Joyce Carol Oates

A family of six disintegrates after a daughter is raped by a high-school student. It happens to the wealthy Mulvaneys in upstate New York. The disgrace--there is some question if it was rape--sends the father to drink and financial ruin, the girl leaves home, the others follow.

"Amid a starkly beautiful but uncanny landscape in New Mexico, a married couple from Cambridge, MA takes up residency at a distinguished academic institute. When the husband is stricken with a mysterious illness, misdiagnosed at first, their lives are uprooted and husband and wife each embarks upon a nightmare journey. At thirty-seven, Michaela faces the terrifying prospect of widowhood -- and the loss of Gerard, whose identity has greatly shaped...

When evangelical Luther Dunphy assassinates abortion doctor Augustus Vorhees, the two grieving families find their lives intricately linked.

After being attacked by a man who believed she was someone else and assaulted by her husband, Rebecca Schwartz reflects on her life of violence--her father killed her mother and himself and her brothers were also violent men--and decides to take her nine-year-old son and create a new life.

When a young girl disappears near a community in the Adirondacks, the people of the town of Carthage must face the fact that an Iraq War veteran is the prime suspect.

This novel provides an examination of contemporary America through the prism of a family tragedy: when a powerful parent dies, each of his adult children reacts in startling and unexpected ways, and his grieving widow in the most surprising way of all. Stark and penetrating, it's an exploration of psychological trauma, class warfare, grief, and eventual healing.

From the legendary literary master, winner of the National Book Award and New York Times bestselling author Joyce Carol Oates, a collection of thirteen mesmerizing stories that maps the eerie darkness within us all. Insightful, disturbing, imaginative, and breathtaking in their lyrical precision, the stories in Lovely, Dark, Deep display Joyce Carol Oates's magnificent ability to make visceral the terror, hurt, and uncertainty that lurks at the edges...

"Which should prevail: loyalty to family or loyalty to the truth? Is telling the truth ever a mistake and is lying for one's family ever justified? Can one do the right thing, but bitterly regret it? ... My Life as a Rat follows Violet Rue Kerrigan, a young woman who looks back upon her life in exile from her family following her testimony, at age twelve, concerning what she knew to be the racist murder of an African-American boy by her older brothers....

Sixteen-year-old Katya Spiva is walking with her two summer babysitting charges in Bayhead Harbor, New Jersey, when she's approached by silver-haired, gentlemanly Marcus Kidder, a local resident of some renown. What does this mysterious rich man really want from Katya, who is young enough to be his granddaughter? And what will he risk to get it?

Genna Meade looks back from the perspective of fifteen years to 1975 when, as a student at an exclusive women's liberal arts college near Philadelphia, she tried to befriend one of the school's few African-American students who was the victim of racially-motivated harassment.