Great Books

January 21, 2010

Joyce Carol

Joyce Carol
Has anyone read Expensive People by Joyce Carol Oates?

I can not find the book as far as a summary of the plot, information, or anything really.

These links may help you: http://www.randomhouse.com/modernlibrary/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780812976540 http://jco.usfca.edu/works/novels/expensive.html

Faithless: Tales of Transgression Faithless: Tales of Transgression
List Price: $14.95
Sale Price: $3.59

In this collection of twenty-one unforgettable stories, Joyce Carol Oates explores the mysterious private lives of men and women with vivid, unsparing precision and sympathy. By turns interlocutor and interpreter, magician and realist, she dissects the psyches of ordinary people and their potential for good and evil with chilling understatement and lasting power.

Penzler Pick, March 2001: I guess it's no secret that I regard Joyce Carol Oates as one of the great living American writers, both of mystery-crime-suspense fiction and of virtually every other form invented. I previously reviewed Blonde, which went on to be nominated for a National Book Award, and it's my joy to be able to recommend Faithless: Tales of Transgression, the stories within which are about as good as the short story gets. (Full disclosure here, with the admission that I might be a trifle prejudiced in favor of this volume. It is dedicated to Alice Turner, the former fiction editor of Playboy, and to me--largely, I reckon, because several of these stories were written especially for several anthologies of which I was the editor.) There are 24 stories in this generous volume and while some inevitably linger longer in the memory than others, there is not a dull spot in its nearly 400 pages. The title story is a haunting tale of the disappearance of a woman as recalled by her two daughters, grown now. The ending is utterly expected but, nevertheless, comes as a shock. "The Vampire" is not at all a horror story, at least not in the sense that it involves in any way elements of the supernatural, but has a growing sense of pure terror as the reader comes to see the way in which one person can absorb all the life out of another. In "The High School Sweetheart: A Mystery," a famous mystery writer reads a speech as he accepts the presidency of the most prestigious of all mystery organizations. The speech is delivered as a piece of fiction that appears to be a confession of a horrific crime committed during his teen years while besotted with a girl two years older than he. When the speech ends, the audience cannot imagine applauding because the story seems so true. Is it? Once again, the incomparable Joyce Carol Oates has produced a compelling and important volume for the shelves of anyone who cares about distinguished suspense fiction. --Otto Penzler

Zombie: A Novel (P.S.) Zombie: A Novel (P.S.)
List Price: $13.99
Sale Price: $6.02

Meet Quentin P. He is a problem for his professor father and his loving mother, though of course they do not believe the charge (sexual molestation of a minor) that got him in that bit of trouble. He is a challenge for his court-appointed psychiatrist, who nonetheless is encouraged by the increasingly affirmative quality of his dreams and his openness in discussing them. He is a thoroughly sweet young man for his wealthy grandmother, who gives him more and more, and can deny him less and less. He is the most believable and thoroughly terrifying sexual psychopath and killer ever to be brought to life in fiction, as Joyce Carol Oates achieves her boldest and most brilliant triumph yet—a dazzling work of art that extends the borders of the novel into the darkest heart of truth.

Little Bird of Heaven: A Novel Little Bird of Heaven: A Novel
List Price: $25.99
Sale Price: $9.17

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.

A Fair Maiden A Fair Maiden
List Price: $22.00
Sale Price: $5.57

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 couldn’t be more different from Katya’s drab working-class existence back home in South Jersey, or more enticing. But by degrees, almost imperceptibly, something changes, and posing for Mr. Kidder’s new painting isn’t the lighthearted endeavor it once was. What does he really want from her? And how far will he go to get it? In the tradition of Oates’s classic story "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" A Fair Maiden is an unsettling, ambiguous tale of desire and control.

I Am No One You Know: Stories I Am No One You Know: Stories
List Price: $13.99
Sale Price: $4.79

I Am No One You Know contains nineteen startling stories that bear witness to the remarkably varied lives of Americans of our time. In "Fire," a troubled young wife discovers a rare, radiant happiness in an adulterous relationship. In "Curly Red," a girl makes a decision to reveal a family secret, and changes her life irrevocably. In "The Girl with the Blackened Eye," selected for The Best American Mystery Stories 2001, a girl pushed to an even greater extreme of courage and desperation manages to survive her abduction by a serial killer. And in "Three Girls," two adventuresome NYU undergraduates seal their secret love by following, and protecting, Marilyn Monroe in disguise at Strand Used Books on a snowy evening in 1956. These vividly rendered portraits of women, men, and children testify to Oates's compassion for the mysterious and luminous resources of the human spirit.

