Works by
Joyce Carol Oates
(aka Lauren Kelly, Rosamond Smith)
(Writer)
[June 16, 1938 - ]

Fiction

Children

• Where Is Little Reynard? (2003) with Mark Graham, Illustrator
  Mama cat has seven kittens. Little Reynard is the smallest, and his brothers and sisters tease him about his size and his orange color. Because he is so small and timid, the little girl, Lily, takes special care of Little Reynard. She gives him his own bowl and even lets him sleep on her pillow, yet sometimes he still feels he doesn’t really belong. Then one cold winter day Little Reynard peers out of an open window and sees two young foxes that look very much like him, and when the foxes invite him to join them, Little Reynard says yes!

• Come Meet Muffin! (1998) with Mark Graham, Illustrator
  When the Smith family rescues Muffin on the side of a country road, he appears to be a typical lost kitten in search of a home. But little Lily Smith soon discovers that this watermelon-loving, peanut-butter eating new friend is no ordinary kitty!
  
  Muffin sits at the dinner table, enjoys lettuce and rye crackers, and keeps a protective eye on the other cats in the family. One chilly winter morning, Muffin notices two lost fawns outside Lily's bedroom window. Determined to be helpful to others, Muffin heads out into the forest to deliver the fawns back to their mother. Hooting owls, grumpy squirrels, and chirping chickadees are encountered along the way, until Muffin realizes he has roamed very far into unfamiliar surroundings. The resourceful cat learns that he must rely on his own ingenuity to get himself out of trouble and back into the warmth of his cozy home.
  
  In her first children's book, Joyce Carol Oates pairs playful prose with the exquisite naturalistic oil paintings of Mark Graham. Engaging and atmospheric, this charming tale is one that children will want to hear again and again.

Novels

• The Crosswicks Horror (Future Release)

• A Fair Maiden (June 6, 2010 Release)
  Sixteen-year-old Katya Spivak is out for a walk on the gracious streets of Bayhead Harbor with her two summer babysitting charges when she’s approached by silver-haired, elegant Marcus Kidder. At first his interest in her seems harmless, even pleasant; like his name, a sort of gentle joke. His beautiful home, the children’s books he’s written, his classical music, the marvelous art in his study, his lavish presents to her — Mr. Kidder’s life couldn’t be more different from Katya’s drab working-class existence back home in South Jersey, or more enticing. But by degrees, almost imperceptibly, something changes, and posing for Mr. Kidder’s new painting isn’t the lighthearted endeavor it once was. What does he really want from her? And how far will he go to get it?
  
  In the tradition of Oates’s classic story "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" A Fair Maiden is an unsettling, ambiguous tale of desire and control.

• Little Bird of Heaven (September 15, 2009)
  Set in the mythical small city of Sparta, New York, this searing, vividly rendered exploration of the mysterious conjunction of erotic romance and tragic violence in late-twentieth-century America returns to the emotional and geographical terrain of acclaimed author Joyce Carol Oates's previous bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys and The Gravedigger's Daughter.
  
  When a young wife and mother named Zoe Kruller is found brutally murdered, the Sparta police target two primary suspects, her estranged husband, Delray Kruller, and her longtime lover, Eddy Diehl. In turn, the Krullers' son, Aaron, and Eddy Diehl's daughter, Krista, become obsessed with each other, each believing the other's father is guilty.
  
  Told in halves in the very different voices of Krista and Aaron, Little Bird of Heaven is a classic Oates novel in which the lyricism of intense sexual love is intertwined with the anguish of loss, and tenderness is barely distinguishable from cruelty. By the novel's end, the fated lovers, meeting again as adults, are at last ready to exorcise the ghosts of the past and come to terms with their legacy of guilt, misplaced love, and redemptive yearning.

• My Sister, My Love: The Intimate Story of Skyler Rampike (2008)
  Herein is the unexpurgated first-person narrative of nineteen-year-old Skyler Rampike, the only surviving child of an "infamous" American family destroyed a decade ago by the murder of Skyler’s six-year-old ice-skating champion sister, Bliss, and the media scrutiny that followed. Part investigation into the unsolved murder, part elegy for the lost Bliss and for his own lost childhood, Skyler’s narrative is an alternately harrowing and corrosively funny exposÉ of upper-middle-class American pretensions—and an unexpectedly subtle and sympathetic exploration of those who dwell in "Tabloid Hell."

