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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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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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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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 Pilgrim is Our Deepest and Purest American Self

Joyce Carol Oates reviews Curtis Sittenfeld’s novel, American Wife (and also looks at her previous novels), on page one of the New York Times Book Review:
“Our greatest 19th-century prose writers from Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville through Henry James and Mark Twain took it for granted that ‘American’ is an identity fraught with ambiguity, as in those allegorical parables by Hawthorne in [...]

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My Sister, My Love is John Barth with Heart

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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JCO on the Fringe

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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New York Review X 2

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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