Download or read book Joyce Carol Oates Letters to a Biographer written by Joyce Carol Oates and published by Akashic Books. This book was released on 2024-03-05 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This rich compilation of Joyce Carol Oates's letters across four decades displays her warmth and generosity, her droll and sometimes wicked sense of humor, her phenomenal energy, and most of all, her mastery of the lost art of letter writing. "It's hard to think of another writer with as fecund and protean an imagination as the eighty-five-year-old Joyce Carol Oates, who is surely on any short list of America's greatest living writers." —New York Times Magazine In this generous selection of Joyce Carol Oates’s letters to her biographer and friend Greg Johnson, readers will discover a never-before-seen dimension of her phenomenal talent. In 1975, when Johnson was a graduate student, he first wrote to Oates, already a world-famous author, and drew an appreciative, empathetic response. Soon the two began a fairly intense, largely epistolary friendship that would last until the present day. As time passed, letters became faxes, and faxes became emails, but the energy and vividness of Oates’s writing never abated. Her letters were often sprinkled with the names of well-known public figures, from John Updike and Toni Morrison to Steve Martin and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. There are also descriptions of far-flung travels she undertook with her first husband, the scholar and editor Raymond Smith, and with her second, the distinguished Princeton neuroscientist Charlie Gross. But much of Oates’s prose centered on the pleasures of her home life, including her pet cats and the wildlife outside her study window. Whereas her academic essays and book reviews are eloquent in a formal manner, in these letters she is wholly relaxed, even when she is serious in her concerns. Like Johnson, she was always engaged in work, whether a long novel or a brief essay, and the letters give a fascinating glimpse into Oates’s writing practice.
Download or read book Invisible Writer written by Greg Johnson and published by Dutton Adult. This book was released on 1998 with total page 536 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Granted privileged access to Joyce Carol Oates's letters and journals, as well as extensive interviews with family, friends, colleagues, and Oates herself, Greg Johnson examines the relationship between Oates's life and work in this fascinating exploration of a complex and gifted artist.Johnson reveals little known facts about Oates's personal and family history and debunks many of the myths that have arisen about this brilliant, enigmatic woman. From her impoverished childhood in rural upstate New York and the birth of her autistic sister, through Oates's studies at Syracuse University, where her talent was immediately recognized, and the full-breadth of her astonishingly productive career; despite bouts with depression and ill-health, Johnson's astute examination of Oates's novels, short stories, and plays demonstrates how her art has been informed by-and transformed-her life. The first complete and only authorized biography of Joyce Carol Oates. Includes discussion of We Were the Mulvaneys, Joyce Carol Oates's highly acclaimed 1996 bestseller. Joyce Carol Oates's reputation has never been greater, and the time is right for an in-depth look at her astonishing career and fascinating personal story.
Download or read book A Widow s Story written by Joyce Carol Oates and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2011-02-15 with total page 479 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Letters to a Fiction Writer written by Frederick Busch and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2000 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contributors include Lee K. Abbott, Charles Baxter, Ray Bradbury, Raymond Carver, Shelby Foote, John Gardner, Joyce Carol Oates, John Updike, Tobias Wolff, and Flannery O'Connor, among others.
Download or read book American Melancholy written by Joyce Carol Oates and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2021-02-09 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new collection of poetry from an American literary legend, her first in twenty-five years Joyce Carol Oates is one of our most insightful observers of the human heart and mind, and, with her acute social consciousness, one of the most insistent and inspired witnesses of a shared American history. Oates is perhaps best known for her prodigious output of novels and short stories, many of which have become contemporary classics. However, Oates has also always been a faithful writer of poetry. American Melancholy showcases some of her finest work of the last few decades. Covering subjects big and small, and written in an immediate and engaging style, this collection touches on both the personal and political. Loss, love, and memory are investigated, along with the upheavals of our modern age, the reality of our current predicaments, and the ravages of poverty, racism, and social unrest. Oates skillfully writes characters ranging from a former doctor at a Chinese People’s Liberation Army hospital to Little Albert, a six-month-old infant who took part in a famous study that revealed evidence of classical conditioning in human beings.
Download or read book Joyce Carol Oates written by Joyce Carol Oates and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Joyce Carol Oates has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the national bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys and Blonde, which was nominated for the National Book Award. In her acceptance speech for the National Book Award in 1970, Joyce Carol Oates remarked that 'language is all we have to pit against death and silence.' In this remarkable new collection of interviews spanning more than 35 years of Oates's career, she talks candidly and insightfully about literature, the writing life, her background, and many other topics. These interviews should interest not only Oates's many fans but anyone who cares about contemporary American literature. The interviews range from Robert Phillip's in The Paris Review to Lawrence Grobel's in Playboy. Though previously published, often in literary magazines, the majority have never appeared in book form.