• The Gravedigger's Daughter (2007)
  Fleeing Nazi Germany in 1936, the Schwarts immigrate to a small town in upstate New York. Here the father—a former high school teacher—is demeaned by the only job he can get: gravedigger and cemetery caretaker. When local prejudice and the family's own emotional frailty give rise to an unthinkable tragedy, the gravedigger's daughter, Rebecca heads out into America. Embarking upon an extraordinary odyssey of erotic risk and ingenious self-invention, she seeks renewal, redemption, and peace—on the road to a bittersweet and distinctly “American” triumph.

• Black Girl/White Girl (2006)
  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.

• Missing Mom (2005)
  Nikki Eaton, single, thirty-one, sexually liberated, and economically self-supporting, has never particularly thought of herself as a daughter. Yet, following the unexpected loss of her mother, she undergoes a remarkable transformation during a tumultuous year that brings stunning horror, sorrow, illumination, wisdom, and even—from an unexpected source—a nurturing love.

• The Falls (2004)
  It is 1950 and, after a disastrous honeymoon night, Ariah Erskine's young husband throws himself into the roaring waters of Niagara Falls. Ariah, "the Widow Bride of the Falls," begins a relentless seven-day vigil in the mist, waiting for his body to be found. At her side is confirmed bachelor and pillar of the community Dirk Burnaby, who is unexpectedly drawn to her. What follows is a passionate love affair, marriage, and family -- a seemingly perfect existence. But tragedy soon takes over their lives, poisoning their halcyon years with distrust, greed, and murder.
  
  Set against the mythic-historic backdrop of Niagara Falls in the mid-twentieth century, this haunting exploration of the American family in crisis is a stunning achievement.

• The Tattooed Girl (2003)
  A celebrated but reclusive author, generally regarded as a somewhat idiosyncratic bachelor, young but in failing health, Joshua Seigl reluctantly admits to himself that he can no longer live alone. Although it goes against his instincts to do so, he must hire an assistant to help him with his increasingly complicated professional and personal affairs. Considering at first only male applicants, he is dissatisfied with everyone he meets.
  
  Then one day at the bookstore he encounters Alma. A young woman with synthetic-looking blond hair and pale, tattooed skin, she stirs something inside Seigl -- pity? desire? responsibility? Though he's uncertain why, he decides she is the one -- she will be his assistant. Unaware of her torturous past -- the abuses she's suffered, the wrongs she's committed, and the hatred that seethes within her -- he has no idea that he is bringing into his home an enemy: an anti-Semite who despises him virulently and unquestioningly. Seigl allows Alma more and more deeply into his life, mindless of the danger she presents. Yet their closeness forces Seigl and Alma to make discoveries that cut to the core of their identities.
  
  With her unique, masterful balance of dark suspense and surprising tenderness, Joyce Carol Oates probes the tragedy of ethnic hatred and challenges accepted limits of desire.

• I'll Take You There (2002)
  I'll Take You There is told by a woman looking back on her first years of college, at Syracuse in the 1970s. Her story, softened by the gauze of memory and the relief of having survived, nonetheless captures a harrowing ordeal of alienation and despair, heightened by a wrenching interracial love affair and her father's death.
  
  Cursed by insatiable yearning and constant dissatisfaction, "Anellia" has always been haunted by her mother. With her father and brothers making her feel responsible for her mother's death, she longs for acceptance and the warmth of human compassion. When Anellia begins college, she naively seeks that compassion at a sorority house, with disastrous results. Gradually she descends to deeper levels of estrangement, until she is nearly an outcast. She is swept up in a turbulent love affair with a black philosophy student only to be abandoned. Her sense of rejection reaches a turning point when she's called away to be with her dying father.
  
  With deftly cast philosophical meditations -- on love, death, identity, the body -- I'll Take You There is a portrait of a young woman surprised to discover strength in simply enduring. It is a thought-provoking meditation on the existential questions that arise in burgeoning adulthood, a tender evocation of the dignity and power of young love.

• Middle Age: A Romance (2001)
  In Salthill-on-Hudson, a half-hour train ride from Manhattan, everyone is rich, beautiful, and -- though they look much younger -- middle-aged. But when Adam Berendt, a charismatic, mysterious sculptor, dies suddenly in a brash act of heroism, shock waves rock the town. But who was Adam Berendt? Was he in fact a hero, or someone more flawed and human?

