Joyce Carol Oates | The New York Review of Books

None-Too-Gay Divorcées

Ursula Parrott’s 1929 novel Ex-Wife was a scandalous, best-selling portrayal of the era’s “new woman,” but in her own life she remained trapped in conventional views of marriage and relationships.

Ex-Wife

by Ursula Parrott, with a foreword by Alissa Bennett and an afterword by Marc Parrott

Becoming the Ex-Wife: The Unconventional Life and Forgotten Writings of Ursula Parrott

by Marsha Gordon

July 20, 2023 issue

Disaster Was Her Element

Miranda Seymour’s I Used to Live Here Once is a richly detailed and warmly sympathetic look at Jean Rhys’s turbulent, disjointed life.

I Used to Live Here Once: The Haunted Life of Jean Rhys

by Miranda Seymour

September 22, 2022 issue

‘See What You Can Make of It’

“I am not so interested in the voice of the essayist, precisely because it is my ‘own’ voice—yet there is a kind of pleasure in speaking directly and without a mask.”

February 19, 2022

Left Behind in Lisbon

Maria Judite de Carvalho’s depiction of the lives of women in mid-twentieth-century Portugal is executed as precisely and without sentiment as an autopsy.

Empty Wardrobes

by Maria Judite de Carvalho, translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa, with an introduction by Kate Zambreno

February 10, 2022 issue

Chronicle of a Death Ignored

Becky Cooper’s We Keep the Dead Close is as much a study of corrosive institutional patriarchy as it is an investigation into an unsolved 1969 murder at Harvard.

We Keep the Dead Close: A Murder at Harvard and a Half Century of Silence

by Becky Cooper

February 11, 2021 issue

Loney

a poem

May 9, 2019 issue

Sleeping Beauty

My Year of Rest and Relaxation

by Ottessa Moshfegh

October 11, 2018 issue

The Ghostwriter’s Mask

First Person

by Richard Flanagan

September 27, 2018 issue

Exsanguination

a poem

December 7, 2017 issue

The Poet of Freakiness

Stories, Plays and Other Writings

by Carson McCullers, edited by Carlos L. Dews

Complete Novels

by Carson McCullers, edited by Carlos L. Dews

The Lonely Hunter: A Biography of Carson McCullers

by Virginia Spencer Carr, with a foreword by Tennessee Williams

September 28, 2017 issue

Postcards from the Edge

Always Happy Hour

by Mary Miller

The Last Days of California

by Mary Miller

Big World

by Mary Miller

April 20, 2017 issue

Shirley Jackson in Love & Death

Her fiction exerts a mordant, hypnotic spell

Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life

by Ruth Franklin

Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery: A Graphic Adaptation

by Miles Hyman

Let Me Tell You: New Stories, Essays, and Other Writings

by Shirley Jackson, edited by Laurence Jackson Hyman and Sarah Hyman DeWitt, with a foreword by Ruth Franklin

October 27, 2016 issue

Unflinching About Women

A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories

by Lucia Berlin, edited and with an introduction by Stephen Emerson, and with a foreword by Lydia Davis

March 10, 2016 issue

Joan Didion: Risk & Triumph

The Last Love Song: A Biography of Joan Didion

by Tracy Daugherty

October 8, 2015 issue

Was Plato ‘Churlish’?

October 8, 2015 issue

Inspiration and Obsession

Why do we write?

August 13, 2015 issue

Letter

Christopher Moore

Was Plato ‘Churlish’?

October 8, 2015 issue

The Remains of the Britons

Kazuo Ishiguro’s ‘The Buried Giant’

The Buried Giant

by Kazuo Ishiguro

April 2, 2015 issue

Witness to the Unknowable

In the Light of What We Know

by Zia Haider Rahman

October 23, 2014 issue

The Real West, At Last

The Last Kind Words Saloon

by Larry McMurtry

June 5, 2014 issue

Shocks of Recognition

‘Bark: Stories’ by Lorrie Moore

Bark: Stories

by Lorrie Moore

April 3, 2014 issue