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Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates’s most recent book is Hazards of Time Travel. She is currently a Visiting Professor in the English Department at the University of California at Berkeley. (May 2019)

Follow Joyce Carol Oates on Twitter: @JoyceCarolOates.

IN THE REVIEW

Loney

Old fears in dead of night like lozenges stuck dry on the tongue. Wakened numb as Novocain. In dead of night ask for God’s sake what did you miss. You know goddamned well you have missed what …

Sleeping Beauty

Ottessa Moshfegh

My Year of Rest and Relaxation

by Ottessa Moshfegh
Like her first novel, Eileen (2015), narrated in a memorably dyspeptic first-person female voice, Ottessa Moshfegh’s second novel reads like an uncensored, unapologetic, despairingly funny confession. Its unnamed narrator is a twenty-four-year-old woman who looks “like a model” and defines herself as a “somnophile”: “Oh, sleep. Nothing else could ever …

The Ghostwriter’s Mask

Richard Flanagan as John Friedrich

First Person

by Richard Flanagan
“I have been missing since I was born.” —First Person As Isaiah Berlin noted the distinction between thinkers who know many things, like Archilochus’s fox, and thinkers who know one big thing, like Archilochus’s hedgehog, so it’s helpful to distinguish between writers who explore myriad strategies of fiction, more …

The Poet of Freakiness

Carson McCullers, Nyack, New York, 1947; photograph by Henri Cartier-Bresson

Stories, Plays and Other Writings

by Carson McCullers, edited by Carlos L. Dews

Complete Novels

by Carson McCullers, edited by Carlos L. Dews
Too readily classified, or dismissed, as a Southern Gothicist, Carson McCullers (1917–1967) is one of the most radical writers of the American mid-twentieth century. Among, for instance, her female contemporaries, a remarkable gathering that includes Jean Stafford, Mary McCarthy, Eudora Welty, Harper Lee, Flannery O’Connor, and Shirley Jackson, it is …

Postcards from the Edge

Mary Miller, Oxford, Mississippi, April 2015

Always Happy Hour

by Mary Miller

The Last Days of California

by Mary Miller
If the novel, as Stendhal famously said, is a mirror moving along a roadway, a short story might be said to be a glimpse in a rearview mirror, small and intense in concentration, capturing what is fleeting, finite. In particular the subgenre of American short fiction known as minimalism captures …

Shirley Jackson in Love & Death

Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life

by Ruth Franklin

Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery: A Graphic Adaptation

by Miles Hyman
Characterized by the caprice and fatalism of fairy tales, the fiction of Shirley Jackson exerts a mordant, hypnotic spell. No matter how many times one has read “The Lottery,” Jackson’s most anthologized story and one of the classic works of American gothic literature, one is never quite prepared for its slow-gathering momentum, the way in which what appears initially to be random and casual is revealed to be as inevitable as water circling a drain.

NYR DAILY

The Fighter’s Cruel Art

A still from The Fighter (2010)

The Fighter might more accurately have been titled The Fighter and His Family: it’s a boisterous, brilliantly orchestrated ensemble piece at the paradoxically near-still center of which is an Irish-American boxer (Mark Wahlberg), whose once-promising career, like his grim hometown, Lowell, Massachusetts, is on what appears to be an inevitable downward spiral. Just nominated for seven Academy Awards—including best picture and Christian Bale as supporting actor, the current favorite in that category—the film is based on the life and career of former junior welterweight champion Micky Ward, most famous for his three brutally hard-fought bouts with Arturo Gatti in 2002–2003. It is also a group portrait of working-class Irish-Americans in a blighted, postindustrial landscape: the brawling, clannish, emotionally combustible Ward-Eklund family for whom Micky is the great hope and from whom, if he wants to survive, let alone prevail as a boxer of ambition, he must separate himself.

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