The Corn Maiden And Other Nightmares

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The Corn Maiden

Author : Joyce Carol Oates
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1781850518
Total Pages : 281 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (818 download)

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Book Synopsis The Corn Maiden by : Joyce Carol Oates

Download or read book The Corn Maiden written by Joyce Carol Oates and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2012-11-01 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the towering imagination of Joyce Carol Oates, literary icon and author of BLONDE, now a major motion picture, seven nightmarish and unbearably taut tales. Marissa is an innocent girl, with hair the colour of corn-silk. She does not hold others in strange thrall, as some young women do, she obeys her parents, she does not stay late after school, lingering on her walk through the swaying heads of maize. She is the perfect sacrifice. Twice nominated for the Nobel Prize, Oates presents an unbearably taut and terrifying tale combining the fury of folklore and blood sacrfice with the depths of adolescent insecurity in The Corn Maiden, a novella, followed by six other nightmares. Reviews for Joyce Carol Oates: 'A writer of extraordinary strengths.' Guardian 'Oates chillingly depicts the darkness lurking within the everyday.' Sunday Express 'Both haunting and sublime.' Literary Review 'Splendidly chilling.' Financial Times 'Visceral, psychologically involving, and socially astute.' Booklist

The Corn Maiden

Author : Joyce Carol Oates
Publisher : Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
ISBN 13 : 0802195032
Total Pages : 248 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (21 download)

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Book Synopsis The Corn Maiden by : Joyce Carol Oates

Download or read book The Corn Maiden written by Joyce Carol Oates and published by Grove/Atlantic, Inc.. This book was released on 2011-12-06 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seven “masterfully told” stories of suspense and nightmarish drama from the National Book Award–winning author of Them (The Guardian). With the novella and six stories collected here, Joyce Carol Oates reaffirms her singular reputation for portraying the dark complexities of the human psyche. The title novella tells the story of Marissa, an eleven-year-old girl with hair the color of corn silk. When she suddenly disappears, mounting evidence points to a local substitute teacher. Meanwhile, an older girl from Melissa’s school is giddy with her power to cause so much havoc unnoticed. And she intends to use that power to enact a terrifying ritual called The Corn Maiden. In “Helping Hands,” published here for the first time, a widow meets an Iraq War veteran in a dingy charity shop, having no idea where the peculiar encounter is about to lead. In “Fossil-Figures,” a pair of twins—an artist and a congressman—never outgrow an ugly sibling rivalry. And in “A Hole in the Head,” a plastic surgeon gives in to an unusual and dangerous request. Together, these seven tales offer “a virtuoso performance” of “probing, unsettling, intelligent” storytelling from one of the world’s greatest writers of suspense (The Guardian). “The seven stories in this stellar collection from the prolific Oates may prompt the reader to turn on all the lights or jump at imagined noises. . . . This volume burnishes [her] reputation as a master of psychological dread.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review “For horror stories to be truly horrific, the reader has to care. Oates feels this deeply in her writing, and delivers with style.” —The Independent “Further confirmation of a unique writer’s restless, preternatural brilliance.” —The Guardian

Daddy Love

Author : Joyce Carol Oates
Publisher : Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
ISBN 13 : 080219365X
Total Pages : 256 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (21 download)

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Book Synopsis Daddy Love by : Joyce Carol Oates

Download or read book Daddy Love written by Joyce Carol Oates and published by Grove/Atlantic, Inc.. This book was released on 2013-01-08 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the author of Bellefleur: A “psychologically incisive” glimpse into the mind of a deranged predator and the boy he abducts to be his son (Booklist). Robbie Whitcomb is five years old when he’s taken from his mother in a mall parking lot. In her attempt to chase the kidnapper, she’s left badly injured and permanently disfigured. Such are the methods of the man who calls himself Daddy Love—a man known to the rest of the world as charismatic preacher Chester Cash. For the next six years, Robbie is to be Daddy’s son. That means doing whatever Daddy says—and giving him whatever he wants. Soon Robbie learns to accept his new name, Gideon. He also learns that he is not the first of Daddy Love’s sons. And that each of the others, after reaching a certain age, was never seen again. As Robbie’s mother recovers from her wounds, her life and marriage are a daily struggle. But as years go by, she maintains a flicker of hope that her son is still alive. Meanwhile, Robbie approaches the “bittersweet age” with no illusions about his fate. But somewhere within this tortured child lies a spark of rebellion. And he knows all too well what survival requires. “After all these years, Joyce Carol Oates can still give me the creeps.” —Marilyn Stasio, The New York Times Book Review “A lean and disturbing tale that reverberates after its ending.” —The Columbus Dispatch “Oates makes us squirm as she forces us to see some of the action through Love’s twisted and warped perspective.” —Kirkus Reviews “This unsettling tale showcases Oates’s masterful storytelling.” —Publishers Weekly