• Blonde (2000)
  She was an all-American girl who became a legend of unparalleled stature. She inspired the adoration of millions, and her life has beguiled generations of fans and fellow artists. The story of Norma Jeane Baker better known by her studio name "Marilyn Monroe"--has been dissected for more than three decades, but never has it been captured in a narrative as breathtaking and transforming as Blonde.
  
  With fresh insights into the heart of a celebrity culture hypnotized by its own, myths, Blonde is a sweeping novel about the elusive magic of a woman, the lasting legacy of a star, and the heartbreak behind the creation of the most evocative icon of the twentieth century.

• Broke Heart Blues (1999)
  John Reddy Heart came to Willowsville, New York, driving a salmon-colored Cadillac Bel Air and sitting on three Las Vegas phone books; he was eleven years old. From that day on, as John, his seductive mother, addled grandfather, and younger siblings settled into one of the town's most beautiful homes, John Reddy Heart would become legendary as a rebel, a heartthrob, and an outlaw. In this uproarious epic novel from one of our most gifted contemporary storytellers, the ballad of John Reddy Heart--his rise, fall, and second ascent into the realm of myth--is sung by a chorus of Willowsville voices who find in him their savior, scapegoat, dream lover, and confessor. Broke Heart Blues may be the most entertaining novel yet from Joyce Carol Oates: razor-sharp satire that holds a mirror up to America's obsession with celebrity.

• My Heart Laid Bare (1998)
  My Heart Laid Bare is a striking departure for Joyce Carol Oates: a sweeping saga of the fortunes and misfortunes of a family of enterprising confidence artists in 19th-century America. Mythic in scope, ballad-like in the telling, it is Oates's most daring work yet--a stunning tale of crime and transgression--with profound moral consequences.
  
  Oates's picture of America as a land of opportunity to immigrants and settlers takes on a dark tone as we see these veritable shape-shifters exploit the unsuspecting rich by appealing to their deepest flaws. Yet recognizing the sins of greed, lust, pride, and small-mindedness in others does not prevent the patriarch and his brilliant children from being laid low by the same faults.
  
  From the virgin provinces of New York State to the rough and tumble Western frontier, from the backrooms of Washington, D.C., to the Atlantic City of the Gilded Age, from Carnegie Hall to Harlem in the twenties, My Heart Laid Bare transports readers with its mesmerizing narrative voice.

• Man Crazy (1997)
  Fresh from the triumph of We Were the Mulvaneys, Joyce Carol Oates continues her exploration of family love and possibilities of human redemption with this compelling story of how one young woman suffers profoundly in the pursuit of love, but manages to emerge safe and whole. Set in several towns on the Chatauqua River in upstate New York, Man Crazy tells the story of Ingrid Boone, who at age eight is taken into hiding by her beautiful young mother, Chloe. Sought by the men who have taunted Chloe, the authorities, and Ingrid's loving but volatile father still haunted by memories of Vietnam, Ingrid and her mother fight to survive both together and apart. "Man crazy" is the label assigned to teenage Ingrid, whose desperate need to find a substitute for her father's affection makes her easy prey for the charismatic leader of a violent cult. Eventually, the police surround the cult compound and a tense standoff erupts in bullets and flames. Ingrid escapes to rebuild her life, and Oates' depiction of this severely damaged young woman's slow but miraculous process of healing stands as one of the most brilliant portraits she has ever created. Oates' gift for haunting imagery reaches new heights in this emotionally resonant work.

• We Were the Mulvaneys (1996) -- 2001 Oprah Book Club selection
  The Mulvaneys are blessed by all that makes life sweet: a hardworking father, a loving mother, three fine sons, and a bright, pretty daughter. They are confident in their love for each other and their position in the rural community of Mt. Ephraim, New York. But something happens on Valentine's Day, 1976 - an incident that is hushed up in the town and never spoken of in the Mulvaney home - that rends the fabric of their family life.
  
  As the years pass the secrets they keep from each other threaten to destroy them, but ultimately they bridge the chasms between them and reunite in the spirit of love and healing. Rarely has such an acclaimed writer made such a startling and inspiring statement about the value of hope and compassion.

