Shirley Jackson Award Finalist

Joyce Carol Oates’s story collection Wild Nights! is among the finalists for the 2008 Shirley Jackson Award. Other finalists in the “collection” category include A Better Angel, Chris Adrian; Dangerous Laughter, Steven Millhauser; The Diving Pool, Yoko Ogawa; The Girl on the Fridge, Etgar Keret; and Just After Sunset, Stephen King.
The Shirley Jackson Awards ”have been established for outstanding achievement in [...]

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Flannery O’Connor

Joyce Carol Oates adds to her many writings on Flannery O’Connor in the April 9 New York Review of Books with The Parables of Flannery O’Connor, a review-essay around Brad Gooch’s biography of O’Connor. JCO, a great admirer of O’Connor’s work, speaks of  her “cartoon art” (but this term is desrciptive, not derogatory):
Is the art [...]

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Fifty Years

Joyce Carol Oates published her first “professional” work fifty years ago this year.
When she was a junior at Syracuse University, JCO entered her short story “In the Old World” in the Mademoiselle College Fiction Competition. The story was selected as co-winner of the competition (two winners each year) and was published in the August 1959 [...]

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JCO Miscellany: Four

A Hollywood film based on Joyce Carol Oates’s novella Rape: A Love Story is scheduled to begin shooting in June. The film will star Samuel L. Jackson, Maria Bello, and Abigail Breslin; be written by John Mankiewicz, and directed by Harold Becker (who directed George C. Scott, Sean Penn, and Tom Cruise in “Taps”; and Al [...]

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Joyce / Carolee

Joyce Carol Oates will be at Bloomingdale’s to support Literacy Partners, a charitable organization teaching adult literacy skills. Fashion jewelry company CAROLEE will be selling an Author’s Collection of bangles called “Words to Live By,” engraved with quotes from Joyce Carol Oates (and others) as well as the author’s signature. CAROLEE will donate 10% of retail [...]

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John Updike

John Updike was “the contemporary American writer [Joyce Carol Oates] most admired,” according to Greg Johnson’s biography of JCO: “Updike’s rural upbringing, his devotion to the art of fiction, his wide reading,
and his amazing productivity resembled her own, even though the two writers’ work could hardly have been more different in style and subject matter.” 
Updike, [...]

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Wild Nights at McCarter!

Princeton’s McCarter Theatre presented readings yesterday of two new one-act plays by Joyce Carol Oates: Wild Nights, about a couple who purchase an android Emily Dickinson to liven up their lives; and Grandpa Clemens & Angelfish 1906, involving Mark Twain and a group of young schoolgirls. Both plays were adapted from recent stories published in the [...]

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JCO on Hortense Calisher

The recent passing of Hortense Calisher prompted me to review Joyce Carol Oates’s writings about her. There were mentions in the Journal, and in an essay, “Imaginary Cities: America,” as well as book reviews of Calisher’s The New Yorkers and Mysteries of Motion.
Of the latter, JCO writes:
This massive, densely plotted novel of the not-very- distant [...]

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The Woman in White

In the September 25 edition of the New York Review of Books, Joyce Carol Oates reviews Christopher Benfrey’s A Summer of Hummingbirds: Love, Art, and Scandal in the Intersecting Worlds of Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Martin Johnson Heade; and Brenda Wineapple’s White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson.
“And the hummingbird as [...]

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Kentucky Welcomes JCO

Cheryl Truman, books editor of the Lexington Herald-Leader, profiles and interviews Joyce Carol Oates in advance of the Kentucky Women Writers Conference.
Tidbits of interest:
Oates didn’t used to be much of a TV watcher but admits immersing herself in tabloid-news TV to research My Sister, My Love: Bill O’Reilly, Geraldo Rivera and Nancy Grace (”I think sometimes she [...]

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