JCO News

A thread for any news related to Joyce Carol Oates. New books, interviews...etc.

She seems to have two novels coming out this year:

Fair Maiden (due out August), Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in the US, ISBN 9780151015160

Little Bird of Heaven (due out 9/15/09) Ecco Press in the US, ISBN 0061829838

In August 10th, New York Times Magazine: "Women's Work: Questions for Joyce Carol Oates"

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/12/magazine/12wwln-q4-t.html

Thanks to Nickelini for pointing this out.

I've put links to a review and another interview regarding her new collection, Dear Husband on the short fiction thread. Wasn't quite sure the best place to put it.

Other forthcoming JCO-related books as noted on her website:

Shirley Jackson
(collected works)
Edited by Joyce Carol Oates for the Library of America
Expected publication date: ??

* * *

"Rewriting Literary Genre: The Short Fiction of Joyce Carol Oates
(criticism)
By Susana Araùjo
Expected publication date: ??

* * *

The Coming Storm
(poems)
By Joyce Carol Oates
Expected publication date: ??

* * *

The Crosswicks Horror
(novel)
By Joyce Carol Oates
Expected publication date: ??

Excerpt from an article in the Guardian by Elaine Showalter"

...There are at least 50 outstanding contemporary American women novelists, but I am going to limit myself to eight key figures (Toni Morrison is so well known she does not need to be included). At the top of the list is the prodigious Joyce Carol Oates, author of 55 novels, more than 800 short stories, and thousands of pages of plays (frequently staged in the US), poems, journals and critical essays. Influenced by both Emily Dickinson and Edgar Allan Poe, Oates has reinvented herself as a novelist in almost every decade. In the 1960s, she was a social realist devoted to chronicling the lives of her parents' generation in the depression, and writing about migrant workers, "white trash", racial tensions, and the powerless inhabitants of towns such as Lockport, New York, where she grew up, and Detroit, where she lived and taught from 1962 to 1967. In the 1970s, Oates experimented with postmodernism, writing about "the yet uncharted, apocalyptic America of the late Vietnam war period when the idealism of antiwar sentiment had turned to cynicism and the counterculture fantasy ... had self-destructed". Then in the 1980s she reimagined the great fictional genres of 19th-century American women writers in novels such as A Bloodsmoor Romance (1982) and Mysteries of Winterthurn (1984); explored the deep sources of female creative identity in Solstice (1985) and Marya (1986); and challenged the macho literary establishment, especially Norman Mailer, with books, stories and essays about the symbolic themes of American masculine fantasy and contest, including boxing, sports-car racing and Marilyn Monroe.

From the 1990s to the present, she has been writing with ever-more furious speed and intensity on varieties of American crime, from rape to child murder to serial killers, and their effects on families and communities. Although she insists that violence and psychopathology are part of the contemporary subjects a serious writer must explore, I suspect that Oates, whose life has undergone dramatic changes in 2009, with the death of her husband of 47 years and a recent second marriage, is about to enter a new phase in her fiction. Whatever comes next, her obsession to record what she has called "American ambition, American delusion, American strife, American hopes, American violence, American dreams-gone-wrong" will continue to expand.

Full article here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/may/09/female-novelists-usa

Amazon.co.uk are touting

'Little Bird of Heaven' to be published in September 2009.

Only other information is that it is 448 pages long, would assume a novel.

Little Bird of Heaven, a novel, is now on bookshelves here in the states. I have it on the couch with another book I picked up. It's calling to me . . .

A Q&A with JCO in which she reveals she's working on a memoir, entitled "The Siege: A Widow’s First Six Months"

http://flavorwire.com/40714/exclusive-qa-joyce-carol-oates

New JCO book due out in January

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/1847248586/ref=s9_sima_gw_s0_p14_i2?pf_rd_m=A...

>10 Caroline_McElwee: yeah, I'm not sure why my initial information in #2 turned out wrong. Perhaps she or the publishers postponed it (perhaps her recent marriage meant she couldn't keep up with her writing as well ;-)

Q&A with JCO in today's Guardian magazine:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/jan/09/joyce-carol-oates-interview

Another Q&A with JCO, this time in the FT.

JCO FT Q&A

I like her answer to which literary character most resembles her.

>13 Jargoneer: That was a great answer. I was interested that she should dislike in herself her proclivity to 'time-wasting'.

>15 Jargoneer: - that was a frightening answer. Imagine she actually stopped wasting time - she could do a book a month.

>15 Jargoneer: ROTFL!