The Corn Maiden and Other Nightmares

Author : Joyce Carol Oates
Publisher : Mysterious Press-Highbridge Audio Classics
ISBN 13 : 9781611746020
Total Pages : pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (46 download)

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Book Synopsis The Corn Maiden and Other Nightmares by : Joyce Carol Oates

Download or read book The Corn Maiden and Other Nightmares written by Joyce Carol Oates and published by Mysterious Press-Highbridge Audio Classics. This book was released on 2014-05-10 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A chilling volume of stories and novellas by Joyce Carol Oates, one of the world's greatest and most prolific writers.

Evil Eye

Author : Joyce Carol Oates
Publisher : Open Road + Grove/Atlantic
ISBN 13 : 0802194028
Total Pages : 202 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (21 download)

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Book Synopsis Evil Eye by : Joyce Carol Oates

Download or read book Evil Eye written by Joyce Carol Oates and published by Open Road + Grove/Atlantic. This book was released on 2013-09-03 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A quartet of shrewd and unnerving novellas about toxic entanglements” from the National Book Award–winning author (Booklist). Joyce Carol Oates is one of the most prominent writers of her generation, and she is fearless when exploring the most disturbing corners of human nature. In Evil Eye, Oates offers four chilling tales about love so powerful that people might die—or kill—for it. In the title story, we meet Mariana, the young fourth wife of a prominent intellectual. When her husband’s first wife comes to visit, Mariana learns a terrible secret that threatens her marriage and sanity. In “So Near Any Times Always,” shy teenager Lizbeth meets Desmond, a charming older boy who offers the first spark of romance. Yet as their relationship blossoms, Lizbeth realizes that a menacing soul lies beneath Desmond’s perfect façade. In “The Execution,” spoiled college student Bart Hansen has planned the perfect crime to get back at his condescending parents. What he didn’t plan on was the resilience of his mother’s love, even in the face of death. And in “The Flatbed,” childhood trauma has prevented Cecelia from enjoying physical intimacy with a man. But when she meets the love of her life, Cecelia must confront the demon who stole her innocence long ago. With the razor-sharp prose that has made Joyce Carol Oates a living legend, Evil Eye shows love as sporadically magical, mysterious, and murderous. “A dazzling, disturbing, tour de force of Gothic suspense: four odd, compelling, ingeniously narrated tales that gain in power and resonance when read in conjunction with each other.” —The Boston Globe “Exquisitely suspenseful. . . . The relationships between the damaged, sometimes monstrous individuals who people these pages will keep the reader riveted.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review

High Crime Area

Author : Joyce Carol Oates
Publisher : Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
ISBN 13 : 0802192130
Total Pages : 227 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (21 download)

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Book Synopsis High Crime Area by : Joyce Carol Oates

Download or read book High Crime Area written by Joyce Carol Oates and published by Grove/Atlantic, Inc.. This book was released on 2014-04-01 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eight stories from the author of A Book of American Martyrs that display her “mastery of imagery and stream of consciousness” (Kirkus Reviews). Joyce Carol Oates is an unparalleled investigator of human personality. In these eight stories, she deftly tests the bonds between damaged individuals—brother and sister. teacher and student, two lonesome strangers on a subway—in the beautiful, bracing prose that has become her signature. In the title story, a white, aspiring professor in Detroit tries to shake a black, male shadow during the summer of the city’s 1967 race riots. In “The Rescuer,” a promising graduate student detours to inner-city Trenton, New Jersey, to save her brother from a downward spiral, only to find herself entranced by his dangerous new world. Meanwhile, a young woman prowls the New York City subways in search of her perfect man in “Lorelei.” In each of these short stories, Oates portrays a desperate confrontation with the demons inside us. Sometimes it’s the human who wins, and sometimes it’s the demon. “Oates offers unexpected glimmers of redemption amid the grotesquerie, degradation, and exploitation that fill this collection’s eight tales.” —Publishers Weekly

The Doll-Master

Author : Joyce Carol Oates
Publisher : Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
ISBN 13 : 0802189938
Total Pages : 294 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (21 download)

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Book Synopsis The Doll-Master by : Joyce Carol Oates

