), What I Lived For (1994), and Blonde (2000), and her short story collections The Wheel of Love (1970) and Lovely, Dark, Deep: Stories (2014) were each finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. She has won many awards for her writing, including the National Book Award, for her novel them (1969), two O. Henry Awards, the National Humanities Medal, and the Jerusalem Prize (2019). Oates taught at Princeton University from 1978 to 2014, and is the Roger S. Berlind '52 Professor Emerita in the Humanities with the Program in Creative Writing. From 2016 to 2020, she was a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley, where she taught short fiction in the spring semesters. She now teaches at Rutgers University, New Brunswick.Oates was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2016. Early life and education Oates was born in Lockport, New York, the eldest of three children of Carolina (née Bush), a homemaker of Hungarian descent, and Frederic James Oates, a tool and die designer. She grew up on her parents' farm outside the town. Her brother, Fred Jr., and sister, Lynn Ann, were born in 1943 and 1956, respectively. Lynn Ann has autism and is institutionalized, and Oates has not seen her since 1971. Oates grew up in the working-class farming community of Millersport, New York. She characterized hers as "a happy, close-knit and unextraordinary family for our time, place and economic status", but her childhood as "a daily scramble for existence". Her widowed paternal grandmother, Blanche Woodside, lived with the family and was "very close" to Joyce. After Blanche's death, Joyce learned that Blanche's father had killed himself. Oates eventually drew on aspects of her grandmother's life in writing the novel The Gravedigger's Daughter (2007).Violence marred the lives of Oates and her recent ancestors: Oates's mother's biological father was murdered in 1917, which led to Oates mother's informal adoption. At age fourteen, Oates's paternal grandmother Blanche survived an attempted murder-suicide at the hands of her own father. He did kill himself. When Oates was a child, her next-door neighbor pleaded guilty to charges of arson and attempted murder of his family, and was sentenced to a prison term at Attica Correctional Facility.Oates attended the same one-room school her mother had attended as a child. She became interested in reading at an early age and remembers Blanche's gift of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) as "the great treasure of my childhood, and the most profound literary influence of my life. This was love at first sight!" In her early teens, she read the work of Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, Fyodor Dostoevsky, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and Henry David Thoreau, writers whose "influences remain very deep".Oates began writing at the age of 14, when Blanche gave her a typewriter. Oates later transferred to several bigger, suburban schools and graduated from Williamsville South High School in 1956, where she worked for her high school newspaper. She was the first in her family to complete high school.As a teen, Oates also received early recognition for her writing by winning a Scholastic Art and Writing Award. University Oates earned a scholarship to attend Syracuse University, where she joined Phi Mu. She found Syracuse to be "a very exciting place academically and intellectually", and trained herself by "writing novel after novel and always throwing them out when I completed them". It was at this point that Oates began reading the work of Franz Kafka, D. H. Lawrence, Thomas Mann, and Flannery O'Connor, and she noted, "these influences are still quite strong, pervasive". At the age of 19, she won the "college short story" contest sponsored by Mademoiselle. Oates was elected to Phi Beta Kappa as a junior and graduated valedictorian from Syracuse University with a B.A. summa cum laude in English in 1960, and received her M.A. from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1961. She was a Ph.D. student at Rice University but left to become a full-time writer.Evelyn Shrifte, president of the Vanguard Press, met Oates soon after Oates received her master's degree. "She was fresh out of school, and I thought she was a genius", Shrifte said. Vanguard published Oates' first book, the short-story collection By the North Gate, in 1963. Career The Vanguard Press published Oates' first novel, With Shuddering Fall (1964), when she was 26 years old. In 1966, she published "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?", a short story dedicated to Bob Dylan and written after listening to his song "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue". The story is loosely based on the serial killer Charles Schmid, also known as "The Pied Piper of Tucson". It has been anthologized many times and adapted as a 1985 film, Smooth Talk, which starred Laura Dern. In 2008, Oates said that of all her published work, she is most noted for "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" Another early short story, "In a Region of Ice" (The Atlantic Monthly, August 1966), features a young, gifted Jewish-American student. It dramatizes his drift into protest against the world of education and the sober, established society of his parents, his depression, and eventually murder-cum-suicide. It was inspired by a real-life incident (as were several of her works) and Oates had been acquainted with the model of her protagonist. She revisited this subject in the title story of her collection Last Days: Stories (1984). "In the Region of Ice" won the first of her two O. Henry Awards.Her second novel was A Garden of Earthly Delights (1967), first of the so-called Wonderland Quartet published by Vanguard 1967–71. All were finalists for the annual National Book Award. The third novel in the series, them (1969), won the 1970 National Book Award for Fiction. It is set in Detroit during a time span from the 1930s to the 1960s, most of it in black ghetto neighborhoods, and deals openly with crime, drugs, and racial and class conflicts. Again, some of the key characters and events were based on real people whom Oates had known or heard of during her years in the city. Since then, she has published an average of two books a year. Frequent topics in her work include rural poverty, sexual abuse, class tensions, desire for power, female childhood and adolescence, and occasionally the "fantastic". Violence is a constant in her work, even leading Oates to have written an essay in response to the question: "Why Is Your Writing So Violent?"In 1990, she discussed her novel, Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart, which also deals with themes of racial tension, and described "the experience of writing [it]" as "so intense it seemed almost electric".... Discover the Joyce Carol Oates popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Joyce Carol Oates books.