• Zombie (1995) - Bram Stoker Award for Best Novel (1995)

• Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang (1993)
  Movie (Foxfire, 1996): Annette Haywood-Carter, director with  Angelina Jolie and Hedy Burress  DVD  VHS

• What I Lived For (1994)

• Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart (1990)

• American Appetites (1989)
  Chilling tale in which the American dream becomes a nightmare.

• You Must Remember This (1987)
  Joyce Carol Oates's epic novel of an American family in the 1950's probes the tender division between the permissible and the forbidden, between ordinary life and the secret places of the heart. Set in an industrial, working-class town in upstate New York, this book chronicles the frustrating marriage of parents Lyle and Hannah; the idealistic political journey of son Warren, and the passionate, obsessive relationship that develops between 15-year-old Enid Maria and her uncle Felix, a professional boxer twice her age. While brilliantly re-creating a decade that worshipped conformity, You Must Remember This presents the lives of family members that break every convention in the search for meaning and fulfillment.

• Marya: A Life (1986)
  Successful author and famous intellectual Marya Knauer did not always occupy such a secure and comfortable position in life. Her memories of her childhood in Innisfail, New York are by turns romantic and traumatic. The early violent death of her father and abandonment by her mother have left her with a permanent sense of dislocation and loss. After decades apart, Marya becomes determined to find the mother who gave her away. In searching for her past, Marya changes her present life more than she could ever have imagined. Vividly evoking the natural beauty of rural upstate New York, and the complex emotions of a woman artist, Marya: A Life is one of Joyce Carol Oates's most deeply personal and fully-realized novels.

• Solstice (1985)
  Two women meet. One, Monica Jensen, is in her late twenties, vulnerable and insecure, not yet over the shock of her recent divorce, a teacher at a boys' private school in rural Pennsylvania. The other, Sheila Trask, is in her mid-thirties, the widow of a world-famed sculptor and herself a painter of stature, dominating, fascinating, restless in her need for what or for whom she seems unable to define, even to herself.
  
  These two women meet. Drawn to each other, they become friends. Imperceptibly, hardly aware of what is happening to them at the deepest level of feeling, they move, or are moved, toward love, and ultimately beyond it, arriving at last at a near-fatal obsession with each other.

• Mysteries of Winterthurn (1984)

• A Bloodsmoor Romance (1982)

• Angel of Light (1981)

• Bellefleur (1980)
  A wealthy and notorious clan, the Bellefleurs live in a region not unlike the Adirondacks, in an enormous mansion on the shores of mythical Lake Noir. They own vast lands and profitable businesses, they employ their neighbors, and they influence the government. A prolific and eccentric group, they include several millionaires; a mass murderer; a spiritual seeker who climbs into the mountains looking for God; a wealthy noctambulist who dies of a kitten scratch; a young girl whose passion for her uncle can only be acted out on the silver screen; a brilliant boy-scientist; a baby, Germaine—the heroine of the novel—and her parents, Leah and Gideon.  Written with a voluptuousness and immediacy unusual even for Oates, Bellefleur is widely regarded as one of her masterworks.

• Cybele (1979)

• Unholy Loves (1979)

• Son of the Morning (1978)

• Childwold (1976)

• The Assassins: A Book of Hours (1975)

• Do With Me What You Will (1973)

• With Shuddering Fall (1964)
  A story of love obsessed of innocence enslaved of the dark world of sexual chaos.

1. A Garden of Earthly Delights (1967)
   In her second novel, Joyce Carol Oates, author of many bestselling novels, including We Were the Mulvaneys and Blonde, created one of her most memorable heroines, Clara, the beautiful daughter of migrant farmworkers. Intent upon rising above her haphazard life of violence and poverty, Clara struggles for independence while relying on four men to fashion her destiny: her father, a hardened laborer simmering with resentment; Lowry, who rescues the teenage Clara from her family and offers her a first glimpse of love; Revere, the wealthy married man who promises Clara stability; and Swan, Clara's son, who bears the burden of his mother's mistaken identity.

2. Expensive People (1968) -- Finalist National Book Award
    In Expensive People, Oates takes a provocative and suspenseful look at the roiling secrets of America’s affluent suburbs. Set in the late 1960s, this first-person confession is narrated by Richard Everett, a precocious and obese boy who sees himself as a minor character in the alarming drama unfolding around him.
   
