Joyce Carol Oates

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Joyce Carol Oates's Latest Book

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  • Bibliography:
    164 Books (1 Series)
  • First Book:
    January 1966
  • Latest Book:
    June 2025
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Full Series List in Order

Wonderland Quartet

Expensive People (Oct-1968)
Them (1970)
Wonderland (Jan-1979)

Multi-Author Series List

Bibliomysteries

26 - Mystery, Inc. (Apr-2015)

Book List in Order: 164 titles

  • A Garden of Earthly Delights

    • / Contemporary Romance
    • Buy Buy

    In this stirringly powerful novel, Joyce Carol Oates tells the story of Clara, the golden child of a migrant worker, whose fragile and haunting beauty plunges her too swiftly into womanhood. With superb dramatic irony the novel captures the terrible ...

  • Expensive People

    Wonderland Quartet

    Joyce Carol Oates’s Wonderland Quartet comprises four remarkable novels that explore social class in America and the inner lives of young Americans. In Expensive People, Oates takes a provocative and suspenseful look at the roiling secrets of Ameri...

  • Them

    • / Historical Romance
    • Buy Buy
    Wonderland Quartet

    A novel about class, race, and the horrific, glassy sparkle of urban life, them chronicles the lives of the Wendall's, a family on the steep edge of poverty in the windy, riotous Detroit slums. Loretta, beautiful and dreamy and full of regret by age ...

  • Upon the Sweeping Flood and Other Stories

  • The Hostile Sun

  • The Poisoned Kiss and Other Stories from the Portuguese

  • Goddes and Other Women

  • Wheel of Love

  • New Heaven, New Earth



  • Crossing the Border

  • Marriages and Infidelities: Short Stories

  • Triumph of the Spider Monkey

    New York Times"bestselling author Unavailable for 40 years, this seminal crime novel of madness and murder is a powerful trip into the mind of a maniac -- and features a never-before-seen companion novella. “Oates’ tale of criminal psy...

  • Wonderland

    Wonderland Quartet

    Joyce Carol Oates’s Wonderland Quartet comprises four remarkable novels that explore social class in America and the inner lives of young Americans. Spanning from the Great Depression to the turbulent Vietnam War era, Wonderland is the epic accou...

  • Son of the Morning

    The latest Ecco reissue of Joyce Carol Oates’ early classics: a fiery gothic tale of doomed fates and demons of biblical proportions in rural New York state Nathan Vickery came into the world amid unfortunate circumstances. His mother, Elsa Vi...

  • Cybele

  • Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?

    "

    Joyce Carol Oates''s prize-winning story ""Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?"" takes up troubling subjects that continue to occupy her in her fiction: the romantic longings and limited options of adolescent women; the tensions between mot...

  • Night-Side

  • Sentimental Education

    A collection of stories exploring the puzzles and potentials of passionate love includes tales of a divorcee's hasty marriage, a rich executive's affair with a wayward girl, and the erotic love between two cousins...

  • Contraries



  • The Seduction and Other Stories

    "17 stories: An American Adventure, Gifts,Getting and Spending, Splendid Architecture, On the Gulf, The Seduction, Passions and Meditations, 6.27pm, Out of Place, Notes on Contributors, The Imposters, Years of Wonders, The Madwoman, Double Tragedy st...

  • Angel of Light

    A story of loyalty, betrayal, revenge and finally, forgiveness. It begins when Maurice Halleck, Director of the Commission for the Ministry of Justice is accused of wrongdoing, then dies in a suspicious car accident. A suicide note and confession are...

  • Bellefleur

    Travel through a "dark, chaotic, unfathomable pool of time" with JOYCE CAROL OATES as she explores the Bellefleur curse. Your journey begins one dark and stormy night when Mahalaleel arrives at the 64-room castle and everything begins to happen to: ...

  • Assassins

  • Childwold

    A lonely middle-aged eccentric named Kasch falls in love with a beautiful fourteen-year-old girl named Laney and becomes fatefully involved with her family, inhabitants of the distant, impoverished, but enchanting region of Childwold...

  • Unholy Loves

    Looks at the lives of the men and women of a prestigious upstate college, including Albert St. Dennis, Professor of Poetry, and the people he meets--Brigit, a divorcee, and Alexis, a pianist and composer...

