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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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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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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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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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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JCO Reviews Keith Gessen in the New York Review of Books

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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JCO in Pushcart Prize

Joyce Carol Oates’s short story, “Nowhere,” originally published in Conjunctions, is included in the 2008 edition of The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses. This is JCO’s twelfth piece in the prize anthology.
Other recent JCO works in award anthologies include the short stories “Meadowlands” (The Best American Mystery Stories, 2007), “Babysitter” (Horror: The Best [...]

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Sam Coale on JCO’s Journal

Sam Coale, Professor of English at Wheaton College, reviews The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates in The Providence Journal. “In this dazzling, forthright and revealing record of her life from ages 34 to 44, … Oates feels herself existentially marooned between the polarities of work and life, public image and private reality, obsession and community, [...]

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