In Rough Country: Essays and Reviews In Rough Country: Essays and Reviews
List Price: $14.99
Sale Price: $7.48

In twenty-nine provocative essays, Joyce Carol Oates maps the "rough country" that is both the treacherous geographical and psychological terrain of the writers she so cogently analyzes—Flannery O'Connor, Cormac McCarthy, Philip Roth, E. L. Doctorow, and Margaret Atwood, among others—and the emotional terrain of Oates's own life following the unexpected death of her husband, Raymond Smith, after forty-eight years of marriage. "As literature is a traditional solace to the bereft, so writing about literature can be a solace, as it was to me when the effort of writing fiction seemed beyond me, as if belonging to another lifetime," 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 results of those meditations are the essays of In Rough Country—balanced and illuminating investigations that demonstrate an artist working at the top of her form.

Wild Nights!: Stories About the Last Days of Poe, Dickinson, Twain, James, and Hemingway Wild Nights!: Stories About the Last Days of Poe, Dickinson, Twain, James, and Hemingway
List Price: $24.95
Sale Price: $6.54

Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson, Samuel Clemens ("Mark Twain"), Henry James, Ernest Hemingway—Joyce Carol Oates evokes each of these American literary icons in her newest work of prose fiction, poignantly and audaciously reinventing the climactic events of their lives. In subtly nuanced language suggestive of each of these writers, Oates explores the mysterious regions of the unknowable self that is "genius"—for Edgar Allan Poe, a belated encounter with bizarre life‑forms utterly alien to the poet's exalted Romantic aesthetics; for Emily Dickinson, resurrected in the twenty-first century in a "distilled" state, a belated encounter with blundering humanity and brute passion of a kind excluded from the poet's verse; for the elderly, renowned Samuel Clemens, a belated encounter with impassioned innocence, in the form of "the little girl who loves you"; for Henry James, an aging volunteer in a London hospital during World War I, a belated encounter with the physicality of desire and the raw yearning of love long absent from the master's fiction; and, for Ernest Hemingway, the most tragic of these figures, a belated encounter with the "profound mysteries of the world outside him, and the profound mysteries of the world inside him." Wild Nights! is Joyce Carol Oates's most original and haunting work of the imagination, a writer's memoirist work in the form of fiction.

The Falls: A Novel The Falls: A Novel
List Price: $16.95
Sale Price: $2.59

It is 1950 and, after a disastrous honeymoon night, Ariah Erskine's young husband throws himself into the roaring waters of Niagara Falls. Ariah, "the Widow Bride of the Falls," begins a relentless seven-day vigil in the mist, waiting for his body to be found. At her side is confirmed bachelor and pillar of the community Dirk Burnaby, who is unexpectedly drawn to this plain, strange woman. What follows is a passionate love affair, marriage, and family—a seemingly perfect existence. But the tragedy by which they were thrown together begins to shadow them, damaging their idyll with distrust, greed, and even murder. Set against the mythic-historic backdrop of Niagara Falls in the mid-twentieth century, this haunting exploration of the American family in crisis is a stunning achievement from "one of the great artistic forces of our time" (The Nation).

Middle Age: A Romance Middle Age: A Romance
List Price: $14.95
Sale Price: $3.49

In Salthill-on-Hudson, a half-hour train ride from Manhattan, everyone is rich, beautiful, and -- though they look much younger -- middle-aged. But when Adam Berendt, a charismatic, mysterious sculptor, dies suddenly in a brash act of heroism, shock waves rock the town. But who was Adam Berendt? Was he in fact a hero, or someone more flawed and human?

Blonde: A Novel Blonde: A Novel
List Price: $16.95
Sale Price: $5.26

In her most ambitious work to date, Joyce Carol Oates boldly reimagines the inner, poetic, and spiritual life of Norma Jeane Baker -- the child, the woman, the fated celebrity and idolized blonde the world came to know as Marilyn Monroe. In a voice startlingly intimate and rich, Norma Jeane tells her own story of an emblematic American artist -- intensely conflicted and driven -- who had lost her way. A powerful portrait of Hollywood's myth and an extraordinary woman's heartbreaking reality, Blonde is a sweeping epic that pays tribute to the elusive magic and devastation behind the creation of the great twentieth-century American star.

