The Best Joyce Carol Oates Books
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Vote for the Joyce Carol Oates novels you just couldn't put down. If you haven't read a book, don't downvote it.
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Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart is a 1990 novel by American novelist Joyce Carol Oates. The title is taken from "In the Desert," a poem by Stephen Crane. Oates's novel was nominated for best work of fiction in the 1990 National Book Awards.- Photo:
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- We Were the Mulvaneys
The Mulvaneys, a seemingly perfect family, are nearly destroyed after daughter Marianne (Tammy Blanchard) is raped at the school prom. Patriarch Michael (Beau Bridges) descends into alcoholism afterward, while mother Corinne (Blythe Danner) tries to deny the incident happened. As her relationship with her parents becomes cold and distant, Marianne is sent away to a relative's home, and her once-pristine reputation is left to be dragged through the mud until one of her brothers takes action.- Photo:
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The Gravedigger's Daughter is a 2007 novel by Joyce Carol Oates. It is her 36th published novel. The novel was based on the life of Oates's grandmother, whose father, a gravedigger settled in rural America, injured his wife, threatened his daughter, and then committed suicide. Oates explained that she decided to write about her family only after her parents died, adding that her "family history was filled with pockets of silence. I had to do a lot of imagining." The novel was completed in the early 2000s but its publication was repeatedly bumped in favor of releasing new Oates novels "her American publisher believed were more 'controversial', such as Missing Mom." The novel's epistolary epilogue was first published as a short story titled "The Cousins" in the July 2004 issue of Harper's Magazine, and was anthologized in The Best American Short Stories of 2005 and in Oates's 2006 collection High Lonesome: New & Selected Stories, 1966–2006. The Gravedigger's Daughter was published on June 1, 2007, and debuted at #17 on the New York Times Best Seller list. The novel was a 2007 finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction.- Photo:
The Falls is a novel by Joyce Carol Oates, originally published in 2004 by the Ecco Press, and winner of the 2005 Prix Femina Etranger. It tells the story of Ariah, a woman whose husband threw himself over Niagara Falls on their honeymoon. The rest of the book is the story of her life afterward and family, and how she finds love, then loses it when Ariah's new husband becomes engrossed in his work on what was to become the Love Canal case. The novel spans the time between 1950, when environmental issues were literally unheard of and 1978, when these issues became the object of nationwide interest and concern. The author makes use of information about the Love Canal scandal and uses information provided by the two books by Lois Marie Gibbs, Love Canal:My Story, and Love Canal:The Story Continues.- Photo:
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5Them is a novel by Joyce Carol Oates, the third in the Wonderland Quartet she inaugurated with A Garden of Earthly Delights. It was first published by Vanguard in 1969 and it won the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction in 1970. Many years and many awards later, Oates surmised that them and Blonde were the works she will most be remembered for, and would most want a new reader to select, though she added that "I could as easily have chosen a number of titles."- Photo:
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Blonde is a bestselling 2000 historical novel by Joyce Carol Oates that chronicles the inner life of Marilyn Monroe, though Oates insists that the novel is a work of fiction that should not be regarded as a biography. It was a finalist of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Rocky Mountain News and Entertainment Weekly have listed Blonde as one of Joyce Carol Oates's best books, and Oates herself has said that Blonde is one of the two books for which she thinks she will be remembered.- Photo:
You Must Remember This is a novel by Joyce Carol Oates. It tells the story of Enid Maria, a girl who falls in love with her uncle, a professional boxer. It also is about her family, the Steviks, and their thriving life in Port Oriskany, a fictional industrial city in upstate New York. The title comes from the song "As Time Goes By", whose first lines are, "You must remember this/ a kiss is still a kiss". The song was also the theme to the film Casablanca.- Photo:
A Garden of Earthly Delights is a novel by Joyce Carol Oates, published by Vanguard in 1967. It was her second book published and it inaugurated the so-called Wonderland Quartet. It was a finalist for the annual U.S. National Book Award for Fiction. A Garden sets out to explore social class in America and the inner lives of its youngsters. It follows heroine Clara Walpole, a very beautiful daughter of a Kentucky-born farmer. The novel brings to life Clara's ill-fated life and the four men who shaped it: Clara’s father, an utterly bitter hard-working migrant farm worker; Lowry, who whisks the teenage Clara away and tempts her with love; Revere, a wealthy married business man who gives Clara stability; and Swan, Clara’s son who carries the physiological burden of Clara’s determination to escape her haphazard existence of violence and poverty. In an attempt to rise above her mother's ambitions, Clara struggles for independence by way of her relationships with the four different men in her life. For a recent Modern Library edition of the novel, Oates revised three-quarters of the original published version of the novel.- Photo:
Bellefleur is a magic realist novel by Joyce Carol Oates about the generations of an upstate New York family. It is the first book in Oates' "Gothic Saga" and at the time of publication represented a major departure from the modern-day themes about which Oates had written up to that point.- Photo:
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Black Water is a 1992 novella by Joyce Carol Oates.- Photo:
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Little Bird of Heaven is a 2009 novel by Joyce Carol Oates. It is her 38th published novel. The novel is the third set in the fictional city of Sparta, NY, which was also a main setting for her two previous best-sellers We Were the Mulvaneys and The Gravedigger's Daughter.- Photo:
Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang is a novel by Joyce Carol Oates about a group of teenage girls in upstate New York in the 1950s who form a gang called Foxfire.- Photo:
Wonderland is a 1971 novel by Joyce Carol Oates, the fourth in the so-called Wonderland Quartet. It was a finalist for the annual U.S. National Book Award for Fiction and it has been called one of the prolific author's best books. Wonderland follows the character Jesse Vogel from his childhood in the Great Depression to his marriage and career in the late 1960s. Oates later wrote that Jesse is a protagonist who does not have an identity unless he is "deeply involved in meaningful experience", a theme that allowed her to address both what she calls "the phantasmagoria of personality" and the faceless nature of the novelist. Oates wrote in a 1992 Afterword that Wonderland among her early novels was "the most bizarre and obsessive" and "the most painful to write". Oates continued to think about the novel after its completion, and rewrote the ending for the 1972 paperback edition.- Photo:
Middle Age : A Romance is a bestselling 2001 novel by Joyce Carol Oates.- Photo:
15Zombie is a 1995 novel by Joyce Carol Oates which explores the mind of a serial killer. It was based on the life of Jeffrey Dahmer. Dahmer stated in an interview with Stone Phillips, "The only motive that there ever was to completely control a person, a person I found physically attractive, and keep them with me as long as possible, even if it meant keeping a part of them.". Currently, a short film adaptation is in production shooting in Boston, Massachusetts. The film stars Bill Connington, who also wrote the screenplay, and is directed by Tom Caruso.- Photo:
16Beasts is a novella by Joyce Carol Oates and was originally published in 2001.- Photo:
Wild Nights! Stories about the last days of Poe, Dickinson, Twain, James and Hemingway is a collection of short stories by Joyce Carol Oates. As the title suggests, the stories are about the final days in the lives of authors Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Henry James and Ernest Hemingway. It was published in April 2008 by HarperCollins.- Photo:
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18A Book of American Martyrs
A Book of American Martyrs is a novel by Joyce Carol Oates. It tells the story of Luther Dunphy who assassinates abortion provider Augustus Voorhees leaving his family in ruins.
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Black Girl / White Girl is a novel by Joyce Carol Oates first published in 2006. It takes the form of an untitled 300 page manuscript written in 1990 by Generva Meade, a white historian, who truthfully recounts the events which happened during her freshman year at a prestigious liberal college in 1974-75, and Meade's own paternal family history which uncomfortable spans the gap between a proud history of progressive thinking and subsequent revolutionary and violent ideas. The action on the stage is played by a Black conservative Christian who reluctantly attends the school on a scholarship and encounters racial discrimination there. Subsequent events and her own disintegrating mental health lead to a personal and institutional tragedy.- Photo:
20What I Lived For
What I Lived For is a book by Joyce Carol Oates.- Photo:
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Man Crazy is a novel by Joyce Carol Oates. It was first published as a full novel in 1997.- Photo:
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22Sexy is a novel by Joyce Carol Oates. First published in 2005, it is her fourth book written for young adults. The book's themes of pedophilia, homosexuality, and pre-marital sex as well as its adult language have caused it to be the source of attempts to ban the book from school libraries.- Photo:
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23American Appetites
American Appetites is a novel by Joyce Carol Oates. It follows Ian McCullough as he faces trial for the murder of his w
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My Sister, My Love is a 2008 novel by Joyce Carol Oates, her 37th published novel. It reimagines the JonBenét Ramsey murder, with the ice-skating champion Bliss Rampike standing in for JonBenét, and is narrated by her surviving older brother, Skyler Rampike. The book received generally positive reviews, with USA Today noting, "Employing her powerful imagination, the gifted Oates gets inside her fictional characters’ tormented souls to solve the case…as a literary exercise, it deserves a rave…she brilliantly depicts status-obsessed parents who alternately push and ignore their deeply unhappy children."- Photo:
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Marya is a novel by Joyce Carol Oates. It follows a young woman from her tragic childhood to her days at college where she finds success though traumas of the past continue to haunt her.
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Big Mouth & Ugly Girl is Joyce Carol Oates's first young adult novel. It was published in 2002 by HarperCollins.- Photo:
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Do with Me What You Will is a short story by Joyce Carol Oates.- Photo:
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28Angel of Light
Angel of Light is a novel by Joyce Carol Oates. It features themes of loyalty, betrayal, and forgiveness.
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29Daddy Love
Daddy Love is a novel by Joyce Carol Oates. It follows the lives of a mother and son whose world's are turned upside down following an attack in a mall parking lot.
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30Carthage
Carthage is a novel by Joyce Carol Oates. It tells the story of a community shook be the disappearance of a young girl.
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