Download or read book The Doll-Master written by Joyce Carol Oates and published by Grove/Atlantic, Inc.. This book was released on 2016-05-03 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Bram Stoker Award–winning collection is “certain to stick in your mind long after you’ve turned the last page” (St. Louis Post-Dispatch). Includes “Big Momma,” a finalist for the International Thriller Writers Award for Best Short Story Here are six of Joyce Carol Oates’s most “frightening—and deeply disturbing—short stories” (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette). In the titular story, a boy becomes obsessed with his cousin’s doll after her tragic death. As he grows older, he begins to collect “found dolls” from surrounding neighborhoods . . . each with its own sinister significance. In “Gun Accident,” a teenage girl is delighted to house-sit for her favorite teacher, until an intruder forces his way inside—changing more than one life forever. The collection closes with the taut tale of a mystery bookstore owner whose designs on a rare bookshop in scenic New Hampshire devolve into a menacing game with real-life consequences. “At the heart of each story is a predator-prey relationship, and what makes them so terrifying is that most of us can easily picture ourselves as the prey, at least at some time during our lives” (Minneapolis Star-Tribune). “Everything she writes, in whatever genre, has an air of dread, because she deals in vulnerabilities and inevitabilities, in the desperate needs that drive people . . . to their fates. A sense of helplessness is the essence of horror, and Oates conveys that feeling as well as any writer around.” —Terrence Rafferty, The New York Times Book Review “One of the stranger parts of the human condition may be our deep fascination, and at times troubling exploration, of the darker aspects of our nature . . . No other author explores the ugly, and at times, blazingly unapologetic underbelly of these impulses quite like Joyce Carol Oates in The Doll-Master.” —Pittsburgh Post-Gazette “In her new collection . . . [Oates] relishes moments of gothic melodrama, while rooting them firmly in grindingly ordinary American lives.” —The Guardian “Oates convincingly demonstrates her mastery of the macabre with this superlative story collection . . . This devil’s half-dozen of dread and suspense is a must read.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review

Pursuit

Author : Joyce Carol Oates
Publisher : Grove Press
ISBN 13 : 0802147925
Total Pages : 179 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (21 download)

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Book Synopsis Pursuit by : Joyce Carol Oates

Download or read book Pursuit written by Joyce Carol Oates and published by Grove Press. This book was released on 2019-09-27 with total page 179 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the #1 New York Times-bestselling author, “a compelling domestic horror story” of a new bride haunted by childhood nightmares (Kirkus Reviews). Less than twenty-four hours after exchanging vows with her new husband, Willem, Abby steps out into traffic. As his wife lies in her hospital bed, sleeping in fits and starts, Willem tries to determine whether this was an absentminded accident or a premeditated plunge, and he quickly discovers a mysterious set of clues about what his wife might be hiding. Why, for example is there a rash-like red mark circling her wrist? What does she dream about that causes her to wake from the sound of her own screams? Slowly, Abby begins to open up to her husband, revealing to him what she has never shared with anyone before—a story of a terrified mother; a jealous, drug-addled father; a daughter’s terrifying captivity; and the demons behind her terrible recurring dreams of wandering through a field ridden with human skulls and bones… From a recipient of a National Book Award and three Bram Stoker Awards, this suspenseful, twisting tale, named one of the scariest books of the year by Kirkus Reviews, is a “fast-paced examination of the destructive and restorative nature of obsessive love” (Booklist).

High Lonesome

Author : Joyce Carol Oates
Publisher : Harper Collins
ISBN 13 : 0061980099
Total Pages : 688 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (619 download)

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Book Synopsis High Lonesome by : Joyce Carol Oates

Download or read book High Lonesome written by Joyce Carol Oates and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-10-06 with total page 688 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No other writer can match the impressive oeuvre of Joyce Carol Oates. High Lonesome: New and Selected Stories 1966-2006 gathers short fiction from the acclaimed author's seminal collections and includes eleven new tales that further demonstrate the breathtaking artistry and striking originality of an incomparable talent who "has imbued the American short story with an edgy vitality and raw social surfaces" (Chicago Tribune).

I'll Take You There

Author : Joyce Carol Oates
Publisher : HarperCollins Publishers
ISBN 13 : 9780007146444
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (464 download)

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Book Synopsis I'll Take You There by : Joyce Carol Oates

Download or read book I'll Take You There written by Joyce Carol Oates and published by HarperCollins Publishers. This book was released on 2003 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In her bewitching 30th novel, Oates returns again to neurotic female post-adolescence. With deftly cast philosophical meditations--on love, death, identity, the body--this is a portrait of a woman surprised to discover strength in simply enduring.

