The Best Joyce Carol Oates
Discover the best Joyce Carol Oates books, from The Gravedigger's Daughter to We Were the Mulvaneys—a curated list of her most compelling fiction.
Book
We Were the Mulvaneys
by Joyce Carol Oates
An Oprah Book Club® selection A New York Times Notable Book The Mulvaneys are blessed by all that makes life sweet. But something happens on Valentine’s Day, 1976—an incident that is hushed up in the town and never spoken of in the Mulvaney home—that rends the fabric of their family life...with tragic consequences. Years later, the youngest son attempts to piece together the fragments of the Mulvaneys’ former glory, seeking to uncover and understand the secret violation that brought about the family’s tragic downfall. Profoundly cathartic, this extraordinary novel unfolds as if Oates, in plumbing the darkness of the human spirit, has come upon a source of light at its core. Moving away from the dark tone of her more recent masterpieces, Joyce Carol Oates turns the tale of a family struggling to cope with its fall from grace into a deeply moving and unforgettable account of the vigor of hope and the power of love to prevail over suffering. “It’s the novel closest to my heart....I’m deeply moved that Oprah Winfrey has selected this novel for Oprah’s Book Club, a family novel presented to Oprah’s vast American family.”—Joyce Carol Oates
Book
Them
by Joyce Carol Oates
Loretta Wendall and her two children experience violence and poverty in Detroit from the Depression in the 1930s to the riots of 1967.
Book
The Gravedigger's Daughter
by Joyce Carol Oates
From one of the greatest literary forces of our time, an intensely realized and masterful epic of a young womans struggle for identity and survival in post-World War II America.