Ford and Showalter on JCO’s Marriage

Richard Ford and Elaine Showalter spoke at the recent celebration of Joyce Carol Oates and Charlie Gross’s wedding. Ford offered the new husband a humorous take on what to expect living with a particular novelist:
… everything Joyce undertakes — including … (yes, Charlie) … including marriage — becomes a literary concoction with a fictive dimension. [...]

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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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Reflecting on Joyce Carol Oates

Joanne Creighton, President of Mt. Holyoke College, and Joyce Carol Oates scholar, offers her thoughts on JCO’s life and career in the Summer 2009 issue of On Wisconsin, the University of Wisconsin, Madison alumni magazine.
“While Joyce Carol Oates was early called the ‘Dark Lady of American Letters,’ that label is not right. She has tremendous [...]

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Mike Tyson

Joyce Carol Oates attended a screening of James Toback’s documentary Tyson with the director and Iron Mike himself, and participated in a Q & A session, as reported in New York Magazine:
“What’s the experience of watching yourself in this movie?” [Oates] asked. “Do you feel like you yourself are an abstract piece of art?”
“I [...]

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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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A Woman’s Work

Deborah Solomon interviews Joyce Carol Oates for the New York Times Magazine:
Why do you find violence so alluring as a literary subject?
If you’re going to spend the next year of your life writing, you would probably rather write “Moby Dick” than a little household mystery with cat detectives. I consider tragedy the highest form of [...]

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National Arts Club Award

Joyce Carol Oates was awarded the Medal of Honor in Literature at the National Arts Club on April 7th. The event was emceed by Roger Rosenblatt, with remarks given by JCO’s editor at Ecco Press, Dan Halpern, fellow Princeton author Edmund White, and artist Gloria Vanderbilt.
In a gossipy New York Observer article, Leon Neyfakh reports on [...]

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