Joyce Carol Oates Book Recommendations & Book Mentions

Joyce Carol Oates

(many of us, perhaps most, who have had long careers, realize that a significant number of our novels/ stories would not be published today, probably. "sensitivity readers" would certainly reject Faulkner, Nabokov, Flannery O'Connor, Welty ("Where is the Voice Coming From?") https://t.co/xkOIQi6c5e

Joyce Carol Oates

all credit, entire credit, 100% credit to Mary Shelley, 18 years old when she began "Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus." most impressive fiction debut, ever. https://t.co/veZS8mueWE

Joyce Carol Oates

I really am an experimental writer, and…experimental writing doesn’t sell…when I look at a novel by Cormac McCarthy like “Child of God,” that is a novel that I love. I thought, Wow, it’s so funny and weird and wonderful, and I don’t think there’s almost any readership for that.

Joyce Carol Oates

RT @angelique1z: Night. Sleep. Death. The Stars. by Joyce Carol Oates review – a portrait of a family and a nation in crisis ⁦@JoyceCarolOa…

Joyce Carol Oates

interesting to compare Marian Engels's novella "Bear" (1967) with Rachel Ingalls's "Mrs. Caliban" (1982). "The Bear" is one of the most controversial & famous of Canadian novels while "Mrs. Caliban" occupies a more modest, cultish status among admirers of literary fiction.

Joyce Carol Oates

the author makes the point that each "Great Book" contains much that is objectionable & offensive in some way, exempting only a novel by Jane Austen--which, in fact, might well offend some readers for its privileging of marriage, heterosexual pieties, & tacit conservatism. https://t.co/b76omPAX8Z

Joyce Carol Oates

Ursula Parrott became a millionaire by writing women's romances but her first novel "Ex-Wife" is really a witty, searing anti-romance, like a novel Dorothy Parker might have written if she'd taken herself more seriously. https://t.co/Aq5kDehMq3

Joyce Carol Oates

Henry Adams grimly foresaw the ruination/rot of democracy by wealth: one billionaire can purchase countless votes & "push state to the far right" out of some whim of pseudo-conviction such as women's bodies must be controlled by men, or there are some lives "unworthy of life"... https://t.co/pBMZUMHidA

Joyce Carol Oates

At its most entertaining Ex-Wife is a Broadway play in novel form, with briskly clever dialogue tending toward the comic-aphoristic, as if Dorothy Parker, Noël Coward, and Oscar Wilde had collaborated to examine the war between the sexes in the post-Victorian era.

Joyce Carol Oates

Excellent stage play by David Henry Hwang now reimagined as opera, “M. Butterfly” could have been an homage to the empowering nature of fantasy but turns rueful & self-analytical; burdened by joyless role of the French diplomat. Much grating music in Act 1. https://t.co/ZEgnS6KiWh