Penzler Pick, April 2000: It is surprising and shocking to realize that Joyce Carol Oates, one of the great writers living today, has never made The New York Times bestseller list (at least not in recent memory). Far less talented (and less famous) authors have made it while she, in all likelihood not caring much, has been shut out. That could easily change with her new novel, Blonde, which may be the masterpiece of a staggeringly distinguished career. This 700-plus-page tome is based on the life of (you guessed it) Marilyn Monroe. In fictional form, with names changed (husband Joe DiMaggio is referred to as "The Ex-Athlete," Arthur Miller as "The Playwright," John F. Kennedy as "The President," for example), this may be the most accurate and compelling portrait of this beautiful and complex woman that one is ever likely to read. But why discuss it on the mystery page, you might well be asking yourself. It was the author's intent to structure the book as a mystery, and of course she succeeds, as she seems to succeed at everything she attempts in the world of letters. And there is a murder, apparently arranged by a secret government bureau (FBI? CIA?), although that could be the victim's hallucination. Of course, it could also be both real and hallucinated (remember, even paranoids have enemies). If you like biographies, you'll like Blonde. If you like novels, you'll like Blonde. If you like mysteries, you'll like Blonde. And if you fear that more than 700 pages by one of the greatest of living literary lions might be tough slogging, here's a little excerpt from the chapter titled "The President's Pimp:" Sure he was a pimp. But not just any pimp. Not him! He was a pimp par excellence. A pimp nonpareil. A pimp sui generis. A pimp with a wardrobe, and a pimp with style. A pimp with a classy Brit accent. Posterity would honor him as the President's Pimp. A man of pride and stature: the President's Pimp. At Rancho Mirage in Palm Springs in March 1962 there was the President poking him in the ribs with a low whistle. "That blonde. That's Marilyn Monroe?" He told the President yes it was. Monroe, a friend of his. Luscious, eh? But a little crazy. Thoughtfully, the President asked, "Have I dated her yet?" Nothing inaccessible about Joyce Carol Oates, especially in this most readable and relentlessly fascinating study of the lovely woman with whom the whole country was at least a little in love. --Otto Penzler