Little Bird of Heaven

Author : Joyce Carol Oates
Publisher : Harper Collins
ISBN 13 : 0061829838
Total Pages : 454 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (618 download)

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Book Synopsis Little Bird of Heaven by : Joyce Carol Oates

Download or read book Little Bird of Heaven written by Joyce Carol Oates and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-09-15 with total page 454 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the tradition of the remarkably successful "New York Times" bestseller "The Gravedigger's Daughter," Oates is back with this dark, romantic, and captivating tale set in the Great Lakes regions of upstate New York.

Black Girl/White Girl

Author : Joyce Carol Oates
Publisher : Harper Collins
ISBN 13 : 0061862444
Total Pages : 306 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (618 download)

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Book Synopsis Black Girl/White Girl by : Joyce Carol Oates

Download or read book Black Girl/White Girl written by Joyce Carol Oates and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-10-13 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fifteen years ago, in 1975, Genna Hewett-Meade's college roommate died a mysterious, violent, terrible death. Minette Swift had been a fiercely individualistic scholarship student, an assertive—even prickly—personality, and one of the few black girls at an exclusive women's liberal arts college near Philadelphia. By contrast, Genna was a quiet, self-effacing teenager from a privileged upper-class home, self-consciously struggling to make amends for her own elite upbringing. When, partway through their freshman year, Minette suddenly fell victim to an increasing torrent of racist harassment and vicious slurs—from within the apparent safety of their tolerant, "enlightened" campus—Genna felt it her duty to protect her roommate at all costs. Now, as Genna reconstructs the months, weeks, and hours leading up to Minette's tragic death, she is also forced to confront her own identity within the social framework of that time. Her father was a prominent civil defense lawyer whose radical politics—including defending anti-war terrorists wanted by the FBI—would deeply affect his daughter's outlook on life, and later challenge her deepest beliefs about social obligation in a morally gray world. Black Girl / White Girl is a searing double portrait of "black" and "white," of race and civil rights in post-Vietnam America, captured by one of the most important literary voices of our time.

Incubus

Author : Ann Arensberg
Publisher : Open Road Media
ISBN 13 : 1480401242
Total Pages : 253 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (84 download)

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Book Synopsis Incubus by : Ann Arensberg

Download or read book Incubus written by Ann Arensberg and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2014-07-08 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: National Book Award winner Ann Arensberg brings readers a modern horror story about evil descending on an insular Maine town It begins with the theft of six candles from the church altar, a few herbs found strewn in the local graveyard. In the summer of 1974, the prosperous farming community of Dry Falls, Maine, is hit by a brutal heat wave. Crops fail. Drought blights once-verdant lawns. Men inexplicably lose all interest in sex, while women complain of erotic nocturnal visitations. Farm animals give birth to monstrosities. An unholy, unimaginable force is disrupting the natural order—and it seems to be specifically targeting Dry Falls. Narrated by the careful and practical Cora Whitman, wife of the town pastor, this tale of creeping strangeness quickly turns sinister. Incubus subtly builds to its shattering climax with Cora at its epicenter. Expertly interweaving themes of faith, religion, and marriage with that of the supernatural, this modern horror classic will enthrall fans of Ann Arensberg and attract a legion of new readers.

Jack of Spades

Author : Joyce Carol Oates
Publisher : Open Road + Grove/Atlantic
ISBN 13 : 0802191037
Total Pages : 197 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (21 download)

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Book Synopsis Jack of Spades by : Joyce Carol Oates

Download or read book Jack of Spades written by Joyce Carol Oates and published by Open Road + Grove/Atlantic. This book was released on 2015-05-05 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exquisite, psychologically complex thriller about opposing forces within the mind of one ambitious writer and the delicate line between genius and madness. Andrew J. Rush has achieved the kind of critical and commercial success most authors only dream about: He has a top agent and publisher in New York, and his twenty-eight mystery novels have sold millions of copies. Only Stephen King, one of the few mystery writers whose fame exceeds his own, is capable of inspiring a twinge of envy in Rush. But Rush is hiding a dark secret. Under the pseudonym “Jack of Spades,” he pens another string of novels—noir thrillers that are violent, lurid, and masochistic. These are novels that the upstanding Rush wouldn’t be caught reading, let alone writing. When his daughter comes across a Jack of Spades novel he has carelessly left out, she picks it up and begins to ask questions. Meanwhile, Rush receives a court summons in the mail explaining that a local woman has accused him of plagiarizing her own self-published fiction. Before long, Rush’s reputation, career, and family life all come under threat—and in his mind he begins to hear the taunting voice of the Jack of Spades. “Sleek and suspenseful . . . Readers are sure to be gripped and unsettled by [Oates’s] depiction of a seemingly mild-mannered character whose psychopathology simmers frighteningly close to the surface.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review “Just when you think you’ve got her all figured out, Joyce Carol Oates sneaks up behind and confounds you yet again. She does it with a wicked flourish in Jack of Spades.” —The New York Times Book Review

