New Releases by Joyce Carol Oates

Matt Donaghy is the class joker, and Ursula Riggs is the misfit loner. Neither knows the other. But when Matt is arrested on a charge of threatening to blow up the school and massacre the students, Ursula is the only one who sees through the hysteria and hypocrisy, and corroborates Matt''s story.

Fifteen-year-old Frankie relates the events of the year leading up to her mother''s mysterious disappearance and her own struggle to discover and accept the truth about her parents'' relationship.

In her novel, set against the mythic-historic backdrop of Niagara Falls in the mid-20th century, Oates explores the American family in crisis.

Chronicles the lives of the Wendalls, a family on the steep edge of poverty in the windy, riotous Detroit slums.

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.

An epic novel of an American family in the 1950s proves the tender division between what is permissible and what is taboo, between ordinary life and the secret places of the heart.

Though he was the most famous and most highly regarded American artist of his era, George Bellows, the intense, prolific painter of the early twentieth century, has remained as much of an enigma to his successors as to his contemporaries. Best known for his gritty, impressionistic depictions of underground boxing and the lower east side of New York, Bellows was also influenced by cultural movements and theories of art as diverse as transcendentalism and surrealism. In George Bellows: American Artist, Joyce Carol Oates explores his life and work from the perspective of a writer and admirer. Examining Bellows'' art within his historical and cultural contexts, Oates sheds new light on his technical versatility and voracious imagination.

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.

One of American''s foremost authors ventures into dark, uncharted territories of the human psyche in a collection of stories that rival the work of Edgar Allan Poe. Oates is the 1994 recipient of the Bram Stoker Award for Lifetime Achievement given by the Horror Writers of America.

Joyce Carol Oates adds to her extraordinary body of work with this stunning National Book Award Finalist filled with violence, love, racism, and a shared secret in mid-century New York. In the early 1950s in an industrial town, racial boundaries may keep people apart—or bring them together explosively. Iris Courtney, who is white, is the only witness when handsome Jinx Fairchild, a black basketball player, kills a white man in order to protect her. The secret link between Iris and Jinx is not only their attraction to each other, but a bond of passion and guilt that has formed between them. This one irrevocable, tragic act shapes their lives and alters their destinies in Joyce Carol Oates’s finest, emotion-packed novel—a work critics call a masterpiece, the best work of America’s best writer of contemporary realism.

Oates displays her amazing versatility with these emotionally charged, powerful plays with contemporary themes. "Greensleeves" portrays a girl''s grief after her friend dies of AIDS. "Ballad of Love Canal" shows the effects of toxic waste on one family. Feminism is the theme of "I Stand Before You Naked," a collage play in which 12 different women expose their souls to the audience. Many of the plays deal with the difficulties of relationships. In "Black" a man, his ex-wife, and her new black lover form a strange triangle. In "Tone Clusters" the amplified voice actually becomes a character in the play. "The Eclipse" is dominated by a shadow falling across the stage. Many of the plays are experimental and surreal, and are meant to be performed before an audience. ISBN 0-525-93376-X: $19.95.

Set in an affluent upper-class suburb in the late 1980s, this chilling tale by master storyteller Joyce Carol Oates reveals the dark side of the American Dream. A close-knit group of friends draws closer, and then apart, when scandal and tragedy erupt among them.

These twenty-five interviews with Joyce Carol Oates from early in her career to the present are the first such collection to be published. In these conversations from sources as diverse as major news magazines and small scholarly journals, Oates candidly talks about her work, her concepts of literature, her methods of writing, and many other topics. Throughout this anthology, Oates discusses how her writing paints a modern panorama of American life. Oates described her vast canvas to an interviewer: ""I could not take the time to write about a group of people who did not represent, in their various struggles, fantasies, unusual experiences, hopes, etc., our society in miniature."" She also comments upon her responsibility as an artist ""to bear witness"" to certain aspects of society. In this light, she responds to criticisms that violence seems to dominate her work by noting that ""one simply cannot know strengths unless suffering, misfortune, and violence are explored quite frankly by the writer.""In addition to discussing her works---from her first book By the North Gate (1963) to her most popular novel You Must Remember This (1987)---this prolific writer also answers questions about her writing habits. These interviews, spanning nineteen years, reveal a vivid portrait of Joyce Carol Oates writing as the conscience of society, as the creator of memorable prose and poetry, and as the artist deeply committed to a unique vision.

Unpublished printer''s proof of the title: (Woman writer): occasions and opportunities.

Unpublished printer''s proofs of the title: Raven''s wing.

A collection of eleven stories that explores the experiences of Americans abroad, in locations such as Berlin, Warsaw, and Africa.

Maurice Halleck, Director of the Commission for the Ministry of Justice, is accused of wrongdoing and then dies in a suspicious car accident. A suicide note and confession are found. But are they legitimate, or was he coerced into writing them before he was taken out to be killed?

In seven provocative essays, the author confronts the contradictions to which readers respond emotionally in great works of literature.

Part one : Hugh -- Part two : Yvonne -- Part three : Stephen.

Explores the ways in which such writers as Virginia Woolf, Flannery O''Connor, and Franz Kafka apply an innate awareness of the unifying life force permeating existence to their art for socially formative ends.

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

Brings to life in Elena Howe the year''s most transfixing heroine.

Miss Oates examines the work of such writers as Chekhov, Melville, Yeats, and Toresco in this study.

Twenty four short stories all on the themes of marriage and infidelity.

"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.

"[Oates''s] stories concern themselves with problems and situations that youth knows: the conflict between the hope of the young and the pessimism of the old; the realization of the injustices of the civilized order; the horror of the senseless cruelty condoned by society; the reality of evil, existing even in the good and the loving; brutality without motivation -- the ultimate horror; the senseless machinations of fate that condition all of life. And above all, man standing at the north gate -- the boundary between civilization and wilderness, both borne in his heart -- and striving toward the victory of which he is capable."--Dust jacket flap.