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Stories
The sixteen stories of Sourland beautifully resonate with the author's trademark fascination for the unpredictable in the midst of the 'ordinary' - the commingling of sexual love and violence, the tumult of family life, a predilection for dark humor, and a gift for voice. The inhabitants of Sourland are as varied as a desperate man who dons a jack-o-lantern head as a prelude to a most curious sort of courtship, a story of a stabbing many times recounted in the life of a lonely young girl, a beguiling young woman librarian whose amputee state attracts a married man and father, a girl hopelessly in love with her renegade, incarcerated cousin, and a professor's wife who finds herself tragically isolated at the party she is hosting for her beloved husband's colleagues.
"Oates's fiction has the curious, morbid draw of a flaming car wreck. It's a testament to Oates's talent that she can nearly always force the reader to look." - Publishers Weekly
"Starred Review. This is a trenchant book of 'cruel fairy tales' in which people are severely tested, profoundly punished, and tragically transformed." - Booklist
"When Oates is at her best, the work reflects a delicious boundary-crossing mix of literary artistry and genre-writing skill. The stories that work less well lack the requisite subtlety to transcend the journalistic taint." - Library Journal
This information about Sourland was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Photo by Dustin Cohen
Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Humanities Medal, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Book Award, and the 2019 Jerusalem Prize for Lifetime Achievement, and has been nominated several times for the Pulitzer Prize. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the national bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys; Blonde; and the New York Times bestseller The Falls, which won the 2005 Prix Femina. In 2020 she was awarded the Cino Del Duca World Prize for Literature. She is the Roger S. Berlind '52 Distinguished Professor of the Humanities emerita at Princeton University and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978.
Pony Confidential
by Christina Lynch
In this whimsical mystery, a grumpy pony must clear his beloved human's name from a murder accusation.
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Wisdom is the reward you get for a lifetime of listening when you'd rather have been talking
Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!
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