An article by JCO in the Smithsonian. There is also an interview with Ms. Oates in the same issue.

as mentioned to me by detailmuse

New collection coming out in September

Sourland: Stories
Ecco, hardcover, 978-0061996528

also, coming out in January 2011

Give Me Your Heart: Tales of Mystery and Suspense
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, hardcover, 978-0547385464

(Little Bird of Heaven is out in paperback in the US in August, A Fair Maiden is in paperback in the US in January)

Missed this one:

coming out in June from Ecco, paperback, 978-0061963988

In Rough Country: Essays and Reviews

Acclaimed for her novels and short stories, Joyce Carol Oates is also an unparalleled literary critic whose insights and commentary have graced the pages of such publications as the "New York Review of Books", the "Times Literary Supplement", and the "New York Times Book Review". This new collection brings together some of her most brilliant and provocative pieces, covering a diverse range of subjects and ideas. The rough country is both the treacherous geographical/psychological terrains of the writers she analyses - Flannery O'Connor, Shirley Jackson, Cormac McCarthy, Annie Proulx, and Margaret Atwood among others-and also the emotional terrain of Oates's own life following the unexpected death of her husband, Raymond Smith, after 48 years of marriage. As literature is a traditional solace to the bereft, so writing about literature can be a solace to the bereft as it was to me during the days, weeks, and months when the effort of writing fiction often seemed beyond me, as if belonging to another lifetime when I'd been younger, more resilient and reckless, Oates writes. Reading and taking notes, especially late at night when I can't sleep, has been the solace, for me, that saying the rosary or reading "The Book of Common Prayer" might be for another. The result of those meditations are the pieces of In Rough Country-balanced and illuminating essays that demonstrate an artist working at the top of her form. As she engages with forebears and contemporaries, Oates provides clues to her own creative process, for prose is a kind of music: music creates 'mood'. What is argued on the surface may be but ripples rising from a deeper, subtextual urgency.

In chatting with the people from Ecco this past week at Book Expo, they mentioned that the first installment of her memoirs would be out in the not so distant future...

No word on a second volume to the journals, though.

Thanks for the update's Avaland. All the volumes you mention in >>19 avaland: & 20 are of interest. Wish there were more journals due though as I found those particularly fascinating.

>21 Caroline_McElwee: re the journals: me, too! I really find it far less interesting who she rubbed elbows with than what she was thinking when she was writing "X".

A VERY interesting article in today's NY Times titled "Violence Expert Visits Her Dark Past" and reviews Denial by Jessica Stern (and speaks to the author). But what is more the point is that,—and here Joyce Carol Oates is brought into the essay—it is also a discussion on women being able to write about violence.

>>21 Caroline_McElwee: - ditto
>>22 avaland: - very interesting reading.

Rough Country: Essays and Reviews is now out.

LA Times article:

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/jacketcopy/2010/07/joyce-carol-oates-is-at-it-ag...

"Joyce Carol Oates Widowhood with Literature" by Caroline Kellogg

Due in November 2010

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Give-ME-Your-Heart-Stories/dp/1848875665/ref=sr_1_37?s=b...

Just caught up with the fact that JCO was given the Obama Awards National Humanities Medal for 2010. What a joy to see her acknowledged in this way.

>28 Caroline_McElwee: I didn't hear this Caroline, how wonderful! Thanks for posting this.

Fascinating interview around her new memoir:

http://onpoint.wbur.org/2011/02/28/joyce-carol-oates-2

I caught parts of this while driving and hope to find time to listen to the whole thing.

>28 Caroline_McElwee:. If you don't mind, the title of the award is the "National Humanities Medal," presented by the President of the U.S. It is not an "Obama Award," just as it was not a "Bush Award." The prize is awarded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

The National Humanities Medal honors individuals or groups whose work has deepened the nation’s understanding of the humanities, broadened citizens’ engagement with the humanities, or helped preserve and expand Americans’ access to important resources in the humanities.

Sorry Labwriter, I'm a Brit in the UK and don't know all the awards, I mis-read the heading on the article.

Oh, please, no problem. I'm sorry, I didn't know you were from the UK. I clicked on your "Caroline_McElwee" this morning and received only a blank screen--a glitch with my computer, no doubt. It's just that our president sometimes takes credit where no credit is due, so I wanted to "be clear," as he himself so frequently is wont to say. As you said, it is wonderful to see Oates get this award. Philip Roth received one along with her--heh.

>33 labwriter: That's interesting, because I think, for the most part, our president doesn't get the credit he often deserves for many things he has done which are far more important than an NEA award (yes, even one for JCO!) But then again, this is not the forum for such a discussion...

Joyce Carol Oates has won the World Fantasy Award for Short Story - “Fossil-Figures” (Stories: All-New Tales).

Congratulations JCO

>35 Jargoneer: Interesting. A WFA, very interesting.

Her new book A Book of American Martyrs sounds incredible:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/03/23/joyce-carol-oates-american-martyrs-ho...

>38 kswolff: I got through about half of it before the election happened and I haven't been able to pick it up since.... It had an interesting (and not very good) review in the NYTimes as it was assessed in midst of our political turmoil. Still, I hope to go back to it, or, if not, I have more than a few of her others to read :-)