Hard-hitting, page-turning and celebratory of friendship in unlikely circumstances, Joyce Carol Oates' sure touch with small town life hits home in her first young adult novel. Matt Donaghy is the class joker, and Ursula Riggs is the misfit loner. Neither knows the other. But when Matt is suddenly arrested on a charge of threatening to blow up the school and massacre the students, Ursula is the only one who sees through the hysteria and hypocrisy, and corroborates Matt's story. The case is dropped, but Matt's old friends avoid him, and his teachers treat him with kid gloves. Even Ursula, apparently his only friend during the crisis, can't meet his eye. But Ursula can't remain aloof when she catches Matt contemplating suicide -- and a strange friendship is born.

Big Mouth and Ugly Girl

Children's Books

Joyce Carol Oates

Growing Up & Facts of Life

Harpercollins Childs

Joyce Carol Oates is one of the world's most respected living novelists. Her new novel is an intense, deeply moving story of how a young woman finds her place in the world. 'In those days in the early 1960s we were not women yet but girls. This was, without irony perceived as our advantage.' So begins 'I'll Take You There', an astonishingly intimate and unsparing self-portrait of a young woman who comes of age in the most turbulent of American decades. 'Anellia' -- as she sometimes calls herself -- is a student at Syracuse University, the first time she has lived away from her family. Headstrong, passionate, occasionally obsessive, she is pitiless in exposing herself to her new life as she searches for a place in the world. In her quest for belonging, 'Anellia' discovers the risks, and curious rewards, of confronting the world: being taken in, and then cruelly rejected by a 'sisterhood' of her fellow students, falling recklessly in love with an older graduate student who happens to be black, making a journey westward when summoned by a figure from her past who she believed to be dead. Through this triptych of events, the atoms of 'Anellia's' life comes together as she begins her journey into adulthood. Joyce Carol Oates' new novel confirms her as one of America's most important writers. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our times. 'I'll Take You There' is a deeply moving, wry, intense examination of how a girl becomes a young woman.

I'll Take You There

Literature & Fiction

Contemporary

Fourth Estate

Joyce Carol Oates is one of the world's most respected living novelists. 'I'll take You There' is an intense, deeply moving story of how a young woman finds her place in the world. 'In those days in the early 1960s we were not women yet but girls. This was, without irony perceived as our advantage.' So begins 'I'll Take You There', an astonishingly intimate and unsparing self-portrait of a young woman who comes of age in the most turbulent of American decades. 'Anellia' - as she sometimes calls herself - is a student at Syracuse University, the first time she has lived away from her family. Headstrong, passionate, occasionally obsessive, she is pitiless in exposing herself to her new life as she searches for a place in the world. In her quest for belonging, 'Anellia' discovers the risks, and curious rewards, of confronting the world: being taken in, and then cruelly rejected by a 'sisterhood' of her fellow students, falling recklessly in love with an older graduate student who happens to be black, making a journey westward when summoned by a figure from her past who she believed to be dead. Through this triptych of events, the atoms of 'Anellia's' life comes together as she begins her journey into adulthood. This spellbinding novel confirms Oates as one of America's most important writers. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our times. 'I'll Take You There' is a deeply moving, wry, intense examination of how a girl becomes a young woman.

Fourth Estate Ltd.

Hard-hitting, page-turning and celebratory of friendship in unlikely circumstances, Joyce Carol Oates' sure touch with small town life hits home in her first young adult novel.Matt Donaghy is the class joker, and Ursula Riggs is the misfit loner. Neither knows the other. But when Matt is suddenly arrested on a charge of threatening to blow up the school and massacre the students, Ursula is the only one who sees through the hysteria and hypocrisy, and corroborates Matt's story.The case is dropped, but Matt's old friends avoid him, and his teachers treat him with kid gloves. Even Ursula, apparently his only friend during the crisis, can't meet his eye. But Ursula can't remain aloof when she catches Matt contemplating suicide - and a strange friendship is born.

Big Mouth & Ugly Girl

Teen & Young Adult

Romance

Collins Educational

From one of America's best loved and most prolific novelists: the story of a woman coming to terms with the violent death of her mother, and uncovering all the hidden secrets stowed away over the years. When her mother uncharacteristically fails to return her phone calls, 31-year old Nikki Eaton calls in to check up on her. She finds the house turned upside-down, and her mother lying dead, murdered, on the garage floor. Single, sexually liberated and economically self-supporting, Nikki has never particularly thought of herself as a daughter. She learns to cope with the unexpected loss of her mother over the course of a tumultuous year of mourning that brings sorrow and even from an unexpected source, a nurturing love. This is a candid, engaging and personal novel about mothers and daughters from one of the greatest American novelists alive today.