   Fascinated by yet alienated from his attractive, self-absorbed parents and the privileged world they inhabit, Richard incisively analyzes his own mismanaged childhood, his pretentious private schooling, his “successful-executive” father, and his elusive mother. In an act of defiance and desperation, eleven-year-old Richard strikes out in a way that presages the violence of ever-younger Americans in the turbulent decades to come.

3. them (1969) -- Winner 1970 National Book Award
   A novel about class, race, and the horrific, glassy sparkle of urban life, them chronicles the lives of the Wendalls, a family on the steep edge of poverty in the windy, riotous Detroit slums. Loretta, beautiful and dreamy and full of regret by age sixteen, and her two children, Maureen and Jules, make up Oates' vision of the American fam-ily--broken, marginal, and romantically proud. The novel's title, pointedly uncapitalized, refers to those Americans who inhabit the outskirts of society--men and women, mothers and children--whose lives many authors in the 1960s had left unexamined. Alfred Kazin called her subject "the sheer rich chaos of American life." The Nation wrote, "When Miss Oates' potent, life-gripping imagination and her skill at narrative are conjoined, as they are preeminently in them, she is a prodigious writer."

4. Wonderland (1971) -- Finalist National Book Award
   Spanning from the Great Depression to the turbulent Vietnam War era, Wonderland is the epic account of Jesse Vogel, a boy who emerged from a family tragedy with his life spared but his world torn apart. Orphaned after watching his father murder his entire family, Jesse embarks on a personal odyssey that takes him from a Dickensian foster home to college and graduate school to the pinnacle of the medical profession. As an adult, Jesse must summon the strength to reach across the “generation gap” and rescue his endangered teenaged daughter, who has fallen into the drug-infused 1960s counterculture.

• Blood Mask (2006)
  A wealthy, charismatic, and controversial "benefactress of art," Drewe Hildebrand disappears from her estate on the Hudson River, seemingly abducted in the night. Her young niece, Marta, found in a desolate wooded area close by, is too traumatized to describe the abductors. A provocative exhibit of avant-garde "bio-art" that includes a blood mask of Drewe Hildebrand is disrupted by protestors.
  
  In this, her third suspense novel, Lauren Kelly explores the startling world of "bio-artists" and their admirers, examining the intermingling of private, inscrutable motives with public masks of dominance and power; the ways in which spiritual yearnings may be transformed into worldly, erotic appetites that consume the innocent.

• The Stolen Heart (2005)
  Sixteen years ago, a vivacious fifth-grade classmate of Merilee Graf was abducted from a park in Mt. Olive, New York. Haunted by the memory of the eleven-year-old "gypsy-looking" girl whose disappearance has never been explained, Merilee returns home to keep a vigil at the bedside of her dying father, a prosperous importer of exotic goods and a former, popular mayor of the upstate New York town on the Chautauqua River. After Mr. Graf's death, Merilee finds herself an "heiress" in more ways than one as she becomes involved, with both dread and fascination, with two very different men from her Mt. Olive past -- the elusive older brother of her missing classmate and her own seductive "Uncle Jedah," executor of her father's estate. Past and present mysteries converge in a revelation too painful, and too shocking, for Merilee to accept, and in a sudden act of reckless courage she frees herself of the terrifying obsessions of the past.

• Take Me, Take Me with You: A Novel of Suspense (2003)
  Lara Quade, a disaffected intellectual associated with a prominent Princeton research center, is a young woman whose physical beauty has been scarred in a childhood accident. She is jarred out of the routine of her life by a seemingly chance meeting with a young man named Zedrick Dewe, whom she seems to know somehow as he in turn seems to know her. What is the connection between them? Who has brought them together? And why are they drawn so powerfully to one another? Their encounter leads to a highly charged erotic experience that takes an abrupt turn from tender to violent, predictable to terrifying. And from this initial episode springs a sequence of inexplicable events and revelations so shocking that they lead Lara, long in denial about her life, to uncover the truth about the buried hurt and rage in the tortured past of her family.