Hazards of Time Travel

Author : Joyce Carol Oates
Publisher : HarperCollins
ISBN 13 : 0062319612
Total Pages : 336 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (623 download)

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Book Synopsis Hazards of Time Travel by : Joyce Carol Oates

Download or read book Hazards of Time Travel written by Joyce Carol Oates and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2018-11-27 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An ingenious, dystopian novel of one young woman’s resistance against the constraints of an oppressive society, from the inventive imagination of Joyce Carol Oates “Time travel” — and its hazards—are made literal in this astonishing new novel in which a recklessly idealistic girl dares to test the perimeters of her tightly controlled (future) world and is punished by being sent back in time to a region of North America — “Wainscotia, Wisconsin”—that existed eighty years before. Cast adrift in time in this idyllic Midwestern town she is set upon a course of “rehabilitation”—but cannot resist falling in love with a fellow exile and questioning the constrains of the Wainscotia world with results that are both devastating and liberating. Arresting and visionary, Hazards of Time Travel is both a novel of harrowing discovery and an exquisitely wrought love story that may be Joyce Carol Oates’s most unexpected novel so far.

Night-Gaunts

Author : Joyce Carol Oates
Publisher : Grove Press
ISBN 13 : 0802146287
Total Pages : 289 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (21 download)

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Book Synopsis Night-Gaunts by : Joyce Carol Oates

Download or read book Night-Gaunts written by Joyce Carol Oates and published by Grove Press. This book was released on 2018-06-05 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dark, brilliant fiction from the New York Times-bestselling author: “Oates’ spookiness is visceral, psychologically involving, and socially astute.”―Booklist In the title story of her taut new fiction collection, Joyce Carol Oates writes: Life was not of the surface like the glossy skin of an apple, but deep inside the fruit where seeds are harbored. There is no writer more capable of picking out those seeds and exposing all their secret tastes and poisons than Oates herself—as demonstrated in these six stories. One tale opens with a woman, naked except for her high-heeled shoes, seated in front of the window in an apartment she cannot, on her own, afford. In this exquisitely tense narrative reimagining of Edward Hopper’s Eleven A.M., 1926, the reader enters the minds of both the woman and her married lover, each consumed by alternating thoughts of disgust and arousal, as he rushes, amorously, murderously, to her door. In “The Long-Legged Girl,” an aging, jealous wife crafts an unusual game of Russian roulette involving a pair of Wedgwood teacups, a strong Bengal brew, and a lethal concoction of medicine. Who will drink from the wrong cup, the wife or the dance student she believes to be her husband’s latest conquest? In “The Sign of the Beast,” when a former Sunday school teacher’s corpse turns up, the blighted adolescent she had by turns petted and ridiculed confesses to her murder—but is he really responsible? And another young outsider, Horace Phineas Love, Jr., is haunted by apparitions at the very edge of the spectrum of visibility after the death of his tortured father in “Night-Gaunts,” a fantastic ode to H.P. Lovecraft. “Consummately well-written, stylistically dashing...forthrightly nightmarish.”―Kirkus Reviews

A Widow's Story

Author : Joyce Carol Oates
Publisher : Harper Collins
ISBN 13 : 0062082639
Total Pages : 479 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (62 download)

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Book Synopsis A Widow's Story by : Joyce Carol Oates

Download or read book A Widow's Story written by Joyce Carol Oates and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2011-02-15 with total page 479 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unlike anything Joyce Carol Oates has written before, A Widow’s Story is the universally acclaimed author’s poignant, intimate memoir about the unexpected death of Raymond Smith, her husband of forty-six years, and its wrenching, surprising aftermath. A recent recipient of National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, Oates, whose novels (Blonde, The Gravedigger’s Daughter, Little Bird of Heaven, etc.) rank among the very finest in contemporary American fiction, offers an achingly personal story of love and loss. A Widow’s Story is a literary memoir on a par with The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion and Calvin Trillin’s About Alice.