  • A Bloodsmoor Romance

    One beauteous autumn day in 1879, a sinister black balloon swooped from the skies and abducted Miss Deirdre Zinn as her four sisters gaped, mute and terror-struck. For their family nothing was ever the same again......

  • Do With Me What You Will

    DO WITH ME WHAT YOU WILL brings to life in Elena Howe the year's most transfixing heroine. A novel with a contemporary setting reflecting today's social upheavals and shifting morality, it is, in the author's words, "a love story that concentrates up...

  • Mysteries of Winterthurn

    Lurid, Bloody, Shocking... The secrets of Winterthurn are as dark and violent as a winter's night. Evil grips the town, smothering its first families in a demonic spell. Innocent babes are eaten away. Honeymooners, mutilated. Gullible girls bludge...

  • Last Days



  • Solstice

    Two women meet. One, Monica Jensen, is in her late twenties, vulnerable and insecure, not yet over the shock of her recent divorce, a teacher at a boys' private school in rural Pennsylvania. The other, Sheila Trask, is in her mid-thirties, the widow ...

  • Wild Nights!

    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 e...

  • Jigsaw

  • Marya: A Life

    A deeply intimate psychological portrait of a young woman's tragic childhood, her reinvention as a successful young artist in the literary circles of 1950s New York City, and her struggle to understand and overcome the trauma of her past.Growing up i...

  • Raven's Wing

    A collection of sixteen stories explores the mysteries and varieties of American experience and includes "Golden Gloves," the story of a would-be champion boxer whose career and marriage fall tragically short of his expectations...

  • You Must Remember This

    Joyce Carol Oates's epic novel of an American family in the 1950's probes the tender division between the permissible and the forbidden, between ordinary life and the secret places of the heart. Set in an industrial, working-class town in upstate New...

  • The Assignation

    A woman's lover seems not to recognize her on the street. A teenage girl accepts a ride from a stranger in a rust-speckled Cadillac. An old man is obsessed by the memory of his innocent childhood intrusion on a half-dressed aunt.In forty-four very sh...

  • American Appetites

    Finally returned to print in a beautiful new trade paperback edition, American Appetites is classic Joyce Carol Oates -- a suspenseful thriller in which the happy facade of an affluent suburban couple crumbles under the weight of tragedy and scandal....

  • Woman Writer

    Twenty-seven essays touch upon everything from Moby Dick to Boxing, cover literati from Emily Dickinson to Kafka, and take up the fiery debate over differences and similarities between male and female writers...

  • Time Traveler



  • Conversations with Joyce Carol Oates

  • Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart

    Iris Courtney, a young white woman living in upstate New York in the decade prior to the Civil rights movement, begins a clandestine relationship with Jinx Fairchild, a black man who had defended her in a fatal street fight with a white man...

  • I Lock My Door Upon Myself

    A fictional biography of Edith Margaret Freilicht offers a complex portrait of the willful, eccentric, and enigmatic "Calla"--an elusive woman who views her world as through a dream--and her relationship with Tyrell Thompson, an itinerant black farm ...

  • Oates in Exile

  • Heat: And Other Stories

  • Black Water

    The Pulitzer Prize-nominated novel from the author of the New York Times bestselling novel We Were the Mulvaneys“Its power of evocation is remarkable.” -- The New Yorker  In the midst of a long summer on Grayling Island, Maine, twenty-six-y...

  • The Rise of Life on Earth

    "Like most important writers―Joyce, Proust, Mann―she has an absolute identification with her material: the spirit of a society at a crucial point in its history."―Walter Clemens, Newsweek

    "Like most important writers―Joyce, Proust, M...

  • The Oxford Book of American Short Stories

    "How ironic," Joyce Carol Oates writes in her introduction to this marvelous collection, "that in our age of rapid mass-production and the easy proliferation of consumer products, the richness and diversity of the American literary imagination should...

  • The Sophisticated Cat

    An anthology of classic stories and poems about cats features the work of Balzac, Chekhov, Colette, Poe, Twain, Runyon, Hemingway, Oates, Adams, LeGuin, Keats, Dickinson, Eliot, Zola, Saki, Wodehouse, and others. 25,000 first printing. $25,000 ad/pro...

  • Where Is Here

    In dramatic, tightly focused narratives charges with tension, menace, and the shock of the unexpected, Where Is Here? examines a world in which ordinary life is electrified by the potential for sudden change. Domestic violence, fear and abandonmen...