Download or read book Foxfire written by Joyce Carol Oates and published by Penguin. This book was released on 1994-08-01 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New York Times bestselling author Joyce Carol Oates’s strongest and most unsparing novel yet—an always engrossing, often shocking evocation of female rage, gallantry, and grit. The time is the 1950s. The place is a blue-collar town in upstate New York, where five high school girls join a gang dedicated to pride, power, and vengeance on a world that seems made to denigrate and destroy them. Here is the secret history of a sisterhood of blood, a haven from a world of male oppressors, marked by a liberating fury that burns too hot to last. Above all, it is the story of Legs Sadovsky, with her lean, on-the-edge, icy beauty, whose nerve, muscle, hate, and hurt make her the spark of Foxfire: its guiding spirit, its burning core. At once brutal and lyrical, this is a careening joyride of a novel—charged with outlaw energy and lit by intense emotion. Amid scenes of violence and vengeance lies this novel’s greatest power: the exquisite, astonishing rendering of the bonds that link the Foxfire girls together. Foxfire reaffirms Joyce Carol Oates’s place at the very summit of American writing.
Download or read book Woman Writer written by Joyce Carol Oates and published by Plume. This book was released on 1989 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As Oates confronts questions of gender in the act of writing, she also delivers an "impish ability to surprise".--Publishers Weekly.
Download or read book Vinegar Hill written by Colm Tóibín and published by Beacon Press. This book was released on 2022-04-12 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the New York Times best-selling author of Brooklyn, Colm Tóibín’s first collection of poetry explores sexuality, religion, and belonging through a modern lens Fans of Colm Tóibín’s novels, including The Magician, The Master, and Nora Webster, will relish the opportunity to re-encounter Tóibín in verse. Vinegar Hill explores the liminal space between private experiences and public events as Tóibín examines a wide range of subjects—politics, queer love, reflections on literary and artistic greats, living through COVID, and facing mortality. The poems reflect a life well-traveled and well-lived; from growing up in the town of Enniscorthy, wandering the streets of Dublin, and crossing the bridges of Venice to visiting the White House, readers will travel through familiar locations and new destinations through Tóibín’s unique lens. Within this rich collection of poems written over the course of several decades, shot through with keen observation, emotion, and humor, Tóibín offers us lines and verses to provoke, ponder, and cherish.
Download or read book The Lost Landscape written by Joyce Carol Oates and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2015-09-08 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 farm; from her first friendships to her earliest experiences with death, The Lost Landscape is a powerful evocation of the romance of childhood, and its indelible influence on the woman and the writer she would become. In this exceptionally candid, moving, and richly reflective account, Oates explores the world through the eyes of her younger self, an imaginative girl eager to tell stories about the world and the people she meets. While reading Alice in Wonderland changed a young Joyce forever and inspired her to view life as a series of endless adventures, growing up on a farm taught her harsh lessons about sacrifice, hard work, and loss. With searing detail and an acutely perceptive eye, Oates renders her memories and emotions with exquisite precision, transporting us to a forgotten place and time—the lost landscape of her youth, reminding us of the forgotten landscapes of our own earliest lives.
Download or read book Blonde written by Joyce Carol Oates and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2017-02-14 with total page 495 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The National Book Award finalist and national bestseller exploring the life and legend of Marilyn Monroe Soon to be a Netflix Film starring Ana de Armas, Adrien Brody, Bobby Cannavale and Julianne Nicholson In one of her most ambitious works, Joyce Carol Oates boldly reimagines the inner, poetic, and spiritual life of Norma Jeane Baker—the child, the woman, the fated celebrity, and idolized blonde the world came to know as Marilyn Monroe. In a voice startlingly intimate and rich, Norma Jeane tells her own story of an emblematic American artist—intensely conflicted and driven—who had lost her way. A powerful portrait of Hollywood’s myth and an extraordinary woman’s heartbreaking reality, Blonde is a sweeping epic that pays tribute to the elusive magic and devastation behind the creation of the great 20th-century American star.