Best Seller Joyce Carol Oates Books of 2024
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Tzili
Aharon Appelfeld & Dalya BiluThe youngest, leastfavored member of an Eastern European Jewish family, Tzili is considered an embarrassment by her parents and older siblings. Her schooling has been a failure, sh...
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Babysitter
Joyce Carol OatesFrom one of America’s most renowned storytellersthe bestselling author of Blondecomes a novel about love and deceit, and lust and redemption, against a backdrop of shocking murders...
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Lovely, Dark, Deep
Joyce Carol OatesFrom 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 map...
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The Kill Jar
J. Reuben AppelmanNow the subject of the Discovery+ series Children of the Snow, a cold case murder investigation is cracked open by “a powerful, confident voice in the new true crime memoir genre” ...
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On Boxing
Joyce Carol OatesA reissue of bestselling, awardwinning author Joyce Carol Oates' classic collection of essays on boxing.
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Zero-Sum
Joyce Carol OatesZerosum games are played for lethal stakes in these arresting stories by one of America’s most acclaimed writers, the awardwinning, bestselling author of BlondeA brilliant young ph...
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When Things Get Dark
Ellen Datlow, Joyce Carol Oates, Josh Malerman, Carmen Maria Machado & Paul TremblayThe Stoker Awardwinning chilling anthology of 18 short stories in tribute to the genius of Shirley Jackson, collecting today’s best horror writers. Featuring Joyce Carol Oates, Jos...
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Night. Sleep. Death. The Stars.
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....
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Echoes
Ellen DatlowThe essential collection of beloved ghost stories, compiled by the editor who helped define the genreincluding stories from awardwinning, bestselling authors such as Joyce Carol Oa...
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We Were the Mulvaneys
Joyce Carol OatesAn Oprah Book Club® selectionA New York Times Notable BookThe Mulvaneys are blessed by all that makes life sweet. But something happens on Valentine’s Day, 1976an incident tha...
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Butcher
Joyce Carol OatesFrom 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 t...
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Beautiful Days
Joyce Carol OatesA new collection of thirteen mesmerizing stories by American master Joyce Carol Oates, including the 2017 Pushcart Prize–winning “Undocumented Alien”The diverse stories of Beautifu...
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The Sacrifice
Joyce Carol OatesNew 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...
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Breathe
Joyce Carol OatesA NOVEL OF LOVE AND LOSS FROM BESTSELLING AND PRIZEWINNING AUTHOR JOYCE CAROL OATESAmid a starkly beautiful but uncanny landscape in New Mexico, a married couple from Cambridge, MA...
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The Man Without a Shadow
Joyce Carol OatesIn this taut and fascinating novel, the bestselling, New York Times bestselling and National Book Awardwinning author of The Sacrifice, The Accursed, and Lovely, Dark, Deep examine...
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Bellefleur
Joyce Carol OatesA 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 profita...
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Vampires, Zombies, Werewolves and Ghosts
Barbara H. Solomon & Eileen PanettaThey are the fearful images that have stalked humanity’s nightmares for centuries, supernatural creatures that feast on flesh and haunt the soul, macabre and uncanny beings that fr...
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Dear Husband
Joyce Carol Oates“[Oates] has once again held a haunting mirror up to America, revealing who we are.”Boston GlobeThe inimitable Joyce Carol Oates returns with Dear Husbanda gripping and moving stor...
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Carthage
Joyce Carol OatesNew York Times Bestselling AuthorA young girl’s disappearance rocks a community and a family, in this stirring examination of grief, faith, justice, and the atrocities of war, the ...
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My Heart Laid Bare
Joyce Carol OatesNew York Times Bestselling AuthorFinally returned to print in a beautiful trade paperback edition, a haunting gothic tale that illuminates the fortunes and misfortunes of a 19thcen...