  • Foxfire

    New York Times bestselling author Joyce Carol Oates’s strongest and most unsparing novel yet -- an always engrossing, often shocking evocation of female rage, gallantry, and grit. The time is the 1950s. The place is a blue-collar town in ...

  • Will You Always Love Me?: And Other Stories

    • / General Fiction
    • Buy Buy

    Surveying a cross-section of the American scene, a collection of twenty-four short stories takes readers from inner cities to isolated backwaters with such titles as "The Goose Girl" and "Good To Know You." 30,000 first printing....

  • Haunted

    Revealing another side of the accomplished writer's unlimited imagination, sixteen tales of the grotesque include "Accursed Inhabitants of the House of Bly," a reworking of The Turn of the Screw, and the chilling "No Trespassing." Reprint....

  • What I Lived For

    The stunning, classic portrait of a powerful man's downward spiral to moral ruinJerome "Corky" Corcorn. A money-juggling wheeler dealer, rising politico, popular man's man, and successful womanizer. It is a Memorial Day weekend, and we are about to l...

  • On Boxing

    A reissue of bestselling, award-winning author Joyce Carol Oates' classic collection of essays on boxing....

  • The Perfectionist and Other Plays

  • Zombie

    A hero who gets into the mind of a serial killer is a fixture of television crime shows, but such stories are usually disappointing, because the viewer knows it's just a gimmick. Not so with this unusual little novel, which The New York Times called ...

  • George Bellows

    A study of George Bellows' brief but prolific career considers the influences of his early life, examines his more intimate work in portraiture, and offers a perspective on his last work, "The Picket Fence"...

  • At the Paradise Motel, Sparks, Nevada

    in Murder for Love

    Sixteen stories about love gone wrong consider the link between romance and death and include contributions by such popular authors as Mary Higgins Clark, Jonathan Kellerman, Elmore Leonard, Ed McBain, and Joyce Carol Oates. Reprint....

  • Unusual Suspects

  • We Were the Mulvaneys

    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...

  • American Gothic Tales

    Joyce Carol Oates has a special perspective on the “gothic” in American short fiction, at least partially because her own horror yarns rank on the spine-tingling chart with the masters. She is able to see the unbroken link of the macabre that tie...

  • Lover

    in Master's Choice: Volume II

    An outstanding array of crime fiction by some of today's leading authors is accompanied by short stories from the acclaimed writers who inspired them and features works by Ian Rankin, Joyce Carol Oates, Mary Higgins Clark, Evan Hunter, Edgar Allan Po...

  • First Love

    A thirteen-year-old girl moves with her mother to her aunt's house, where she becomes involved in an affair with her aloof, twenty-five-year-old cousin, a seminary student, a liaison that leaves her victimized and confused. Reprint....

  • First Love: A Gothic Tale

  • Man Crazy

    Fresh from the triumph of We Were the Mulvaneys, Joyce Carol Oates continues her exploration of family love and possibilities of human redemption with this compelling story of how one young woman suffers profoundly in the pursuit of love, but manages...

  • Telling Stories

    Drawing on syllabi for Joyce Carol Oates’s own writing seminar at Princeton University, Telling Stories gathers over one hundred works of narrative art―"miniature" narratives, dramatic monologues, early stories by well-known writers, prose pie...

  • My Heart Laid Bare

    New York Times Bestselling AuthorFinally returned to print in a beautiful trade paperback edition, a haunting gothic tale that illuminates the fortunes and misfortunes of a 19th-century immigrant family of confidence artists -- a story of morality, d...

  • Come Meet Muffin!

    When the Smith family rescues Muffin on the side of a country road, he appears to be a typical lost kitten in search of a home. But little Lily Smith soon discovers that this watermelon-loving, peanut-butter eating new friend is no ordinary kitty...

  • The Collector of Hearts

    As a follow-up to the acclaimed anthology Haunted, this collection offers another twenty-seven frightening short stories, including such literary gothic pieces as "The Crossing," "Scars," and "Death Mother."...

  • Broke Heart Blues

    The much-anticipated reissue of a novel that is one of Joyce Carol Oates’s personal favorites among her oeuvre; featuring a new afterword by OatesIN THE HEART OF A LANGUID JULY, ELEVEN-YEAR-OLD JOHN REDDY HEART drives a traffic-stopping, salmon-col...