• The Barrens (2001)
  One of the most powerful and original voices in contemporary American literature turns her remarkable skills in this new novel to the complex and compelling story of a serial killer and the people his crimes touch, and transform. Matt McBride, a seemingly happily married man, remembers his first victim. He was a boy when the mutilated body of the pretty, popular, outgoing teenager was found in the desolate New Jersey Pine Barrens. Matt's memory of the atrocity haunts him still; he has long felt guilty at not having been able to prevent it, although he'd hardly known the girl. Now another attractive young woman has disappeared. Matt knew this victim, too -- and just possibly he knew her more intimately than he can acknowledge. By degrees Matt becomes obsessed with guilt, and the police view his increasingly erratic behavior with a suspicion that draws official attention away from Name Unknown, an artist of limited talent but of fierce, demented vision. Under the spell of the missing woman, Matt sets out on a path that leads him to an inevitable confrontation with both Name Unknown and his own deepest, unacknowledged self.

• Starr Bright Will Be with You Soon (1999)
  In Starr Bright Will Be With You Soon, Rosamond Smith takes this scenario to terrifying new heights as we enter the mind and heart of a female serial killer who seeks refuge with her estranged twin sister. When Lily Merrick's twin returns home after 15 years, Lily is overjoyed. What she has no way of knowing is that, under the alias Starr Bright, Sharon has left a trail of murdered men in seedy motel rooms across the country. She is driven by an insatiable need for love and security, yet has found only lust and degradation and time and again, a murderous rage forces her to strike out against them. A novel of tense and mesmerizing power, Starr Bright Will Be With You Soon is a haunting exploration of the helplessness and rage buried deep in the female psyche-- and of the intimate, unspoken bond sisters share.

• Double Delight (1997)

• You Can't Catch Me (1995)

• Snake Eyes (1992)

• Nemesis (1990)

• Soul/Mate (1989)
  Colin Ash comes to an elegant and respectable Boston suburb to stay with his aunt and uncle. We find out at once he is a killer. When he meets lovely young widow Dorothea Deverell, with her "burnished mahogany" hair, gentle heart and impressive job at an art museum near Boston, and believes he has found, as the title has it, a soulmate, we know Dorothea is in trouble. The question is whether she will learn in time that Colin's overreaching admiration threatens her life. It's obvious to readers, and, as Colin's behavior grows more bizarre (he throws a lavish party in Dorothea's honor, kills a man who opposed her promotion), it should be to her. But it isn't, so Dorothea seems a little thick and is much less interesting than the extremely bent Colin, whose search for a mother figure and fantasy lover is at least understandable.

• Lives of the Twins (1987)
  Also published as Kindred Passions.

• After the Wreck, I Picked Myself Up, Spread My Wings, and Flew Away (2006)
  In the raw was how the world felt now. My feelings were raw, my thoughts were raw and hurtful like knife blades. . . . In the blue had been my place to hide, now In the raw there was nowhere to hide.
  
  Jenna Abbott separates her life into two categories: before the wreck and after the wreck. Before the wreck, she was leading a normal life with her mom in suburban New York. After the wreck, Jenna is alone, trying desperately to forget what happened that day on the bridge. She's determined not to let anyone get close to her -- she never wants to feel so broken and fragile again.
  
  Then Jenna meets Crow. He is a powerfully seductive enigma, and Jenna is instantly drawn to him. Crow is able to break down the wall that Jenna has built around her emotions, and she surprises herself by telling him things she hasn't told anyone else. Can Jenna bring herself to face the memories she's tried so hard to erase?

• Rape: A Love Story (2003)
  Teena Maguire should not have tried to shortcut her way home that Fourth of July. Not after midnight, not through Rocky Point Park. Not the way she was dressed: tank top, denim cut-offs, high-heeled sandals. Not with her twelve-year-old daughter, Bethie. Not with packs of local guys running loose on hormones, rage, and alcohol. A victim of gang rape, left for dead in the park boathouse, the once vital and sexy Teena Maguire can now only regret that she has survived. And Bethie can barely remember a childhood uncolored by fear. For they're not even a neighborhood away, the men that she identified for the Niagara Falls Police Department: the wide-browed, sandy-haired Pick brothers; the sneering Jimmy DeLucca; Fritz Haaber with his moustache and stubbled jaw. They've killed her grandmother's longhaired orange cat. At a relentless, compelling pace punctuated by lonely cries in the night and the whisper of terror in the afternoon, National Book Award-winner Joyce Carol Oates unfolds the story of Teena and Bethie, their assailants, and their unexpected, silent champion, a man who knows the meaning of justice. And love.

