Joyce Carol Oates

“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...

"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...

"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."--Publisher.

"In the waning days of the 1970s, the lives of several residents of Detroit and its affluent white suburbs are drawn together following the disappearance of yet another child. Hannah, a wife and mother, begins an affair with a darkly charismatic stranger; Mikey, a young street hustler, finds himself on an unexpected mission to rectify injustice; and then there's the child serial killer known as Babysitter, an enigmatic and elusive figure at the periphery...

"From one of the most important contemporary American writers, Cardiff, by the Sea is a bold, haunting collection of four previously unpublished novellas. Starting with the title novella - in which a romantic-minded young art historian is led to (re)discover a terrifying trauma after inheriting property in faraway Cardiff, Maine - through to "The Surviving Child" - which finds the young new wife of a famous poet's widow haunted by the dead poet's...

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.

In this stirring, reflective collection of short stories, Joyce Carol Oates ponders alternate destinies: the other lives listeners might have led if they would have made different choices. An accomplished writer returns to her childhood home of Yewville, but the homecoming stirs troubled thoughts about the person she might have been if she'd never left. A man in prison contemplates the gravity of his irreversible act. A student's affair with a professor...

"Joyce Carol Oates is renowned for her rare ability to "illuminate the mind's most disturbing corners" (Seattle Times). That genius is on full display in her new collection of seven feverishly unsettling works, DIS MEM BER and Other Stories of Mystery and Suspense. In the title story, a precocious eleven-year-old named Jill is in thrall to an older male relative, the mysterious, attractive black sheep of the family. Without telling her parents Jill...

"In this ambitious book, Joyce Carol Oates boldly reimagines the inner, poetic, and spiritual life of Norma Jeane Baker?the child, the woman, the fated celebrity and idolized blonde the world came to know as Marilyn Monroe. In a voice startling, intimate, and rich, Norma Jeane tells her own story, that of an emblematic American artist?intensely conflicted and driven?who has lost her way. A powerful portrait of Hollywood's myth and an extraordinary...

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. (Bestseller)...