Download or read book We Were the Mulvaneys written by Joyce Carol Oates and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2001-01-24 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An Oprah Book Club® selection A New York Times Notable Book The Mulvaneys are blessed by all that makes life sweet. But something happens on Valentine’s Day, 1976—an incident that is hushed up in the town and never spoken of in the Mulvaney home—that rends the fabric of their family life...with tragic consequences. Years later, the youngest son attempts to piece together the fragments of the Mulvaneys’ former glory, seeking to uncover and understand the secret violation that brought about the family’s tragic downfall. Profoundly cathartic, this extraordinary novel unfolds as if Oates, in plumbing the darkness of the human spirit, has come upon a source of light at its core. 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. “It’s the novel closest to my heart....I’m deeply moved that Oprah Winfrey has selected this novel for Oprah’s Book Club, a family novel presented to Oprah’s vast American family.”—Joyce Carol Oates
Download or read book A Widow s Story written by Joyce Carol Oates and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2011-02-15 with total page 479 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Letters To My Fanny written by Cherry Healey and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2016-05-24 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this hilarious and candid memoir about twenty-first-century womanhood, Cherry Healey shares outrageous, poignant and eye-wateringly funny confessions. "This book is a love letter, to my body. In fact it's several letters - to every part from my brain to my belly. I spent most of my life hating by body. I forced it to survive on a diet of ham; I squeezed it into asphyxiating support pants; I accidentally cut my delicate area whilst trimming my lady garden. But now I've realized that it deserves some well overdue TLC. This book is the story of how I've come to understand some vital life lessons, and started to love being a woman. I hope you enjoy it. Except you, Mum and Dad. You should stop reading now. It's for the best. I promise." Warm, honest and heartfelt, Letters to my Fanny will have you gasping in recognition.
Download or read book Babysitter written by Joyce Carol Oates and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2023-06-06 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From one of America’s most renowned storytellers comes a novel about love and deceit, and lust and redemption, against a backdrop of shocking murders in the affluent suburbs of Detroit. In the waning days of the turbulent 1970s, in the wake of unsolved child-killings that have shocked Detroit, the lives of several residents are drawn together with tragic consequences. There is Hannah, wife of a prominent local businessman, who has begun an affair with a darkly charismatic stranger whose identity remains elusive; Mikey, a canny street hustler who finds himself on a chilling mission to rectify injustice; and the serial killer known as Babysitter, an enigmatic and terrifying figure at the periphery of elite Detroit. As Babysitter continues his rampage of abductions and killings, these individuals intersect with one another in startling and unexpected ways. Suspenseful, brilliantly orchestrated, and engrossing, Babysitter is a starkly narrated exploration of the riskiness of pursuing alternate lives, calling into question how far we are willing to go to protect those whom we cherish most. In its scathing indictment of corrupt politics, unexamined racism, and the enabling of sexual predation in America, Babysitter is a thrilling work of contemporary fiction.
Download or read book You Must Remember This written by Joyce Carol Oates and published by Penguin. This book was released on 1998-11-01 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Joyce Carol Oates, the bestselling author of We Were the Mulvaneys, comes an epic family novel about the division between the permissible and the forbidden, between ordinary life and the secret places of the heart. Set in an industrial, working-class town in upstate New York, You Must Remember This is the story of the Stevicks: two parents trapped in a frustrating marriage; their idealistic, ambitious son, and fifteen-year-old Enid Maria, who becomes caught up in a secret sexual relationship with her uncle Felix, a professional boxer twice her age. A true and empathetic tale that merges love and violence, it is also a brilliant re-creation of a decade that worshiped conformity, one that tells of lives that break every convention in the search for meaning and fulfillment.
Download or read book The Letters of Shirley Jackson written by Shirley Jackson and published by Random House Trade Paperbacks. This book was released on 2022-07-19 with total page 673 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A bewitchingly brilliant collection of never-before-published letters from the renowned author of “The Lottery” and The Haunting of Hill House NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY KIRKUS REVIEWS • “This biography-through-letters gives an intimate and warm voice to the imagination behind the treasury of uncanny tales that is Shirley Jackson’s legacy.”—Joyce Carol Oates Shirley Jackson is one of the most important American authors of the last hundred years and among our greatest chroniclers of the female experience. This extraordinary compilation of personal correspondence has all the hallmarks of Jackson’s beloved fiction: flashes of the uncanny in the domestic, sparks of horror in the quotidian, and the veins of humor that run through good times and bad. i am having a fine time doing a novel with my left hand and a long story—with as many levels as grand central station—with my right hand, stirring chocolate pudding with a spoon held in my teeth, and tuning the television with both feet. Written over the course of nearly three decades, from Jackson’s college years to six days before her early death at the age of forty-eight, these letters become the autobiography Shirley Jackson never wrote. As well as being a bestselling author, Jackson spent much of her adult life as a mother of four in Vermont, and the landscape here is often the everyday: raucous holidays and trips to the dentist, overdue taxes and frayed lines of Christmas lights, new dogs and new babies. But in recounting these events to family, friends, and colleagues, she turns them into remarkable stories: entertaining, revealing, and wise. At the same time, many of these letters provide fresh insight into the genesis and progress of Jackson’s writing over nearly three decades. The novel is getting sadder. It’s always such a strange feeling—I know something’s going to happen, and those poor people in the book don’t; they just go blithely on their ways. Compiled and edited by her elder son, Laurence Jackson Hyman, in consultation with Jackson scholar Bernice M. Murphy and featuring Jackson’s own witty line drawings, this intimate collection holds the beguiling prism of Shirley Jackson—writer and reader, mother and daughter, neighbor and wife—up to the light.