  • Starr Bright Will Be With You Soon

    As Rosamond Smith, Joyce Carol Oates has explored the secret kinship of twins, often depicted as diabolical doubles who are mirror images of our darker, more violent selves-haunting reflections of our fears and dreads. Starr Bright Will Be with You S...

  • Blonde

    The National Book Award finalist and national bestseller exploring the life and legend of Marilyn MonroeNow a Netflix Film starring Ana de Armas, Adrien Brody, Bobby Cannavale and Julianne NicholsonIn one of her most ambitious works, Joyce Carol Oate...

  • Snapshots

    The stories in this volume are literary snapshots from Isabel Allende, Margaret Atwood, Mary Gordon, Jamaica Kincaid, Gloria Naylor, Alice Walker, and Joyce Carol Oates, among others. All seventeen stories deal with a single, central, and vital th...

  • Irreconcilable Differences

    A collection of twenty original crime stories includes contributions by Edna Buchanan, Jeffery Deaver, Jeremiah Healy, Laurie R. King, Margaret Maron, Joyce Carol Oates, Bill Pronzini, and many others. Reprint....

  • The Barrens

    One of the most powerful and original voices in contemporary American literature turns her remarkable skills in this new novel to the complex and compelling story of a serial killer and the people his crimes touch, and transform. Matt McBride, a seem...

  • Beasts

    In her new novella, the prolific Oates paints a riveting picture of a time when drugs were viewed with a more tolerant eye and sexual promiscuity was the order of the day. The story revolves around a group of college girls in the 1970s and their obse...

  • Big Mouth and Ugly Girl

    When sixteen-year-old Matt is falsely accused of threatening to blow up his high school and his friends turn against him, an unlikely classmate comes to his aid. BIG MOUTH No I did not. I did not, I did not. I did not say those things, and I did ...

  • Faithless

    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 t...

  • I'll Take You There

    "Anellia" is a young student who, though gifted with a penetrating intelligence, is drastically inclined to obsession. Funny, mordant, and compulsive, she falls passionately in love with a brilliant yet elusive black philosophy student. But she is te...

  • Middle Age

    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 ...

  • The Tattooed Girl

    Joshua Seigl, a celebrated but reclusive author, is forced for reasons of failing health to surrender his much-prized bachelor's independence. Advertising for an assistant, he unwittingly embarks upon the most dangerous adventure of his privileged li...

  • Where Is Little Reynard?

    Mama cat has seven kittens. Little Reynard is the smallest, and his brothers and sisters tease him about his size and his orange color. Because he is so small and timid, the little girl, Lily, takes special care of Little Reynard. She gives him hi...

  • Small Avalanches and Other Stories

    When The Sky Blue Ball comes soaring over the fence, a high-school girl is confronted with the haunting memory of childhood. A jealous teen lets her cousin go off alone with a dangerous Capricorn, aware of the terrifying possibilities. A vulnerabl...

  • Rape

    Teena Maguire should not have tried to shortcut her way home that Fourth of July. Not after midnight, not through Rocky Point Park. Not the way she was dressed in a tank top, denim cutoffs, and high-heeled sandals. Not with her twelve-year-old daught...

  • I Am No One You Know

    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 ...

  • Conjunctions: 42, Cinema Lingua

    Now that the art of motion pictures has matured into its second century, Conjunctions has commissioned a diverse group of writers to respond--in poetry, fiction, and multi-genre works--to the countless cultural, historical, psychological and theatric...

  • The Faith of a Writer

    A tribute to the brilliant craftsmanship of one of our most distinguished writers, providing valuable insight into her inspiration and her method Joyce Carol Oates is widely regarded as one of America's greatest contemporary literary figures. Having ...

  • The Falls

    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...

  • Sexy

    It was in November, a Thursday after swim practice. The thing with Mr. Tracy, Darren's English teacher. The thing was how Darren would think of it, afterward. The thing that was vague and not-named. The thing that hadn't happened, anyway. Dar...

  • Freaky Green Eyes

    "Later, I would think of it as crossing over. From a known territory into an unknown. From a place where people know you to a place where people only think they know you." Sometimes Franky Pierson has a hard time dealing with life. Like when her pare...

  • Murder-Two

    in A Moment on the Edge

    "

    “An absolutely first-rate anthology. . . a thoughtful and intelligent paean to crime fiction.” — New York Sun

    #1 New York Times bestselling author Elizabeth George serves up a century''s worth of superb crim...

