Joyce Carol Oates

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

Minnesota

A Novel

"A painful truth of family life: the most tender emotions can change in an instant.  You think your parents love you but is it you they love, or the child who is theirs?"  --Joyce Carol Oates, My Life as a Rat

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. In a succession of vividly recalled episodes Violet contemplates the circumstances of her life as the initially beloved youngest child of seven Kerrigan children who inadvertently "informs" on her brothers, setting into motion their arrests and convictions and her own long estrangement.

Arresting and poignant, My Life as a Rat traces a life of banishment from a family--banishment from parents, siblings, and the Church--that forces Violet to discover her own identity, to break the powerful spell of family, and to emerge from her long exile as a "rat" into a transformed life.

My Life As a Rat

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Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

Kentucky

The first Bellefleur, Jean-Pierre, amasses a fortune, but when his namesake is accused of mass murder, the family flounders.

Bellefleur

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New York

A New York Times Notable Book and a former Oprah Book Club 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 the power of love to prevail over suffering. The Mulvaneys of High Point Farm in Mt. Ephraim, New York, are a large and fortunate clan, blessed with good looks, abundant charisma, and boundless promise. But over the twenty-five year span of this ambitious novel, the Mulvaneys will slide, almost imperceptibly at first, from the pinnacle of happiness, transformed by the vagaries of fate into a scattered collection of lost and lonely souls. It is the youngest son, Judd, now an adult, who attempts to piece together the fragments of the Mulvaneys' former glory, seeking to uncover and understand the secret violation that occasioned the family's tragic downfall. Each of the Mulvaneys endures some form of exile--physical or spiritual--but in the end they find a way to bridge the chasms that have opened up among them, reuniting in the spirit of love and healing. Profoundly cathartic, Oates' acclaimed novel unfolds as if, in the darkness of the human spirit, she has come upon a source of light at its core. Rarely has a writer made such a startling and inspiring statement about the value of hope and compassion.

We Were the Mulvaneys

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Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

Alabama

Nikki Eaton, single, thirty-one, sexually liberated, and economically self-supporting, has never particularly thought of herself as a daughter. Yet, following the unexpected loss of her mother, she undergoes a remarkable transformation during a tumultuous year that brings stunning horror, sorrow, illumination, wisdom, and even—from an unexpected source—a nurturing love.

Missing Mom

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Hardcover copy of Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart by Joyce Carol Oates

Oklahoma

Iris Courtney, a young white woman living in upstate New York in the decade prior to the Civil rights movement, begins a clandestine relationship with Jinx Fairchild, a black man who had defended her in a fatal street fight with a white man

Because It Is Bitter and Because It Is My Heart

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Texas

1973-1982

The fascinating personal journal of Joyce Carol Oates has been gathered from one of the most important and productive periods of her long career.

The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates

3171bce8-6dcd-4115-a5a2-6df75041ce5c-0

West Virginia

Stories

Replete with the emotional intensity and pathos for which Joyce Carol Oates is lauded, these fourteen stories explore the intimate lives of contemporary American families: the tangled relationship between generations, the desperation of loving more than one is loved in return. In "Cutty Sark" and "Landfill," the bond between adolescent son and mother reverberates with the force of an unspoken passion. The gripping title story finds Oates boldly reimagining the true-crime story of Andrea Yates, the Texas mother who drowned her children in 2001. Several stories offer a more lighthearted reprieve, examining with dark humor the shadowy intersection between self-awareness and delusion.

Dear Husband,

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Michigan

A Romance

Middle Age

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Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

When sixteen-year-old Matt is falsely accused of threatening to blow up his high school and his friends turn against him, an unlikely classmate comes to his aid.

Big Mouth and Ugly Girl

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California

Connecticut

A NOVEL OF LOVE AND LOSS FROM BESTSELLING AND PRIZEWINNING AUTHOR JOYCE CAROL OATES Amid a starkly beautiful but uncanny landscape in New Mexico, a married couple from Cambridge, MA takes residency at a distinguished academic institute. When the husband is stricken with a mysterious illness, misdiagnosed at first, their lives are uprooted and husband and wife each embarks upon a nightmare journey. At thirty-seven, Michaela faces the terrifying prospect of widowhood - and the loss of Gerard, whose identity has greatly shaped her own. In vividly depicted scenes of escalating suspense, Michaela cares desperately for Gerard in his final days as she comes to realize that her love for her husband, however fierce and selfless, is not enough to save him and that his death is beyond her comprehension. A love that refuses to be surrendered at death--is this the blessing of a unique married love, or a curse that must be exorcized? Part intimately detailed love story, part horror story rooted in real life, BREATHE is an exploration of hauntedness rooted in the domesticity of marital love, as well as our determination to be faithful to the beloved and our determination to survive the trauma of loss.