• Beasts (2002)
  A young woman tumbles into a nightmare of decadent desire and corrupted innocence in a superb novella of suspense from National Book Award–winner Joyce Carol Oates. Art and arson, the poetry of D. H. Lawrence and pulp pornography, hero-worship and sexual debasement, totems and taboos mix and mutate into a startling, suspenseful tale of how a sunny New England college campus descends into a lurid nightmare.

• First Love: A Gothic Tale (1996)

• Black Water (1992)
  Joyce Carol Oates has taken a shocking story that has become an American myth and, from it, has created a novel of electrifying power and illumination. Kelly Kelleher is an idealistic, twenty-six-year-old "good girl" when she meets the Senator at a Fourth of July party. In a brilliantly woven narrative, we enter her past and her present, her mind and her body as she is fatally attracted to this older man, this hero, this soon-to-be-lover. Kelly becomes the very embodiment of the vulnerable, romantic dreams of bight and brave women, drawn to the power that certain men command - at a party that takes on the quality of a surreal nightmare; in a tragic care ride that we hope against hope will not end as we know it must end. One of the acknowleged masters of American fiction, Joyce Carol Oates has written a bold tour de force that parts the black water to reveal the profoundest depths of human truth.

• The Rise of Life on Earth (1991)
  A memorable portrait of one of the "insulted and injured" of American society.  Set in the underside of working-class Detroit of the '60s and '70s, this short, intense novel sketches Kathleen Hennessy's violent childhood and follows her into her early adult years as a hospital health-care worker.  Overworked, underpaid, and quietly overzealous, Kathleen falls in love with a young doctor, whose exploitation of her sets the course of the remainder of her life, in which her passivity masks a deep fury and secret resolve to take revenge.

• I Lock My Door Upon Myself (1990)
  Tale of doomed love.

• The Triumph of the Spider Monkey (1976)

• Big Mouth & Ugly Girl (2002)
  Big Mouth
  
  No I did not. I did not, I did not. I did not say those things, and I did not plan those things. Won't It anyone believe me?
  
  Ugly Girl
  
  All right, Ugly Girl made a mistake. I'd told my mom what I'd heard in the cafeteria, and she'd told Dad. Evidently. I'd thought for sure they would want me to speak up for the truth.

• Small Avalanches and Other Stories (2003)
  When The Sky Blue Ball comes soaring over the fence, a high-school girl is confronted with the haunting memory of childhood. A jealous teen lets her cousin go off alone with a dangerous Capricorn, aware of the terrifying possibilities. A vulnerable young girl cunningly outwits a menacing stranger and exults in her newfound power, surviving the first of many Small Avalanches.

  In these twelve riveting tales, master storyteller Joyce Carol Oates visits the dark, enigmatic psyche of the teenage years. Intense and unnerving, uplifting and triumphant, the stories in this collection explore the fateful consequences of the choices we make in our everyday lives.

• Freaky Green Eyes (2003)
  Sometimes Franky Pierson has a hard time dealing with life. Like when her parents separate and her mother vanishes, Franky wants to believe that her mom has simply pulled a disappearing act. Yet deep within herself, a secret part of her she calls Freaky Green Eyes knows that something is terribly wrong. And only Freaky can open Franky's eyes to the truth.

• Sexy (2005)
  Darren Flynn has the perfect life -- until that day in November.
  
  After that day, after what happened (did it happen?), life is different. Darren is different. Nothing is as it was –– before. His friends, his family, even the people who are supposed to be in charge are no longer who Darren thought they were. Who can he trust, now?
  
  This compelling, masterfully written novel by acclaimed author Joyce Carol Oates explores one teenager's search for identity in a complex, deceiving world, and the answers he finds in the most unexpected places.

• The Coming Storm (Future Release)

• Tenderness: Poems (1996)
  The poems gathered here range from sardonic musings on the American obsession with money to a chilling dramatic monologue by a convicted sex offender. Oates is at the height of her powers here.

