Joyce Carol Oates

A CrimeReads, AARP, Los Angeles Magazine and Dayton Daily News "Most Anticipated" Release

In the newest literary thriller from celebrated author Joyce Carol Oates, a woman mysteriously vanishes, leaving her sister behind to tally up the clues and discover her fate.

What has become of Marguerite Fulmer? On an otherwise average day in Upstate New York, the young woman left her family...

As a child, Abby had the same recurring nightmare night after night, in which she wandered through a field ridden with human skulls and bones. Now an adult, Abby thinks she's outgrown her demons until, the evening before her wedding, the terrible dream returns, forcing her to confront the dark secrets from her past that she has kept from her new husband, Willem. The following day--less than 24 hours after exchanging vows--Abby steps out into traffic....

"Joyce Carol Oates explores the most secret, intimate, and unacknowledged interior lives of characters not unlike ourselves, who assert their independence in acts of bold and often irrevocable defiance. "Fleuve Bleu" exemplifies the rich sensuousness of Oates's prose as lovers married to other persons vow to establish, in their intimacy, a ruthlessly honest, truth-telling authenticity missing elsewhere in their complicated lives, with unexpected results....

At thirty-seven, Michaela faces the terrifying prospect of widowhood... and the loss of Gerard, whose identity has greatly shaped her own. They moved from Cambridge, MA to take residency at a distinguished academic institute in New Mexico. Gerard's mysterious illness, misdiagnosed at first, has uprooted their lives, but Michaela cares desperately for Gerard in his final days as she comes to realize that her love for her husband, however fierce and...

The book opens with a woman, naked except for her high-heeled shoes, seated in front of the window in an apartment she cannot, on her own, afford. In this exquisitely tense narrative reimagining of Edward Hopper's Eleven A.M., 1926, the reader enters the minds of both the woman and her married lover, each consumed by alternating thoughts of disgust and arousal, as he rushes, amorously, murderously, to her door. In "The Long-Legged Girl," an aging,...

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 until they meet again as adults, ready to exorcise the ghosts of the past and come to terms with their legacy...

This is the story of missing my mother. One day, in a way unique to you, it will be your story, too. So begins Missing Mom, Joyce Carol Oates personal and candid new novel. Nikki Eaton, a single, 31-year-old, sexually liberated and economically self-supporting young woman, never particularly thought of herself as a daughter. Yet following the unexpected loss of her mother, her identity is transformed during the course of a tumultuous

...

A major historical novel from "one of the great artistic forces of our time" (The Nation)--an eerie, unforgettable story of possession, power, and loss in early-twentieth-century Princeton, a cultural crossroads of the powerful and the damned
Princeton, New Jersey, at the turn of the twentieth century: a tranquil place to raise a family, a genteel town for genteel souls. But something dark and dangerous lurks at the edges of the town,

...

"Andrew J. Rush has achieved the kind of critical and commercial success most authors only dream about: he has a top agent and publisher in New York, and his twenty-eight mystery novels have sold millions of copies around the world. He also has a loving wife and three grown children and is a well-known philanthropist in his small New Jersey town. But Rush is hiding a dark secret. Under the pseudonym "Jack of Spades," he pens another string of novels--...

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.