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With Shuddering Fall
Joyce Carol OatesThe first novel from New York Timesbestselling author Joyce Carol Oates, a thrilling, dark tale of family, revenge, and two souls intertwined by love and violencenow back in p...
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Sourland
Joyce Carol Oates“Oates is a fearless writer.” Los Angeles Times“Oates is a master of the dark talestories of the hunted and the hunter, of violence, trauma, and deep psychic wounds.”Booklist (star...
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Solstice
Joyce Carol OatesAn engrossing early novel from Joyce Carol Oates’s earlier novels explores a fraught and perilous relationship between two womenOriginally published in 1985, Solstice is ...
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What I Lived For
Joyce Carol OatesThe stunning, classic portrait of a powerful man's downward spiral to moral ruinJerome "Corky" Corcorn. A moneyjuggling wheeler dealer, rising politico, popular man's man, and succ...
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The Broken Hours
Jacqueline BakerIn the cold spring of 1936, Arthor Crandle, downonhis luck and desperate for work, accepts a position in Providence, Rhode Island, as a livein secretary/assistant for an unnamed sh...
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Tales of Two Americas
John FreemanThirtysix major contemporary writers examine life in a deeply divided Americaincluding Anthony Doerr, Ann Patchett, Roxane Gay, Rebecca Solnit, Hector Tobar, Joyce Carol Oates, Edw...
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My Week with Marilyn
Colin ClarkImagine sneaking away to spend seven days with the most famous woman in the world. In 1956, fresh from Oxford University, twentythreeyearold Colin Clark began work as a lowly assi...
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My Life as a Rat
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?” ...
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Complicit
Winnie M. Li“Like the best filmmakers, Li draws you to the edge of your seat and keeps you there.” The New York Times Book ReviewA CRIMEREADS BEST CRIME NOVELAfter a longburied, harrowing inci...
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The Rescuer
Joyce Carol OatesLydia is a graduate student in cultural anthropologya fellow at a prestigious university, with a bright future ahead of her. Harvey, her brother, is a seminary student driven by hi...
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Black Water
Joyce Carol OatesThe Pulitzer Prizenominated novel from the author of the New York Times bestselling novel We Were the Mulvaneys“Its power of evocation is remarkable.” The New Yorker In the m...
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Faithless
Joyce Carol OatesIn this collection of twentyone unforgettable stories, Joyce Carol Oates explores the mysterious private lives of men and women with vivid, unsparing precision and sympathy. By tur...
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The Traveling Feast
Rick BassAcclaimed author Rick Bass decided to thank all of his writing heroes in person, one meal at a time, in this "rich smorgasbord of a memoir . . . a soulnourishing, roadburning act o...
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Lowdown Road
Scott Von DoviakOne of “The Most Wanted Crime Novels of 2023” Crimefictionlover.comJoin a heartracing road trip across 1970s America as two cousins make the heist of their lives and must avoid th...
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American Appetites
Joyce Carol OatesFinally returned to print in a beautiful new trade paperback edition, American Appetites is classic Joyce Carol Oatesa suspenseful thriller in which the happy facade of an affluent...
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High Lonesome
Joyce Carol OatesNo other writer can match the impressive oeuvre of Joyce Carol Oates. High Lonesome: New and Selected Stories 19662006 gathers short fiction from the acclaimed author's seminal col...
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Them
Joyce Carol Oates & Elaine Showalter“If the phrase ‘woman of letters’ existed, [Joyce Carol Oates] would be, foremost in this country, entitled to it.”John Updike, The New YorkerAs powerful and relevant today as...
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A Happy Marriage
Rafael YglesiasA Happy Marriage is both intimate and expansive: It is the story of Enrique Sabas and his wife, Margaret, a novel that alternates between the romantic misadventures of the first we...
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Triumph of the Spider Monkey
Joyce Carol OatesNew York Times–bestselling author Unavailable for 40 years, this seminal crime novel of madness and murder is a powerful trip into the mind of a maniacand features a neverbefores...
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Patricide
Joyce Carol OatesRoland Marks is a Nobel Prize winning novelist with a penchant for younger women and four marriages behind him. LouLou Marks, his grown daughter, is a successful academic in her ow...
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In Rough Country
Joyce Carol Oates“A poignant, nostalgic collection of literary criticism by one of America’s premier authors.”Kirkus ReviewsIn Rough Country is a sterling collection of essays, reviews, and critici...
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The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates
Joyce Carol OatesThe 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 t...