Joyce Carol Oates
Author
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
"'Time travel'-- and its hazards--are made literal in this astonishing new novel in which a recklessly idealistic girl dares to test the perimeters of her tightly controlled (future) world and is punished by being sent back in time to a region of North America-- 'Wainscotia, Wisconsin'-- that existed eighty years before. Cast adrift in time in this idyllic Midwestern town she is set upon a course of 'rehabilitation'-- but cannot resist falling in...
Author
Language
English
Description
This novel provides an examination of contemporary America through the prism of a family tragedy: when a powerful parent dies, each of his adult children reacts in startling and unexpected ways, and his grieving widow in the most surprising way of all. Stark and penetrating, it's an exploration of psychological trauma, class warfare, grief, and eventual healing.
Author
Language
English
Description
When a woman mysteriously vanishes, her sister must tally up the clues to discover her fate. Marguerite, a beautiful woman, has disappeared from her small town in Upstate New York. But is foul play involved? Or did she merely take an opportunity to get away for fun, or finally make the decision to leave behind her claustrophobic life of limited opportunities? Her younger sister Gigi wonders if the flimsy silk Dior dress, so casually abandoned on...
5) Carthage
Author
Language
English
Description
When a young girl disappears near a community in the Adirondacks, the people of the town of Carthage must face the fact that an Iraq War veteran is the prime suspect.
6) The accursed
Author
Language
English
Description
In 20th century Princeton, New Jersey, a powerful curse, which besets the wealthiest of families, causes the disappearance of a young bride, and when her brother sets out to find her, he crosses paths with the town's most formidable people, including Grover Cleveland and Upton Sinclair.
Author
Pub. Date
2015.
Language
English
Description
"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 around the world. He also has a loving wife and three grown children and is a well-known philanthropist in his small New Jersey town. But Rush is hiding a dark secret. Under the pseudonym "Jack of Spades," he pens another string of novels--...
Author
Language
English
Description
Which should prevail: loyalty to family or loyalty to the truth? Is telling the truth ever a mistake and is lying for one's family ever justified? Can one do the right thing, but bitterly regret it? My Life as a Rat follows Violet Rue Kerrigan, a young woman who looks back upon her life in exile from her family following her testimony, at age twelve, concerning what she knew to be the racist murder of an African-American boy by her older brothers....
10) The corn maiden
Author
Language
English
Description
A volume of six stories and novellas by the National Book Award-winning author of We Were the Mulvaneys includes the title story, in which the disappearance of a sweet blonde-haired child is linked to her mother's indiscretions, a too-obvious schoolteacher and an older student with a fascination for a Native American legend.
Author
Pub. Date
2016.
Language
English
Description
Six terrifying tales to chill the blood from the unique imagination of Joyce Carol Oates. A young boy plays with dolls instead of action figures. But as he grows older, his passion takes on a darker edge...A white man shoots dead a black boy creating a media frenzy. But could it be that it was self-defense as he claims? A nervous woman tries to escape her husband. He says he loves her, but she's convinced he wants to kill her...These quietly lethal...
Author
Pub. Date
2018.
Language
English
Description
""The Woman in the Window"...opens with a woman, naked except for her high-heeled shoes, seated in front of the window in an apartment she cannot, on her own, afford. In this exquisitely tense narrative reimagining of Edward Hopper's Eleven A.M., 1926, the reader enters the minds of both the woman and her married lover, each consumed by alternating thoughts of disgust and arousal, as he rushes, amorously, murderously, to her door. In "The Long-Legged...
Author
Language
English
Description
In 1965, neuroscientist Margot Sharpe meets Elihu Hoopes: the "man without a shadow," who will be known, in time, as the most-studied and most famous amnesiac in history. A vicious infection has clouded anything beyond the last seventy seconds just beyond the fog of memory. Over the course of thirty years, the two embark on mirrored journeys of self-discovery: Margot, enthralled by her charming, mysterious, and deeply lonely patient, as well as her...
Author
Pub. Date
2023.
Language
English
Appears on list
Formats
Description
"A brilliant young philosophy student bent on seducing her famous philosopher-mentor finds herself outmaneuvered; diabolically clever high school girls wreak a particularly apt sort of vengeance on sexual predators in their community; a man returns from the dead to haunt his grieving wife; a young mother finds herself captivated by her own motherhood. In the collection's longest story, a much-praised writer cruelly experiments with "drafts" of his...
Author
Language
English
Description
In "Evil Eye," we meet Mariana, the young fourth wife of a prominent intellectual. When her husband's brazen first wife visits one night, Mariana learns a terrible secret that could be a harbinger of doom for her marriage and very soul. In "So Near, Anytime, Always," shy teenager Lizbeth meets Desmond, a charming boy who offers this introverted girl the first sparks of young romance. Yet just as their relationship begins to blossom, Lizbeth realizes...
16) Daddy Love
Author
Language
English
Description
Part-time preacher Chester Cash calls himself Daddy Love. He has abducted, tortured, and raped several young boys into being his lover and his 'son'. Kidnapping Robbie from his mother at a mall, he confines the child in a small box and gradually brainwashes him over subsequent years into believing that they are father and son. Dinah, the boy's mother, who was savagely injured during the abduction, clings to hope that her son is alive.
17) Prison Noir
Author
Pub. Date
2014
Language
English
Formats
Description
“A sobering experience . . . The power of this collection comes from the voices of these authors, voices suffused with rage, despair, and madness.” —The New York Times Book Review
This anthology, with stories set in different prisons across the US, presents an absolutely new perspective on prison literature. From a killer’s confession to a desire for redemption, from stories of...
This anthology, with stories set in different prisons across the US, presents an absolutely new perspective on prison literature. From a killer’s confession to a desire for redemption, from stories of...
Author
Pub. Date
2012
Language
English
Formats
Description
Roland Marks is a Nobel Prize winning novelist with a penchant for younger women and four marriages behind him. Lou-Lou Marks, his grown daughter, is a successful academic in her own right. But her real career lies in attending to her father. An egomaniacal and emotionally manipulative man, he demands of her absolute filial loyalty and an uncompromising acquiescence to his every need—her only reward is his approval, which she feels she never
...19) Wonderland
Author
Pub. Date
2011
Language
English
Formats
Description
Joyce Carol Oates’s Wonderland Quartet comprises four remarkable novels that explore social class in America and the inner lives of young Americans. Spanning from the Great Depression to the turbulent Vietnam War era, Wonderland is the epic account of Jesse Vogel, a boy who emerged from a family tragedy with his life spared but his world torn apart. Orphaned after watching his father murder his entire family, Jesse embarks on a personal...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
Set in the mythical small city of Sparta, New York, this searing, vividly rendered exploration of the mysterious conjunction of erotic romance and tragic violence in late 20th century America returns to the emotional and geographical terrain of Oates's We Were the Mulvaneys and The Gravedigger's Daughter. When Zoe Kruller, a young wife and mother, is found brutally murdered, the Sparta police target two primary suspects: her estranged husband, Delray...