Kevin Morris and Glenn Altschuler of The Huffington Post offer a perceptive and entertaining review of Joyce Carol Oates’s My Sister, My Love: ”Oates’ intentions are signaled with a quotation that precedes the book. In ‘Aesthetics of Composition’ (1846), we learn, E. A. Pym opined that ‘the death of a beautiful child is unquestionably the most [...]
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Two Joyce Carol Oates-related events will be presented at The New York International Fringe Festival (FringeNYC) in August:
The first is a play based on JCO’s novel Zombie. The play is adapted and performed by Bill Connington, who notes that “by the end of the play … you might feel some empathy for a man who [...]
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John Ranard
We note the death of social-documentary photographer John Ranard last month, best known to Joyce Carol Oates fans for his work included in her book On Boxing. Quoted in The Villager, a close friend of Ranard’s said, “John was such a gentle, talented and unique human being—a true artist and individualist, with a [...]
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Joyce Carol Oates has a number of new stories out now:
“Dear Joyce Carol,” in the Spring 2008 issue of Boulevard. This issue also bears the following dedication:
In Memory of
RAYMOND SMITH
editor of
Ontario Review
and Ontario Review Press,
beloved colleague
and friend.
Also out are “Suicide by Fitness Center” in the June 2008 issue of Harper’s Magazine.
And “The Beating” in the [...]
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Fact vs. Fiction
Dan P. Lee of Philadelphia Magazine has published a long article on the death of John Fiocco, Jr. Selected details from initial reports on the tragedy were the starting point for a JCO story, “Landfill,” which publication in the New Yorker caused a brief local storm of indignation when its source material was [...]
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Joyce Carol Oates has been a regular reviewer for the New York Review of Books, contributing nearly fifty review-essays since the early nineties.
JCO’s latest are reviews of Boxing: A Cultural History in the May 29 NYRB: “As Kasia Boddy’s masterwork of bricolage sweeps on, there comes to be something wonderfully Joycean—oceanic, indefatigable, slightly deranged—in the [...]
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The current banner image for this blog and for Celestial Timepiece is taken from HubbleSite, run for NASA by the Space Telescope Science Institute. STScI titles the image “Cone Nebula (NGC 2264): Star-Forming Pillar of Gas and Dust,” and further describes it as “a nightmarish beast rearing its head from a crimson sea”—as if this [...]
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Ace anthologist Ellen Datlow—called “the premiere horror editor of her generation” by Publisher’s Weekly—has announced in her blog the contents of the The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror 2008 which will include Joyce Carol Oates’s story “Valentine, July Heat Wave.” The story was first published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and later collected in The [...]
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For its 85th anniversary issue, Weird Tales magazine has compiled a list of The 85 Weirdest Storytellers of the Past 85 Years. Of Joyce Carol Oates, they note that she is “arguably the darkest and weirdest writer to be fully embraced by the mainstream since Poe himself….” The magazine’s definition of “storyteller” is broad, including [...]
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Joyce Carol Oates reviews Keith Gessen’s All the Sad Young Literary Men in the New York Review of Books: “Beginning with its risky yet playful title, All the Sad Young Literary Men is a rueful, undramatic, mordantly funny, and frequently poignant sequence of sketch-like stories loosely organized by chronology and place and the prevailing theme [...]
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