Joyce Carol Oates

"Presents a collection of stories that explores the musings of a writer, a prisoner, a student, and others who consider how their lives might have unfolded differently had they made different choices."--Publisher description.

Presents nine tales of psyches pushed to their limits by the expectations of everyday life--from a woman who gets lost on her drive home to her plush suburban home and ends up breaking into a stranger's house, to a first-person account of a cloned 1940s magazine pinup girl being sold at auction and embodying America's ideals of beauty and womanhood.

Author of 27 novels, Joyce Carol Oates has won a National Book Award and the PEN/Malamud Award. She has been nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Readers around the world marvel at her ability to trace the subtle dynamics at work in the modern American family. Judd is the youngest of the four Mulvaney children--three boys and a girl--who grow up on their parents' lush farm in upstate New York. In his childhood, Judd is swept...

"This is the story of missing my mother. One day, in a way unique to you, it will be your story, too." So begins Missing Mom, Joyce Carol Oates' personal and candid novel. Nikki Eaton, a single, thirty-one-year-old, sexually liberated, and economically self-supporting young woman, never particularly thought of herself as a daughter. Yet following the unexpected loss of her mother, her identity is transformed during the course of a tumultuous year...

Six terrifying tales to chill the blood from the unique imagination of Joyce Carol Oates. A young boy plays with dolls instead of action figures. But as he grows older, his passion takes on a darker edge ... A white man shoots dead a black boy creating a media frenzy. But could it be that it was self-defense as he claims? A nervous woman tries to escape her husband. He says he loves her, but she's convinced he wants to kill her. These quietly lethal...

"A new collection of thirteen mesmerizing stories by American master Joyce Carol Oates, including the 2017 Pushcart Prize-winning "Undocumented Alien." In the diverse stories of Beautiful Days, Joyce Carol Oates explores the most secret, intimate, and unacknowledged interior lives of characters not unlike ourselves, who assert their independence in acts of bold and often irrevocable defiance. "Fleuve Bleu" exemplifies the rich sensuousness of Oates's...

A Philistine discovers a social conscience. He is Jerome Corcoran, a real estate millionaire and city councilman who lives for money, food and sex. On his way to work he comes across a suicide, a black woman who was a critic of city hall. Corcoran smells foul play and for once decides to do something about it.

"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 around the world. He also has a loving wife and three grown children and is a well-known philanthropist in his small New Jersey town. But Rush is hiding a dark secret. Under the pseudonym "Jack of Spades," he pens another string of novels--...

"Which should prevail: loyalty to family or loyalty to the truth? Is telling the truth ever a mistake and is lying for one's family ever justified? Can one do the right thing, but bitterly regret it? ... My Life as a Rat follows Violet Rue Kerrigan, a young woman who looks back upon her life in exile from her family following her testimony, at age twelve, concerning what she knew to be the racist murder of an African-American boy by her older brothers....