Mother, Missing

Harper-perennial

Fifteen years ago, in 1975, Genna Hewett-Meade's college roommate died a mysterious, violent, terrible death. Minette Swift had been a fiercely individualistic scholarship student, an assertive—even prickly—personality, and one of the few black girls at an exclusive women's liberal arts college near Philadelphia. By contrast, Genna was a quiet, self-effacing teenager from a privileged upper-class home, self-consciously struggling to make amends for her own elite upbringing. When, partway through their freshman year, Minette suddenly fell victim to an increasing torrent of racist harassment and vicious slurs—from within the apparent safety of their tolerant, "enlightened" campus—Genna felt it her duty to protect her roommate at all costs.Now, as Genna reconstructs the months, weeks, and hours leading up to Minette's tragic death, she is also forced to confront her own identity within the social framework of that time. Her father was a prominent civil defense lawyer whose radical politics—including defending anti-war terrorists wanted by the FBI—would deeply affect his daughter's outlook on life, and later challenge her deepest beliefs about social obligation in a morally gray world.Black Girl / White Girl is a searing double portrait of "black" and "white," of race and civil rights in post-Vietnam America, captured by one of the most important literary voices of our time.

Black Girl/White Girl - A Novel

The Gravedigger's Daughter

Genre Fiction

The Fourth Estate

Joyce Carol Oates returns with a dark, romantic, and captivating tale, set in the Great Lakes region of upstate New York—the territory of her remarkably successful New York Times bestseller The Gravedigger's Daughter.    Set in the mythical small city of Sparta, New York, this searing, vividly rendered exploration of the mysterious conjunction of erotic romance and tragic violence in late-twentieth-century America returns to the emotional and geographical terrain of acclaimed author Joyce Carol Oates's previous bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys and The Gravedigger's Daughter.   When a young wife and mother named Zoe Kruller is found brutally murdered, the Sparta police target two primary suspects, her estranged husband, Delray Kruller, and her longtime lover, Eddy Diehl. In turn, the Krullers' son, Aaron, and Eddy Diehl's daughter, Krista, become obsessed with each other, each believing the other's father is guilty.   Told in halves in the very different voices of Krista and Aaron, Little Bird of Heaven is a classic Oates novel in which the lyricism of intense sexual love is intertwined with the anguish of loss, and tenderness is barely distinguishable from cruelty. By the novel's end, the fated lovers, meeting again as adults, are at last ready to exorcise the ghosts of the past and come to terms with their legacy of guilt, misplaced love, and redemptive yearning.

Little Bird of Heaven

"My husband died, my life collapsed."On a February morning in 2008, Joyce Carol Oates drove her ailing husband, Raymond Smith, to the emergency room of the Princeton Medical Center where he was diagnosed with pneumonia. Both Joyce and Ray expected him to be released in a day or two. But in less than a week, even as Joyce was preparing for his discharge, Ray was dead from a hospital-acquired virulent infection, and Joyce was suddenly faced - totally unprepared - with the reality of widowhood.A Widow's Story illuminates one woman's struggle to comprehend a life absent of the partnership that had sustained and defined her for nearly half a century. Joyce Carol Oates shares the derangement of denial, the anguish of loss, the disorientation of the survivor amid a nightmare of "death duties," and the solace of friendship. She writes unflinchingly of the experience of grief - the almost unbearable suspense of the hospital vigil, the treacherous "pools" of memory that surround us, the vocabulary of illness, the absurdities of commercialized forms of mourning. Here is a frank acknowledgment of the widow's desperation - only gradually yielding to the recognition that "this is my life now."Enlivened by the piercing vision, acute perception and mordant humour that are the hallmarks of the work of Joyce Carol Oates, this is an extremely moving tale of life and death, love and grief.

A Widow's Story: A Memoir. by Joyce Carol Oates

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Joyce Carol Oates. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Joyce Carol Oates

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Joyce Carol Oates. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Big Mouth and Ugly Girl

I'll Take You There

I'll Take You There

Big Mouth & Ugly Girl

Mother, Missing

Mother, Missing

Black Girl/White Girl - A Novel

The Gravedigger's Daughter

Little Bird of Heaven

A Widow's Story: A Memoir. by Joyce Carol Oates