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Joyce Carol Oates

Love Mysteries? Love Books? Here’s a Collection For You

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If you like mysteries and you like books, there’s a collection of stories you should know about. Bibliomysteries: Volume Two, edited by Otto Penzler and to be published in August by Pegasus, is just what the title implies: a collection of crime stories about rare books, bookshops, libraries, manuscripts, magical books, collectors, and the like. Among the 15 stories, Ian Rankin sets his tale of the lost manuscript of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in the legendary Paris bookshop Shakespeare & Co., while F. Paul Wilson offers a book with remarkable powers; Joyce Carol Oates portrays an overly ambitious dealer in mystery fiction; James Grady has the “Condor” working in the Library of Congress; Stephen Hunter tells a previously unknown story of Alan…

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Women’s History Month: Authors Tweet Support of Women’s March National School Walk Out

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Women’s March is planning a national school walk out on Wednesday, March 14 in solidarity with the students in Parkland, Florida who have organized a National School Walk Out for March 24.  The purpose of both marches is to bring awareness to the gun violence epidemic in the U.S. and to advocate for common sense gun laws that help keep both our children and our schools safe. Another walk out is scheduled for March 24 and is being organized by March For Our Lives, the organization started by Stoneman Douglas survivors. Wednesday’s March, organized by Women’s March youth group EMPOWER, will begin at 10:00 am EST and last 17 minutes— one minute for each of those lives lost at Stoneman Douglas…

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Sacred and Complex, Amy Bloom’s ‘White Houses’ Chronicles First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt’s Secret Affair

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One of the highlights of my year, thus far, was interviewing bestselling author, Amy Bloom about her new book, White Houses. Released in time for Valentine’s Day (February 13, Penguin Random House) with rave reviews from the likes of Joyce Carol Oates, White Houses is a love story about a complex affair steeped in our history between a First Lady and a woman— a journalist— that spanned more than three decades. Bloom’s novel is based on the real-life love affair between Eleanor Roosevelt and Lorena “Hick” Hickok. This story about to women in love is wrought with obvious challenges given the times— when same-sex relationships and extramarital affairs were taboo.  Add substantial class differences between the women and therein lies a story…

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We All Have a Dark Side: 8 Thrillers from Joyce Carol Oates

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Few authors have been as prolific as literary powerhouse Joyce Carol Oates. Since publishing her first book in 1963, she’s written over 40 novels, nabbed every award imaginable, and earned a coveted endorsement from Oprah Winfrey—all the while experimenting with different formats and genres. One such genre is psychological suspense, for which she frequently writes under the nom de plume “Rosamund Smith.” In Oates’ hands, the darkest corners of humanity are brought to life, turning our worst nightmares into page-turners and New York Times bestsellers. From sex and vengeance to murder and obsession, the Joyce Carol Oates books below are a taste of the National Book Award winner’s most chilling works. And if you love them as much as we…

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Authors Tweet Support for Women’s Marches Around the World

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It’s safe to say that the women’s march in Washington, D.C., on Saturday, January 21, was a huge success. The peaceful rally drew people from all over the world, with satellite marches popping up in cities across the globe (including Antartica!). The numbers are still rolling in, but some sites are reporting that there was an estimated three times the amount of people at the march than there were at Trump’s Inauguration the day before. Many popular authors attended marches around the country, and they took to Twitter to talk about it: Judy Blume tweeted a photo from the Key West march in Florida:   Stephen King joined a rally in Sarasota:   Elizabeth Gilbert shared some of the signs she saw at the…

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Long time, no publish? Authors who are worth the wait

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When Lorrie Moore released Bark: Stories (Knopf) in February of this year, it was with much ballyhoo. After all, 15 years had passed since her last collection of short stories—Birds of America, which garnered wide praise for its insight and humor, and was named a New York Times bestseller. If anyone expected Moore to miss a step after a long hiatus, that misguided reader was surely disappointed. It’s not uncommon for authors to go years between book releases. The creative process may account for some delay, and then there’s the business of selling a book: copyediting, jacket design, the sale of foreign rights, and the slow drumbeat of social media. That said, certain writers take more time than others. Here’s…

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Journey into some favorite books with a “bibliomemoir”

in Fiction by

I retain only the vaguest impressions of George Eliot’s Middlemarch. I read it as a 19-year-old study abroad student in England, too busy exploring a new country and having my first romance to fully appreciate an 800-page treasure of literature. I certainly missed out on the life-changing experience with Eliot that Rebecca Mead, author of the recent My Life in Middlemarch, had as an English teenager in rural Dorset. Now 45 and a New Yorker staff writer, Mead has reread Middlemarch countless times, always gleaning new emotional and philosophical insights. Virginia Woolf famously called Middlemarch “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people,” and though Mead first met it as an adolescent, it has carried her through into…

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