Joyce Carol Oates on Shirley Jackson

Joyce Carol Oates reviews Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle for the New York Review of Books:
Of the precocious children and adolescents of mid-twentieth-century American fiction—a dazzling lot that includes the tomboys Frankie of Carson McCullers’s The Member of the Wedding (1946) and Scout of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), the murderous [...]

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Joyce Carol Oates on Ted Kennedy

As Edward Kennedy is lauded for his tremendous accomplishments as a Senator, Joyce Carol Oates remembers a voiceless victim from his past. From the Guardian:
‘There are no second acts in American lives’– this dour pronouncement of F Scott Fitzgerald has been many times refuted, and at no time more appropriately than in reference to the [...]

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American Fantastic Tales

Joyce Carol Oates makes her first appearance (I believe!) in the monumental Library of America this Fall when the two-volume American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny, edited by Peter Straub, is published. Volume one, “from Poe to the Pulps” covers Charles Brockden Brown to Charles Bloch; and volume two, “from the 1940s to now” [...]

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Joyce Carol Oates in Paris

Guest post by Tanya Tromble
Joyce Carol Oates made an appearance in Paris on Saturday, July 4, for an interview and book signing session at the Virgin Megastore on the Champs Elysées.  The appearance was to promote the release of the French translation of her Journal.  She responded to questions from an interviewer and then from [...]

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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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