Joyce Carol Oates

M.R. Neukirchen--the first female president of a lauded Ivy League institution--struggles to hold onto her self-identity in the face of personal and professional demons.

In the aftermath of her mother's death, thirty-one-year-old, sexually liberated and economically independent Nikki Eaton comes into a startling realization of her identity as a daughter and experiences a tumultuous year of mourning that gives way to greater wisdom and love

Finally returned to print in a beautiful new trade paperback edition, American Appetites is classic Joyce Carol Oates-a suspenseful thriller in which the happy facade of an affluent suburban couple crumbles under the weight of tragedy and scandal. For twenty-six years, Ian McCullough, a demographics researcher at a social science think tank, has been happily married to Glynnis, a successful cookbook writer and a brilliant hostess. When a drunken...

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 until they meet again as adults, ready to exorcise the ghosts of the past and come to terms with their legacy...

"Anellia" is a young student who, though gifted with a penetrating intelligence, is drastically inclined to obsession. Funny, mordant, and compulsive, she falls passionately in love with a brilliant yet elusive black philosophy student. But she is tested most severely by a figure out of her past she'd long believed dead. Astonishingly intimate and unsparing, and pitiless in exposing the follies of the time, I'll Take You There is a dramatic revelation...

Finally returned to print, Joyce Carol Oates's lost classic: the satirical, often surreal, and beautifully plotted Gothic romance that follows the exploits of the audacious Zinn sisters, whose nineteenth-century pursuit of adventurous lives turns a lens on contemporary American culture When their sister is plucked from the shores of the Bloodsmoor River by an eerie black-silk hot air balloon that sails in through a clear blue sky, the lives of the...

Kidnapping a latest victim in a string of young boys he tortures and rapes, a self-styled preacher confines the child in a small box and gradually brainwashes him over subsequent years into believing that they are father and son; while the boy's mother, who was savagely injured during the abduction, clings to hope that her son is alive.

In "Evil Eye," we meet Mariana, the young fourth wife of a prominent intellectual. When her husband's brazen first wife visits one night, Mariana learns a terrible secret that could be a harbinger of doom for her marriage and very soul. In "So Near, Anytime, Always," shy teenager Lizbeth meets Desmond, a charming boy who offers this introverted girl the first sparks of young romance. Yet just as their relationship begins to blossom, Lizbeth realizes...

Remembering Minette Swift, the talented, assertive, 19-year-old African-American girl enrolled as a scholarship student in an exclusive, mostly white liberal arts college near Philadelphia who died under mysterious circumstances fifteen years earlier, Genna, her former roommate, begins an unofficial inquiry into her death. As she reconstructs their tumultuous freshman year at the college in race-torn 1960s Philadelphia, Genna is led also to reconstruct...

Joshua Seigi is a celebrated but reclusive author. Young but in failing health, he reluctantly admits that he can no longer live alone and launches a search for an assistant. He is dissatisfied with everyone he meets until he encounters Alma. A young woman with synthetic-looking blond hair and pale, tattooed skin, she stirs something inside him. Unaware of her torturous past and the hatred that seethes within her, he has no idea that he is bringing...