New Releases by Joyce Carol Oates

release date: Mar 31, 2000

"A lush-bodied girl in the prime of her physical beauty. In an ivory georgette crepe sundress with a halter top that gathers her breasts up in soft undulating folds of the fabric. She's standing with bare legs apart on a New York subway grating. Her blond head is thrown rapturously back as an updraft lifts her full, flaring skirt, exposing white cotton panties. White cotton! The ivory-crepe sundress is floating and filmy as magic. The dress is magic. Without the dress the girl would be female meat, raw and exposed. "

She was an all-American girl who became a legend of unparalleled stature. She inspired the adoration of millions, and her life has beguiled generations of fans and fellow artists. The story of Norma Jeane Baker better known by her studio name "Marilyn Monroe"--has been dissected for more than three decades, but never has it been captured in a narrative as breathtaking and transforming as Blonde.

In her most ambitious work to date, Joyce Carol Oates, one of America's most distinguished, writers, reimagines the inner, poetic, and spiritual life of Norma Jeane Baker--the child, the woman, the fated celebrity--and tells the story in Norma Jeane's own voice: startling, rich, and shattering. This most intimate portrait of Norma Jeane reveals a fragile, idiosyncratically gifted young woman who makes and remakes her identity, ever managing to survive against crushing odds to become the definition of stardom. Bit by bit, she tells her own epic story of how an emblematic American artist--perpetually conflicted and intensely driven--lost her way.

Drawing on biographical and historical sources, Joyce Carol Oates evokes the distinct consciousness of the woman and the unsparing reflection of the myth, writing as she has never written before ecstatic, completely absorbed, inhabited as if by the spirit of her extraordinary subject. Rich with psychological insight and disturbing irony, this mesmerizing narrative illumines Norma Jeane's lonely childhood, wrenching adolescence, and the creation of "Marilyn Monroe."

Distorted and misunderstood, the muted voice of Norma Jeane and the grand legacy of Marilyn Monroe are also a looking glass into the shadow-world of Hollywood. While paying tribute to the elusive art of acting and moviemaking, Joyce Carol Oates depicts the chilling panorama of an industry that nourishes and devours the "pure products" of America.

Blonde offers astonishing-and often disturbing--portraits of the powerful men in Norma Jeane's life: the Ex-Athlete, the Playwright, the President, the Dark Prince.

With fresh insights into the heart of a celebrity culture hypnotized by its own, myths, Blonde is a sweeping novel about the elusive magic of a woman, the lasting legacy of a star, and the heartbreak behind the creation of the most evocative icon of the twentieth century.

You Must Remember This

Review By Ellie Reasoner on August 27, 2005: Oates, my favorite writer, refuses to give in to those who would have us think the 1950's were a placid, contented decade of plenty for everyone. In truth they were fraught with perils, economic and social, and under the surface of post-war calm, the decade boiled with tensions that underlay the fears of the American psyche. In these pages, behind the tale of an incestuous love story of a teenaged niece and her half-uncle, a boxer who might merit a title shot, is the Red Scare, the fear of the bomb, the social intolerance of McCarthyism, and the terror of the consequences of straying from the norms the American culture had set. My favorite scene in this book, and also its most frustrating, is when the father of the family at the heart of this energetic, moody novel, is taken into custody and ruthlessly interrogated by governmental agents, after he is reported for possible "Red sympathies". The cause of this detention? The man had opened an atlas at his store to show an ignorant, argumentative "true blue red-blooded patriotic American" that China, against which the US was at war in Korea at that time, was geographically larger than the United States. In the '50's, that could be all it took to ruin someone's life. You Must Remember This IS also the tale of a secret sexual affair between a teenage girl and her own father's half-brother. It begins with one of the most compelling and addicting ten pages in literature, as the girl undertakes a suicide attempt in her family's presence, in the dead of night. This action funnels any worthy reader in for at least the next hundred pages, at which point it becomes too late to turn back: Oates has already woven her spell. You Must Remember This does not set out to be all things to all readers, but in its tale of tragic love, political intimidation and nuclear fears infiltrating the country's subconscious, it is very nearly that.

Big Mouth & Ugly Girl

Big Mouth

No I did not. I did not, I did not. I did not say those things, and I did not plan those things. Won't It anyone believe me?

Ugly Girl

All right, Ugly Girl made a mistake. I'd told my mom what I'd heard in the cafeteria, and she'd told Dad. Evidently. I'd thought for sure they would want me to speak up for the truth.

The Gravedigger's Daughter

In 1936 the Schwarts, an immigrant family desperate to escape Nazi Germany, settle in a small town in upstate New York, where the father, a former high school teacher, is demeaned by the only job he can get: gravedigger and cemetery caretaker. After local prejudice and the family's own emotional frailty result in unspeakable tragedy, the gravedigger's daughter, Rebecca, begins her astonishing pilgrimage into America, an odyssey of erotic risk and imaginative daring, ingenious self-invention, and, in the end, a bittersweet—but very "American"—triumph. "You are born here, they will not hurt you"—so the gravedigger has predicted for his daughter, which will turn out to be true.In The Gravedigger's Daughter, Oates has created a masterpiece of domestic yet mythic realism, at once emotionally engaging and intellectually provocative: an intimately observed testimony to the resilience of the individual to set beside such predecessors as The Falls, Blonde, and We Were the Mulvaneys.

The Falls