  • The Female of the Species

    A young wife is home alone when the phone rings in "So Help Me God." Is the strange voice flirting with her from the other end of the line her jealous husband laying a trap, or a stranger who knows entirely too much about her? In "Madison at Guignol"...

  • The Best American Mystery Stories 2005

    The National Book Award-winning author of Then serves as guest editor for this new collection of the outstanding mystery tales of the year, in an anthology that incorporates pieces of short fiction by Scott Turow, Louise Erdrich, Dennis Lehan...

  • Missing Mom

    Nikki Eaton, single, thirty-one, sexually liberated, and economically self-supporting, has never particularly thought of herself as a daughter. Yet, following the unexpected loss of her mother, she undergoes a remarkable transformation during a tumul...

  • Flights: Extreme Visions of Fantasy, Volume I

  • Black Girl // White Girl

    In 1975 Genna Hewett-Meade's college roommate died a mysterious, violent death partway through their freshman year. Minette Swift had been assertive, fiercely individualistic, and one of the few black girls at their exclusive, "enlightened" college--...

  • The Gravedigger's Daughter

    Fleeing Nazi Germany in 1936, the Schwarts immigrate to a small town in upstate New York. Here the father--a former high school teacher--is demeaned by the only job he can get: gravedigger and cemetery caretaker. When local prejudice and the family's...

  • High Lonesome

    No other writer can match the impressive oeuvre of Joyce Carol Oates. High Lonesome: New and Selected Stories 1966-2006 gathers short fiction from the acclaimed author's seminal collections and includes eleven new tales that further demonstrate the b...

  • The Museum of Dr. Moses

    In "The Man Who Fought Roland LaStarza" a woman's world is upended when she learns the brutal truth about a family friend's death--and what her father is capable of. Meanwhile, a businessman desperate to find his missing two-year-old grandson in "Sui...

  • After the Wreck, I Picked Myself Up, Spread My Wings, and Flew Away

    Jenna Abbott separates her life into two categories: before the wreck and after the wreck. Before the wreck, she was leading a normal life with her mom in suburban New York. After the wreck, she is alone, desperate to forget what happened that day on...

  • Tales of H. P. Lovecraft

    When he died in 1937, destitute and emotionally as well as physically ruined, H. P. Lovecraft had no idea that he would one day be celebrated as the godfather of modern horror. A dark visionary, his work would influence an entire generation of writer...

  • Naughty Cherie!

    Naughty Chérie is the cutest kitten in the litter, but she certainly isn't the best-behaved one! She tries, but she can't seem to stay out of trouble. Sitting alone in the corner as punishment, she finds a small crack in the wall that leads to a ...

  • My Sister, My Love

    New York Times bestselling author of The Falls, Blonde, and We Were the Mulvaneys, Joyce Carol Oates returns with a dark, wry, satirical tale--inspired by an unsolved American true-crime mystery. "Dysfunctional families are all alike. Ditto 'surv...

  • The Ecco Anthology of Contemporary American Short Fiction

    A definitive collection of the very best short stories by contemporary American masters

    Edited by Joyce Carol Oates, "the living master of the short story" (Buffalo News), and Christopher R. Beha, this volume provide...

  • Dear Husband: Stories

    A gripping and moving new collection of stories by Joyce Carol Oates, which reimagines the meaning of family--by unexpected, often startling means With the unflinching candor and sympathy for which Joyce Carol Oates is celebrated, these fourteen...

  • Little Bird of Heaven

    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 ...

  • A Fair Maiden

    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 pleasan...

  • Tails of Wonder

    From legendary editor Ellen Datlow, Tails of Wonder collects the best of the last thirty years of science fiction and fantasy stories about cats from an all-star list of contributors. The Stephen King Story is UNCOLLECTED, and has not been in print s...

  • Sourland

    A gripping and moving new collection of stories that reimagines the meaning of loss -- through often unexpected and violent means. Joyce Carol Oates is not only one of our most important novelists and literary critics, she is also an unparalleled ...

  • Give Me Your Heart

    The need for love -- obsessive, self-destructive, unpredictable -- takes us to forbidden places, as in the chilling world of Give Me Your Heart, a new collection of stories by the inimitable Joyce Carol Oates. In the suspenseful "Strip Poker," a ...