Breathe

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Colorado

Breathe (2021 First Edition)

Missouri

In The Oxford Book of American Short Stories, Joyce Carol Oates offers a sweeping survey of American short fiction, in a collection of nearly sixty tales that combines classic works with many "different, unexpected" gems, and that invites readers to explore a wealth of important pieces bywomen and minority writers.Some selections simply can't be improved on, Oates admits, and she happily includes such time-honored works as Irving's "Rip Van Winkle" and Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart." But alongside these often-anthologized tales, Oates introduces such little-known stories as Mark Twain's "Cannibalism in theCars," a work that reveals a darker side to his humor. From Melville come the juxtaposed tales "The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids," of which Oates says, "only Melville could have fashioned out of 'real' events...such harrowing and dreamlike allegorical fiction." The reader willalso delight in the range of authors found here, from Charles W. Chesnutt, Jean Toomer, and Sarah Orne Jewett, to William Carlos Williams, Kate Chopin, and Langston Hughes, to Ray Bradbury, H.P. Lovecraft, and Stephen King.For the second edition, Oates has introduced a wide range of new stories from writers who represent the state of American literature today. These new works include Lorrie Moore's "How to Become a Writer," Richard Ford's "Under the Radar," Junot Diaz's "Edison, New Jersey," David Foster Wallace's"Good People," Philip Roth's "Novotny's Pain," and Amy Hempel's "Today Will Be a Quiet Day." As in the original volume, Oates provides fascinating introductions to each writer, blending biographical information with her own trenchant observations about their work. In addition, she has written a newintroductory essay for this edition, in which she offers the fruit of years of reflection on a genre in which she herself is a master.

The Oxford Book of American Short Stories

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First US edition, first printing. Dustjacket protected in Mylar. No markings. Appears unread. Not ex-library. Not price-clipped. Not book club edition. 

Arizona

New Tales of the Grotesque

"It can appear in a dream state; it can breathe in familiar shadows; it can be unique or unbearably recognizable. What is it about the grotesque that fascinates, provokes, and fills us with a rising sense of dread? In these twenty-seven tales of the forbidden, Joyce Carol Oates explores the waking nightmares of life with eyes wide open, facing what the bravest of us fear the most. With eerie brilliance, this master of the short story reminds us just how seductive - and terrifying - they can be. ..."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

The Collector of Hearts

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Heavy Hardcover (2 to 4 lbs)

Massachusetts

#hardcover #oates #largeprint ex library 📚 

Raven's Wing

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A wildly inventive new collection ofstories by Joyce Carol Oates that chartsthe surprising ways in which the worldwe think we know can unexpectedlyreveal its darker contours

The New York Times has hailed Joyce Carol Oates as "adangerous writer in the best sense of the word, one whotakes risks almost obsessively with energy and relish."Black Dahlia & White Rose, a collection of eleven previouslyuncollected stories, showcases the keen rewards ofOates's relentless brio and invention. In one beautifullyhoned story after another, Oates explores the menace thatlurks at the edges of and intrudes upon even the seeminglysafest of lives--and maps with rare emotional acuity thetransformational cost of such intrusions.

Unafraid to venture into no-man's-lands both real andsurreal, Oates takes readers deep into dangerous territory,from a maximum-security prison--vividly delineatingthe heartbreaking and unexpected atmosphere of such aninstitution--to the inner landscapes of two beautiful andmysteriously doomed young women in 1940s Los Angeles:Elizabeth Short, otherwise known as the Black Dahlia,victim of a long-unsolved and particularly brutal murder,and her roommate Norma Jeane Baker, soon to becomeMarilyn Monroe. Whether exploring the psychologicalcompulsion of the wife of a well-to-do businessman whois ravished by, and elopes with, a lover who is not what heseems or the uneasily duplicitous relationships betweenyoung women and their parents, Black Dahlia & White Roseexplores the compelling intertwining of dread and desire,the psychic pull and trauma of domestic life, and resonatesat every turn with Oates's mordant humor and hertrenchant observation.

Black Dahlia and White Rose

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Little Bird Of Heaven

Heavy Paperback (2 to 4 lbs)

Pennsylvania

A darkly comic novel from the author of Blonde and We Were the Mulvaneys

In Salthill-on-Hudson, a half-hour train ride from Manhattan, everyone is rich, beautiful, and -- though they look much younger -- middle-age. But when Adam Berendt, a charismatic, mysterious sculptor, dies suddenly in a brash act of heroism, shock waves rock the town.