ANGEL OF LIGHT by JOYCE CAROL OATES 1st DJ HC 1981 ANGEL OF LIGHT by JOYCE CAROL OATES 1st DJ HC 1981 Paypal US $5.99 2h 39m
Broke Heart Blues By Joyce Carol Oates Broke Heart Blues By Joyce Carol Oates Paypal US $3.69 4h 27m
You Must Remember This By Joyce Carol Oates You Must Remember This By Joyce Carol Oates Paypal US $2.99 4h 28m
NEW Sexy by Joyce Carol Oates NEW Sexy by Joyce Carol Oates Paypal US $1.86 7h 3m
Little Bird of Heaven A Novel by Joyce Carol Oates Little Bird of Heaven A Novel by Joyce Carol Oates Paypal US $17.95 9h 9m
The Falls A Novel Joyce Carol Oates 0060722282 2004 The Falls A Novel Joyce Carol Oates 0060722282 2004 Paypal US $3.50 9h 16m
Man Crazy A Novel Joyce Carol Oates 0452277248 1998 Man Crazy A Novel Joyce Carol Oates 0452277248 1998 Paypal US $1.00 9h 20m
Black Girl White Girl Joyce Carol Oates 0061125652 200 Black Girl White Girl Joyce Carol Oates 0061125652 200 Paypal US $1.00 9h 25m
Wonderland Modern Library Paperbacks Joyce Carol Oate Wonderland Modern Library Paperbacks Joyce Carol Oate Paypal US $4.99 9h 30m
We Were the Mulvaneys Oprahs Book Club Joyce Carol O We Were the Mulvaneys Oprahs Book Club Joyce Carol O Paypal US $2.00 9h 33m
The Falls by Joyce Carol Oates 2008 Paperback Rei The Falls by Joyce Carol Oates 2008 Paperback Rei Paypal US $3.99 10h 11m
BLACK WATER Joyce Carol Oates 1992 First Ed HBDJ BLACK WATER Joyce Carol Oates 1992 First Ed HBDJ Paypal US $10.00 10h 27m
The Barrens by Joyce Carol Oates 2001 Hardcover The Barrens by Joyce Carol Oates 2001 Hardcover Paypal US $1.99 10h 58m
My Sister My Love by Joyce Carol Oates Hardcover My Sister My Love by Joyce Carol Oates Hardcover Paypal 0 Bid US $.89 11h 13m
The Barrens Joyce Carol Oates 1ST EDIT VERY NICE HARDC The Barrens Joyce Carol Oates 1ST EDIT VERY NICE HARDC Paypal US $5.99 11h 27m
We Were the Mulvaneys by Joyce Carol Oates 2001 Pa We Were the Mulvaneys by Joyce Carol Oates 2001 Pa Paypal 0 Bid US $3.00 11h 27m
PAIR OF JOYCE CAROL OATES TITLES FIRST LOVE BEASTS PAIR OF JOYCE CAROL OATES TITLES FIRST LOVE BEASTS Paypal US $10.49 11h 57m
Marya A Life by Joyce Carol Oates First Edition Signed Marya A Life by Joyce Carol Oates First Edition Signed Paypal US $29.00 13h 2m
WE WERE THE MULVANEYS JOYCE CAROL OATES PAPERBACK N WE WERE THE MULVANEYS JOYCE CAROL OATES PAPERBACK N Paypal US $12.52 13h 25m
The Gravediggers Daughter A Novel PS Joyce Carol The Gravediggers Daughter A Novel PS Joyce Carol Paypal US $1.00 13h 28m
The Blacker the Berry Joyce Carol Thomas Floyd Cooper The Blacker the Berry Joyce Carol Thomas Floyd Cooper Paypal US $28.95 13h 38m
My Sister My Love by Joyce Carol Oates 2009 Paper My Sister My Love by Joyce Carol Oates 2009 Paper Paypal US $2.99 13h 51m
BLONDE PB Joyce Carol Oates PAP BLONDE PB Joyce Carol Oates PAP Paypal US $21.22 13h 54m
We Were the Mulvaneys Oprahs Book Club Joyce Carol We Were the Mulvaneys Oprahs Book Club Joyce Carol Paypal US $1.00 14h 51m
We Were the Mulvaneys Joyce Carol Oates New 6 CDs We Were the Mulvaneys Joyce Carol Oates New 6 CDs Paypal US $12.95 14h 53m
We Were the Mulvaneys by Joyce Carol Oates Paperback We Were the Mulvaneys by Joyce Carol Oates Paperback Paypal 0 Bid US $5.99 14h 58m
Oates Joyce Carol THE SOPHISTICATED CAT 1st Oates Joyce Carol THE SOPHISTICATED CAT 1st Paypal US $100.00 15h 38m
MISSING MOM by JOYCE CAROL OATES MISSING MOM by JOYCE CAROL OATES Paypal US $1.99 16h 7m
Blonde by Joyce Carol Oates 2001 book Blonde by Joyce Carol Oates 2001 book Paypal US $10.00 16h 9m
Little Bird of Heaven by Joyce Carol Oates 2010 Pa Little Bird of Heaven by Joyce Carol Oates 2010 Pa Paypal 0 Bid US $.98 17h 20m
Joyce Carol Oates We Were The Mulvaneys Oprahs Club Joyce Carol Oates We Were The Mulvaneys Oprahs Club Paypal 0 Bid US $.99 18h 44m
The Falls A Novel PS Joyce Carol Oates 0060722290 The Falls A Novel PS Joyce Carol Oates 0060722290 Paypal US $2.00 20h 13m
We Were the Mulvaneys Joyce Carol Oates 0452277205 199 We Were the Mulvaneys Joyce Carol Oates 0452277205 199 Paypal US $2.00 20h 17m
The Falls By Joyce Carol Oates The Falls By Joyce Carol Oates Paypal US $2.99 1d 3h 5m
Marya A Life Pavanne Books By Joyce Carol Oates Marya A Life Pavanne Books By Joyce Carol Oates Paypal US $2.99 1d 3h 6m
THE SOPHISTICATED CAT JOYCE CAROL OATES DANIEL HALPE THE SOPHISTICATED CAT JOYCE CAROL OATES DANIEL HALPE Paypal US $5.00 1d 4h 4m
Heat and Other Stories by Joyce Carol Oates 1992 P Heat and Other Stories by Joyce Carol Oates 1992 P Paypal US $1.00 1d 4h 15m
Do With Me What You Will by Joyce Carol Oats 1974 Do With Me What You Will by Joyce Carol Oats 1974 Paypal US $1.25 1d 5h 22m
The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates 1973 1982 Joyce Caro The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates 1973 1982 Joyce Caro Paypal US $6.95 1d 6h 57m

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