Best Selling Books by Joyce Carol Oates

In this collection of twenty-one unforgettable stories, Joyce Carol Oates explores the mysterious private lives of men and women with vivid, unsparing precision and sympathy. By turns interlocutor and interpreter, magician and realist, she dissects the psyches of ordinary people and their potential for good and evil with chilling understatement and lasting power.

Charles Brockden finds a bookshop that instantly piques his desire. He must call it his own; he must add it to his already-extensive collection of bookstores. But surely the owner of such a fine shop wouldn''t easily part with it? Brockden forms a plan to acquire the shop in such a way that no one would ever suspect foul play: untraceable murder. And he knows he will be successful – because this is not the first time he has done it. A DEATH SENTENCE STORY: original shorts about deadly books from the world''s best crime writers.

"Marya" er en intens, virkelighedsnær skildring af en moderne kvinde, der konstant søger en dybere forståelse af sig selv for at opnå det ultimative mål, selvrealisering. Det er måske den mest personlige og mest fascinerende af Joyce Carol Oates‘ romaner. Vi følger Marya Knauer på forskellige trin i hendes udvikling, fra den tidligste barndom præget af vold og fattigdom til hun midt i trediverne som berømt kritiker og intellektuel kommentator tilsyneladende allerede har nået tinderne. Hele tiden betages man af hendes person, og hendes livsforløb synes lige så uforudsigeligt og – i tilbageblik – lige så uundgåeligt som livet selv. Joyce Carol Oates (f.1938) er en amerikansk forfatter, digter, dramatiker, litteraturanmelder og redaktør. Joyce Carol Oates har et stort og velrenommeret forfatterskab bag sig med over 100 titler i bagagen. Joyce Carol Oates er især kendt for sin skildring af det amerikanske samfund og den vold, der eksisterer mellem de forskellige sociale og etniske grupper og mellem kønnene. Hun er siden sin debut i 1963 blevet hædret med flere priser og nomineringer. Blandt andet har hun vundet The National Book Award og været nomineret til en Pulitzer Prize hele fem gange.

Obsession with loss, fear of betrayal, and sudden violence plague the characters who inhabit these twenty-two stories in Will You Always Love Me? Joyce Carol Oates uses her talent like a scalpel to cut swiftly and precisely through the surface of everyday life to lay bare the powerful, perilous emotional currents swirling below. In the title story, a woman''s rage over the savage murder of her sister years ago crowds out all reason and hope of happiness. A respectable suburban matron becomes her son''s accomplice in sexually humiliating a glamorous new neighbor in the prize-winning "The Goose-Girl." In all of the stories-characters, male and female, young and old, rich and poor, sophisticated and naive-come to vivid life in a world of dangerous truths and fateful consequences. Joyce Carol Oates''s uncanny eye for physical detail, her flawless ear for American speech, and her X-ray vision of the human heart and psyche make the stories she tells indelibly and inescapably real.

"Here are stories that are intense, ironic, sinister, and violent, reflecting incisively the mores of a frightening world-- a world in whcih love is complex and difficult, in which evil is ordinary, in which senseless actions lead to even mor senseless non sequiturs, in which religion becomes antiseptic, in which families and societies exploit one another ... in which the enemy is imagined to be external, but is, in reality, within."--Dust jacket flap.

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

Twenty-five stories explore women''s struggles to achieve personal identity in a male dominated society despite the molds in which they are cast.

The victim of a Fourth of July gang rape, single mother Teena Maguire and her daughter become the target of harassment and violence on the part of the assailants after Teena identifies the perpetrators for the Niagara Falls Police Department. 75,000 first printing.

Fresh from the triumph of the bestselling We Were the Mulvaneys, Joyce Carol Oates continues her exploration of family love and the possibilities of human redemption. At five, Ingrid Boone loves her father with all the innocence and blind trust of childhood—until he abandons her and her beautiful young mother in the wake of a violent crime. Desperate to recapture his lost love and hungry for any kind of mercy at a man’s hand, Ingrid allows boys and men to abuse her as she searches for affection in the alcohol, drugs, and sex they offer. When she is targeted as prey by a charismatic leader of a violent cult, Ingrid falls to her blackest moment of despair—yet it is here that she finds unexpected salvation and the will to reclaim her life and heart from the men who have taken it.

A momentous memoir of childhood and adolescence from one of our finest and most beloved writers, as we’ve never seen her before.

Edwin Locke is the luckless victim of Cybele, the great goddess of nature, who asks for his life, when he falls under her enchantment in a mid-life crisis.

The Stoker Award-winning chilling anthology of 18 short stories in tribute to the genius of Shirley Jackson, collecting today’s best horror writers. Featuring Joyce Carol Oates, Josh Malerman, Paul Tremblay, Richard Kadrey, Stephen Graham Jones, Elizabeth Hand and more. A collection of new and exclusive short stories inspired by, and in tribute to, Shirley Jackson. Shirley Jackson is a seminal writer of horror and mystery fiction, whose legacy resonates globally today. Chilling, human, poignant and strange, her stories have inspired a generation of writers and readers. This anthology, edited by legendary horror editor Ellen Datlow, will bring together today’s leading horror writers to offer their own personal tribute to the work of Shirley Jackson. Featuring Joyce Carol Oates, Josh Malerman, Carmen Maria Machado, Paul Tremblay, Richard Kadrey, Stephen Graham Jones, Elizabeth Hand, Kelly Link, Cassandra Khaw, Karen Heuler, Benjamin Percy, John Langan, Laird Barron, Jeffrey Ford, M. Rickert, Seanan McGuire, Gemma Files, and Genevieve Valentine.

An exquisite, psychologically complex thriller about opposing forces within the mind of one ambitious writer and the delicate line between genius and madness. Andrew J. Rush has achieved the kind of critical and commercial success most authors only dream about: He has a top agent and publisher in New York, and his twenty-eight mystery novels have sold millions of copies. Only Stephen King, one of the few mystery writers whose fame exceeds his own, is capable of inspiring a twinge of envy in Rush. But Rush is hiding a dark secret. Under the pseudonym "Jack of Spades," he pens another string of novels—noir thrillers that are violent, lurid, and masochistic. These are novels that the upstanding Rush wouldn''t be caught reading, let alone writing. When his daughter comes across a Jack of Spades novel he has carelessly left out, she picks it up and begins to ask questions. Meanwhile, Rush receives a court summons in the mail explaining that a local woman has accused him of plagiarizing her own self-published fiction. Before long, Rush''s reputation, career, and family life all come under threat—and in his mind he begins to hear the taunting voice of the Jack of Spades. "Sleek and suspenseful . . . Readers are sure to be gripped and unsettled by [Oates''s] depiction of a seemingly mild-mannered character whose psychopathology simmers frighteningly close to the surface." — Publishers Weekly, starred review "Just when you think you''ve got her all figured out, Joyce Carol Oates sneaks up behind and confounds you yet again. She does it with a wicked flourish in Jack of Spades." — The New York Times Book Review

Two plays by Joyce Carol Oates: The Eclipse and Tone Clusters.

Elaine Howe''s search for freedom from misery and loneliness draws her into a fixation on the idea of romantic love

On a February morning in 2008, Joyce Carol Oates drove her ailing husband, Raymond Smith, to the emergency room where he was diagnosed with pneumonia. Both Joyce and Ray expected him to be released in a day or two. But in less than a week, Ray was dead from a hospital-acquired virulent infection, and Joyce was suddenly faced with the stunning reality of a life absent of the partnership that had sustained her for nearly half a century.