But who was Adam Berendt? Was he in fact a hero, or someone more flawed and human? His loss and the rumor that surface of his possible lovers plunge his friends into grief, confusion, and self-reflection. The women who loved Adam find themselves engaging in life-altering romantic adventures. The men who were Adam's closest friends become utterly transformed in his absence. Adam's lawyer, Roger Cavenagh, who has broken the law for Adam's sake, becomes invlolve with an elusive and perhaps treacherous young woman. Marina Troy exiles herself to fullfill a wish Adam had made for her. Lionel Hoffman sets out, unwisely but with great hope, to recapture his lost youth after a lifetime of soulless financial success, even as his wife, Camille, discovers an unspeckable joy close to home. Augusta Cutler, a hitherto sensuous, unreflective woman defiantly endeavors to solve the mystery of Adam's origins, even if it means losing her marriage and family.

Middle Age: A Romance is an intimately drawn, richly sympathetic, yet unsparingly comic portrait of the affluent class at the dawn of the twenty-first century. Incisive, insightful, and never predictable, it's a uniquely American sage of self-determination and identity from one of our finest writers of contemporary fiction.

Middle Age: a Romance

In 1975 Genna Hewett-Meade's college roommate died a mysterious, violent death partway through their freshman year. Minette Swift had been assertive, fiercely individualistic, and one of the few black girls at their exclusive, "enlightened" college--and Genna, daughter of a prominent civil defense lawyer, felt duty-bound to protect her at all costs. But fifteen years later, while reconstructing Minette's tragic death, Genna is forced to painfully confront her own past life and identity...and her deepest beliefs about social obligation in a morally gray world.

Black Girl / White Girl is a searing double portrait of race and civil rights in post-Vietnam America, captured by one of the most important literary voices of our time.

Black Girl/White Girl

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The Intimate Story of Skyler Rampike

Herein is the unexpurgated first-person narrative of nineteen-year-old Skyler Rampike, the only surviving child of an "infamous" American family destroyed a decade ago by the murder of Skyler's six-year-old ice-skating champion sister, Bliss, and the media scrutiny that followed. Part investigation into the unsolved murder, part elegy for the lost Bliss and for his own lost childhood, Skyler's narrative is an alternately harrowing and corrosively funny exposé of upper-middle-class American pretensions--and an unexpectedly subtle and sympathetic exploration of those who dwell in "Tabloid Hell."

My Sister, My Love

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A stunning, major achievement from Joyce Carol Oates, "one of the great artistic forces of our time" (The Nation). A haunting story of the powerful spell Niagara Falls casts upon two generations of a family, leading to tragedy, love, loss, and, ultimately, redemption.

A man climbs over the railings and plunges into Niagara Falls. A newlywed, he has left behind his wife, Ariah Erskine, in the honeymoon suite the morning after their wedding. "The Widow Bride of The Falls," as Ariah comes to be known, begins a relentless, seven-day vigil in the mist, waiting for his body to be found. At her side throughout, confirmed bachelor and pillar of the community Dirk Burnaby is unexpectedly transfixed by the strange, otherworldly gaze of this plain, strange woman, falling in love with her though they barely exchange a word. What follows is their passionate love affair, marriage, and children -- a seemingly perfect existence.

But the tragedy by which their life together began shadows them, damaging their idyll with distrust, greed, and even murder. What unfurls is a drama of parents and their children; of secrets and sins; of lawsuits, murder, and, eventually, redemption. As Ariah's children learn that their past is enmeshed with a hushed-up scandal involving radioactive waste, they must confront not only their personal history but America's murky past: the despoiling of the landscape, and the corruption and greed of the massive industrial expansion of the 1950s and 1960s.

Set against the mythic-historic backdrop of Niagara Falls, Joyce Carol Oates explores the American family in crisis, but also America itself in the mid-twentieth century. As in We Were the Mulvaneys, a "darkly engrossing novel" (Washington Post Book World), she examines what happens when the richly interwoven relationships of parents and their children are challenged by circumstances outside the family.

The Falls is a love story gone wrong and righted, and it alone places Joyce Carol Oates definitively in the company of the great American novelists.

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Joyce Carol Oates

My Life As a Rat

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We Were the Mulvaneys

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Missing Mom

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Because It Is Bitter and Because It Is My Heart

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The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates

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Dear Husband,

Joyce Carol Oates

Middle Age

Joyce Carol Oates

Big Mouth and Ugly Girl

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Big Mouth and Ugly Girl

Joyce Carol Oates

My Life As a Rat

Joyce Carol Oates

Breathe

Joyce Carol Oates

Breathe (2021 First Edition)

Joyce Carol Oates

My Life As a Rat

Joyce Carol Oates

The Oxford Book of American Short Stories

Joyce Carol Oates

The Collector of Hearts

Joyce Carol Oates

My Life As a Rat

Joyce Carol Oates

Raven's Wing

Joyce Carol Oates

Black Dahlia and White Rose

Joyce Carol Oates

Little Bird Of Heaven

Joyce Carol Oates

Middle Age: a Romance

Joyce Carol Oates

Black Girl/White Girl

Joyce Carol Oates

My Sister, My Love

Joyce Carol Oates

The Falls