Fresh from the triumph of We Were the Mulvaneys, Joyce Carol Oates continues her exploration of family love and possibilities of human redemption with this compelling story of how one young woman suffers profoundly in the pursuit of love, but manages to emerge safe and whole. Set in several towns on[...]

A New York Times Notable Book and a former Oprah Book Club(R) selection 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 th[...]

An Otto Penzler Book Sixteen-year-old Katya Spivak is walking with her two summer babysitting charges in Bayhead Harbor, New Jersey, when she's approached by silver-haired courtly Marcus Kidder--a local resident of some renown. At first his interest in Katya seems innocent, even as Katya's interest [...]

An Otto Penzler BookThe need for love--obsessive, self-destructive, unpredictable--takes us to forbidden places, as in the chilling world of "Give Me Your Heart," a new collection of stories by the inimitable Joyce Carol Oates.In the suspenseful "Strip Poker," a reckless adolescent girl must find a [...]

This singular collection is nothing less than a political, spiritual, and intensely personal record of America's tumultuous modern age by our foremost critics, commentators, activists, and artists. In her introduction, Joyce Carol Oates describes her project as "a search for the expression of-person[...]

In this gripping psychological thriller, Joyce Carol Oates, New York Times best-selling author and one of the most versatile and original voices in contemporary American fiction, delivers a startling, complex tale of a serial killer and the people that his ghastly crimes touchand transform. People [...]

Teena Maguire should not have tried to shortcut her way home that Fourth of July. Not after midnight, not through Rocky Point Park. Not the way she was dressed in a tank top, denim cutoffs, and high-heeled sandals. Not with her twelve-year-old daughter Bethie. Not with packs of local guys running lo[...]

Dinah Whitcomb seemingly has everything. A loving and successful husband, and a smart, precocious young son named Robbie. One day, their worlds are shattered when Dinah is attacked and Robbie is taken in a mall parking lot. Dinah, injured, attempts to follow, but is run over by the kidnapper's van, [...]

Joyce Carol Oates is an unparalleled investigator of human flaws. In these eight stories, she deftly tests the bonds between damaged individuals--a brother and sister, a teacher and student, two strangers on a subway--in the fearless prose for which she's become so celebrated. In the title story "Hi[...]

From one of the most inimitable writers of our generation, "Jack of Spades" is an exquisite, psychologically complex thriller about the opposing forces within the mind of one ambitious writer, and the line between genius and madness. Andrew J. Rush has achieved the kind of critical and commercial su[...]

The Corn Maiden is the gut-wrenching story of Marissa, a beautiful and sweet, but somewhat slow, eleven-year-old girl with hair the color of corn silk. Her single mother comes home one night to find her missing and panics, frantically knocking on the doors of her neighbors. She finally calls the pol[...]

Selected by The New York Times Book Review as one of the most notable books of 1991, Joyce Carol Oates's The Rise of Life on Earth is a memorable portrait of one of the "insulted and injured" of American society. Set in the underside of working-class Detroit of the '60s and '70s, this short, lyric n[...]