  • The Sky Blue Ball

    in What You Wish For

    A stellar collection from Newbery medalists and bestselling authors written to benefit Darfuri refugees With contributions from some of the best talent writing for children today, What You Wish For is a compelling collection of affecting, inspirin...

  • The Corn Maiden

    An incomparable master storyteller in all forms, in The Corn Maiden and Other Nightmares Joyce Carol Oates spins six imaginative tales of suspense. ?The Corn Maiden" is the gut-wrenching story of Marissa, a beautiful and sweet eleven-year-old girl wi...

  • Mudwoman

    Mudgirl is a child abandoned by her mother in the silty flats of the Black Snake River. Cast aside, Mudgirl survives by an accident of fate -- or destiny. After her rescue, the well-meaning couple who adopt Mudgirl quarantine her poisonous history be...

  • Patricide

    Roland Marks is a Nobel Prize winning novelist with a penchant for younger women and four marriages behind him. Lou-Lou Marks, his grown daughter, is a successful academic in her own right. But her real career lies in attending to her father. An egom...

  • Two or Three Things I Forgot to Tell You

    It wasn't like she had not warned us. It wasn't like she had not prepared us. We'd known that something was wrong those last several months. But then, Tink hasn't actually vanished. Tink is gone, and yet -- she is here somewhere, even if ...

  • Black Dahlia & White Rose

    A wildly inventive new collection of stories by Joyce Carol Oates that charts the surprising ways in which the world we think we know can unexpectedly reveal its darker contours The New York Times has hailed Joyce Carol Oates as "a dangerous writ...

  • Daddy Love

    Dinah Whitcomb seemingly has everything. A loving and successful husband, and a smart, precocious young son named Robbie. One day, their worlds are shattered when Dinah is attacked and Robbie is taken in a mall parking lot. Dinah, injured, attempts t...

  • The Rescuer

    Lydia is a graduate student in cultural anthropology--a fellow at a prestigious university, with a bright future ahead of her. Harvey, her brother, is a seminary student driven by his god-besotted studies. The two have never shared much of anything e...

  • The Accursed

    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 Prin...

  • Evil Eye

    Few authors are able to create an atmosphere of unease and terror as well as Oates, and the four novellas in this collection prove the point. In the title story, “Evil Eye,” a young woman has recently become the fourth wife of a man who is demand...

  • Carthage

    A young girl's disappearance rocks a community and a family in this stirring examination of grief, faith, justice, and the atrocities of war from Joyce Carol Oates, "one of the great artistic forces of our time" (The Nation) Zeno Mayfield's daught...

  • High Crime Area

    Joyce Carol Oates is an unparalleled investigator of human flaws. In these eight stories, she deftly tests the bonds between damaged individuals -- a brother and sister, a teacher and student, two strangers on a subway -- in the fearless prose for wh...

  • Lovely, Dark, Deep

    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, imagina...

  • The Sacrifice

    New York Times bestselling author Joyce Carol Oates returns with an incendiary novel that illuminates the tragic impact of sexual violence, racism, brutality, and power on innocent lives and probes the persistence of stereotypes, the nature of reveng...

  • Mystery, Inc.

    Bibliomysteries - 26

    A book lover’s lust for acquisition drives him to murder in this short tale from the New York Times"bestselling author of Beautiful Days. Identified only by the hastily -- and clumsily -- chosen alias Charles Brockden, the narrator of this story ...

  • Jack of Spades

    From Joyce Carol Oates, an exquisite, psychologically complex thriller about opposing forces within the mind of one ambitious writer and the delicate line between genius and madness. Andrew J. Rush has achieved the kind of critical and commercial ...

  • Heartbreak

    Powerful, riveting, and real. Sixteen celebrated authors bring us raw, insightful stories that explore guns and teens in a fiction collection that is thought provoking and emotionally gripping. For fans of Forgive Me, Leonard Peacock and Give a Bo...

  • The Man Without a Shadow

    In this taut and fascinating novel, the bestselling, New York Times bestselling and National Book Award-winning author of The Sacrifice, The Accursed, and Lovely, Dark, Deep examines the mysteries of memory, personality, and identity and pierces the ...

  • The Doll-Master and Other Tales of Terror

    From one of our most important contemporary writers, The Doll-Master and Other Tales of Terror is a bold, haunting collection of six stories. In the title story, a young boy becomes obsessed with his cousin’s doll after she tragically passes awa...

