Joyce Carol Oates

Tells of a seemingly ordinary, successful family who is nearly torn apart when tragedy strikes but finds a way to remain happy and loyal despite rumors, secrets and strife.

A recklessly idealistic girl tests the limits of her oppressively controlled, dystopian world and is punished by being sent back in time to Wainscotia, Wisconsin, eighty years in the past, only to fall fatefully in love with a fellow exile.

Explores the high price of success in the life of one woman--the first female president of an Ivy League university--and her hold upon her self-identity in the face of darkly shrouded secrets from her past.

"From literary icon Joyce Carol Oates comes a brand-new collection of haunting and, at times, darkly humorous mystery and suspense stories. These are tales of psyches pushed to their limits by the expectations of everyday life--from a woman who gets lost on her drive home to her plush suburban home and ends up breaking into a stranger's house, to a first-person account of a cloned 1940s magazine pinup girl being sold at auction and embodying America's...

Sixteen-year-old Katya Spivak is out for a walk on the gracious streets of Bayhead Harbor with her two summer babysitting charges when she's approached by silver-haired, elegant Marcus Kidder. At first his interest in her seems harmless, even pleasant; like his name, a sort of gentle joke. His beautiful home, the children's books he's written, his classical music, the marvelous art in his study, his lavish presents to her — Mr. Kidder's life

...

Middle Age portrays a uniquely contemporary phenomenon: the propensity of the affluent middle-aged in America to reinvent themselves romantically when the energies of youth have faded or they have become disillusioned. The setting is Salthill-on-Hudson, NY, a wealthy community where "everyone is middle-aged"--but looks much younger. In this intensely social environment, Adam Berendt, a charismatic and mysterious sculptor, dies unexpectedly, plunging...

Rebecca, the daughter of a German high school teacher who was forced to work as a gravedigger after immigrating to upstate New York, begins a life-changing pilgrimage throughout America in the wake of a prejudice-motivated tragedy.

"In one of her most ambitious works, Joyce Carol Oates reimagines the inner, poetic, and spiritual life of Norma Jean Baker -- the child, the woman, the fated celebrity -- in Norma Jean's own voice. This most intimate portrait reveals a fragile, idiosyncratically gifted young woman who makes and remakes her identity, ever managing to survive against crushing odds to become the definition of stardom ... Blonde is a sweeping novel about the elusive...

A collection of six stories and novellas includes the title story, in which the disappearance of a sweet blonde-haired child is linked to her mother's indiscretions and an older student with a fascination for a Native American legend.

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.