• Time Traveler  (1989)

• Invisible Woman (1982)

• Women Whose Lives Are Food, Men Whose Lives Are Money (1978)

• Fabulous Beasts Poems (1975)

• Angel Fire (1973)

• Love and Its Derangements (1970)

• Anonymous Sins & Other Poems (1969)

• The Faith of a Writer: Life, Craft, Art (2003)
  Joyce Carol Oates is one of America’s greatest contemporary literary figures. Having written nearly 100 books in every conceivable genre, she is a writer clearly able to answer the profound questions about what makes a story good, a novel successful, a writer an artist.
  In The Faith of a Writer, Oates discusses the subjects most important to the narrative craft, and which every writer should know, touching on topics such as inspiration, memory, self-criticism, and ‘the unique power of the unconscious’. On a more personal note, the book answers some of the questions Oates has been frequently asked over the course of her career, such as ‘Why is your writing so violent?’ and ‘How do you manage to write so much?’ Oates also pays homage what she calls her ‘significant predecessors’, and makes a strong case for the importance of reading in the life of a writer.
  
  Oates claims, ‘Inspiration and energy and even genius are rarely enough to make “art”: for prose fiction is also a craft, and craft must be learned, whether by accident or design.’ In its 14 chapters, The Faith of a Writer provides valuable lessons on how language and ideas are assembled to create art.

• George Bellows: American Artist (1995)

• The Life of the Writer the Life of the Career (1995)

• (Woman) Writer: Occasions and Opportunities  (1988)

• On Boxing (1987)
  "No other subject is, for the writer, so intensely personal as boxing. To write about boxing is to write about oneself--however elliptically, and unintentionally. And to write about boxing is to be forced to contemplate not only boxing, but the perimeters of civilization--what it is, or should be, to be 'human' . . .
  
  The sport seems in crisis, its best practitioners no less than its most dubious contaminate by association with fixed fights, manipulated judges, questionable referees. Demands for its abolition are made, indignation is aroused, well-argued editorials are printed, deals continue to be made, boxers continue to be , managed.' occasionally there is a boxing match that, in its demonstration of skill, courage, intelligence, hope, seems to redeem the sport--or almost. Perhaps boxing has always been in crisis a sport of crisis.
  
  Without doubt, it is our most dramatically 'masculine' sport, and our most dramatically 'self-destructive' sport. In this, for some for us, its abiding interest lies."
                                            -- Joyce Carol Oates, from the Foreword

• New Heaven, New Earth: The Visionary Experience in Literature (1974)

• The Hostile Sun: The Poetry of D.H. Lawrence (1973)

• The Edge of Impossibility: Tragic Forms of Literature (1972)

• Short Story Writers: Joyce Carol Oates-Richard Wright 759-1144 Index (2008) by Charles E. May

• The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates: 1973-1982 (2008), Greg Johnson, ed.

• Biography: Joyce Carol Oates (2007)
  An article from: Contemporary Authors Online by Gale Reference Team (Digital HTML)

• Joyce Carol Oates: Conversations (2006) by Greg Johnson

• Dark Eyes On America: The Novels Of Joyce Carol Oates (2005) by Gavin Cologne-Brookes

• The World's Finest Mystery and Crime Stories: Third Annual Collection (2002), Ed Gorman and Martin H. Greenberg, eds.
  Includes works by Anne Perry, Ed McBain, Jeffrey Deaver, Joyce Carol Oates, Lawrence Block, Margaret Coel, Nancy Pickard, Ruth Rendell, and others.

• Joyce Carol Oates: A Study of the Short Fiction (1994) by Greg Johnson

• Joyce Carol Oates: Novels of the Middle Years (1992) by Joanne V. Creighton

• Reading the Fights: The Best Writing About the Most Controversial of Sports (1990), Daniel Halper, ed.
  Includes works by A. J. Liebling, Elliot Gorn, George Plimpton, Michael Stephens, Norman Mailer, Pete Hamill,  and others

• Invisible Writer: A Biography of Joyce Carol Oates (1988) by Greg Johnson

• Understanding Joyce Carol Oates (1987) by Greg Johnson

• Conversations With Contemporary American Writers (1985) by Sanford Pinsker
  Includes Barry Beckham, David Madden, Etheridge Knight, Gerald Stern, I. B. Singer, Josephine Miles, Joyce Carol Oates, Marilynne Robinson, Saul Bellow, Stephen Dunn, and William Stafford

• Joyce Carol Oates (1980) by Ellen G. Friedman