  • A Book of American Martyrs

    In this striking, enormously affecting novel, Joyce Carol Oates tells the story of two very different and yet intimately linked American families. Luther Dunphy is an ardent Evangelical who envisions himself as acting out God's will when he assassina...

  • Double Delight

    An upstanding juror becomes dangerously obsessed with a seductive plaintiff in this “fast-paced, haunting” novel by a #1 New York Times"bestselling author (Boston Sunday Herald).   Terence Greene is admired for his perfect life in an afflu...

  • Nemesis

    This “mesmerizing” novel about a crime at an elite music school “calls to mind a David Lynch film” (The New York Times).   Shy piano teacher Maggie Blackburn has selflessly devoted her life and career to her students at the Forest Park C...

  • Snake Eyes

    A New Jersey family takes an ex-con into their suburban home in this “chilling, nightmarish” novel by a #1 New York Times"bestselling author (San Francisco Chronicle).   Attorney Michael O’Meara’s dogged belief that Lee Roy Sears was i...

  • Soul/Mate

    A lonely widow is romanced by a “brilliantly portrayed” pathological killer in this novel by the National Book Award"winning author of them (The New York Times).   Dorothea Deverell is a New England art historian working for a Boston museu...

  • You Can't Catch Me

    A “sinister, edgy, delectably creepy” story of mistaken identity, murder, and madness from a #1 New York Times"bestselling author (San Francisco Chronicle).   Tristram Heade is a reclusive, repressed Virginia bachelor and antiquarian book ...

  • Dis Mem Ber and Other Stories

    Joyce Carol Oates is renowned for her rare ability to "illuminate the mind’s most disturbing corners” (Seattle Times). That genius is on full display in her new collection of seven feverishly unsettling works, DIS MEM BER and Other Stories of Mys...

  • Beautiful Days: Stories

    A new collection of thirteen mesmerizing stories by American master Joyce Carol Oates, including the 2017 Pushcart Prize-winning "Undocumented Alien" The diverse stories of BEAUTIFUL DAYS, Joyce Carol Oates explore the most secret, intimate, and u...

  • With Shuddering Fall

    The first novel from New York Times-bestselling author Joyce Carol Oates, a thrilling, dark tale of family, revenge, and two souls intertwined by love and violence -- now back in print for fans of America’s most prolific storyteller. Written whe...

  • Night-Gaunts and Other Tales of Suspense

    In the title story of her taut new fiction collection, NIGHT-GAUNTS AND OTHER TALES OF SUSPENSE, Joyce Carol Oates writes: 'Life was not of the surface like the glossy skin of an apple, but deep inside the fruit where seeds are harbored.' There is no...

  • Dreams from the Witch House

    Featuring authors Joyce Carol Oates, Caitlín R. Kiernan, Lois Gresh, Gemma Files, Nancy Kilpatrick, Elizabeth Bear, Storm Constantine and others accompanied by the lavish color artwork of Daniele Serra, Dreams from the Witch House: Female Voices of ...

  • Hazards of Time Travel

    An ingenious, dystopian novel of one young woman’s resistance against the constraints of an oppressive society, from the inventive imagination of Joyce Carol Oates “Time travel” -- and its hazards -- are made literal in this astonishing n...

  • The New Kitten

    From acclaimed author (and cat lover!) Joyce Carol Oates comes a charming, heartwarming picture book. As the only cat in her house, Cherie is accustomed to being showered with treats and affection. So when her family brings home a new kitten named...

  • My Life as a Rat

    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 Kerriga...

  • The Pursuit

    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 ...

  • Cutting Edge

    Joyce Carol Oates, a queenpin of the noir genre, has brought her keen and discerning eye to the curation of an outstanding anthology of brand-new top-shelf short stories (and poems by Margaret Atwood!). While bad men are not always the victims in the...

  • Night. Sleep. Death. The Stars.

    The bonds of family are tested in the wake of a profound tragedy, providing a look at the darker side of our society by one of our most enduringly popular and important writers Night Sleep Death The Stars is a gripping examination of contemporary ...

  • Cardiff, by the Sea

    From one of the most important contemporary American writers, Cardiff, by the Sea is a bold, haunting collection of four previously unpublished novellas. In the titular novella, an academic in Pennsylvania discovers a terrifying trauma from her pa...

