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’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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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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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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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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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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Joyce Carol Oates has a new story, “Pumpkin Head,” in the January 12, 2009 issue of The New Yorker.
This October evening, before the sun had entirely set, a pair of headlights turned in to the driveway, some distance away by the road. She was startled into alertness—at first not sure where she was. Then she [...]
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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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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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