  • Drawing Lines: An Anthology of Women Cartoonists

    Showcasing stories from some of the comics' greatest female creators, this anthology features stories that range from mainstream adventures to hilarious comic shorts to heart-wrenching autobiographical stories. Originally published as Sexy Chix i...

  • The (Other) You: Stories

    A powerful reckoning over the people we might have been if we’d chosen a different path, from a master of the short story In this stirring, reflective collection of short stories, Joyce Carol Oates ponders alternate destinies: the other lives we...

  • Night, Neon

    A new collection of dark, chilling tales from the #1 New York Times Bestselling authorFrom literary icon Joyce Carol Oates comes a brand new collection of haunting and, at times, darkly humorous mystery & suspense stories. These are tales of psyc...

  • Breathe

    A NOVEL OF LOVE AND LOSS FROM BESTSELLING AND PRIZEWINNING AUTHOR JOYCE CAROL OATES Amid a starkly beautiful but uncanny landscape in New Mexico, a married couple from Cambridge, MA takes residency at a distinguished academic institute. When the h...

  • Nattsidan

  • Extenuating Circumstances

    Twenty-two disturbing tales of crime and suspense from "America's preeminent fiction writer" (New Yorker)Two hitmen in a depressed rust belt town struggle with a job gone wrong. A girl witnesses a horrifying accident and carries it with her for the r...

  • Babysitter

    From one of America’s most renowned storytellers -- the bestselling author of Blonde -- comes a novel about love and deceit, and lust and redemption, against a backdrop of shocking murders in the affluent suburbs of Detroit."Hannah’s unreliable, ...

  • 48 Clues into the Disappearance of My Sister

    A CrimeReads, AARP, Los Angeles Magazine and Dayton Daily News "Most Anticipated" ReleaseIn the newest literary thriller from celebrated author Joyce Carol Oates, a woman mysteriously vanishes, leaving her sister behind to tally up the clues and disc...

  • Zero-Sum

    Zero-sum games are played for lethal stakes in these arresting stories by one of America’s most acclaimed writers, the award-winning, best-selling author of BlondeA brilliant young philosophy student bent on seducing her famous philosopher-ment...

  • Zero Sum: Stories

    Zero-sum games are played for lethal stakes in these arresting stories by one of America’s most acclaimed writers, the award-winning, best-selling author of BlondeA brilliant young philosophy student bent on seducing her famous philosopher-mentor f...

  • A Darker Shade of Noir

    Joyce Carol Oates assembles an outstanding cast of authors -- including Margaret Atwood, Tananarive Due, and Megan Abbott -- to explore, subvert, and reinvent one of the most vital subgenres of horror"In this haunting new collection, edited by Oates,...

  • Butcher

    From one of our most accomplished storytellers, an extraordinary and arresting novel about a women’s asylum in the nineteenth century, and a terrifying doctor who wants to change the worldIn this harrowing story based on authentic historical docume...

  • Flint Kill Creek

    A new collection of stories by one of America’s greatest writers These new, recent, and reformulated stories by Joyce Carol Oates, collected here for the first time, showcase a wide range of crime fiction and psychological suspense. A young, insecu...

  • Fox

    A spellbinding novel of literary and psychological suspense about the dark secrets that surface after the shocking disappearance of a charismatic, mercurial teacher at an elite boarding school -- by the legendary author "who is surely on any shortlis...

  • The Best American essays, 1991

    • / General Fiction
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  • Big Momma

    • / Thriller
    • Buy Buy

  • Gun Accident: An Investigation

    • / Thriller
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Award-Winning Books by Joyce Carol Oates

Big Momma
2017 Thriller Award -- Short Story
A Book of American Martyrs
2017 L.A. Times Book Prize -- Mystery/Thriller
The Corn Maiden
2011 Bram Stoker Award -- Collection
The Doll-Master and Other Tales of Terror
2016 Bram Stoker Award -- Fiction Collection
Gun Accident: An Investigation
2016 Thriller Award -- Short Story
Them
1970 National Book Award -- Fiction
Zombie
1996 Boston Book Review -- Fiction
1996 Bram Stoker Award -- Novel


Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Joyce Carol Oates has published 164 books.

The next book by Joyce Carol Oates, Fox, will be published in June 2025.

The first book by Joyce Carol Oates, A Garden of Earthly Delights, was published in January 1966.

Yes. Joyce Carol Oates has 1 series.
Pseudonyms / Co-Author
Author Series
Multi-Author Series
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