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“A poignant, nostalgic collection of literary criticism by one of America’s premier authors.”
—Kirkus Reviews
In Rough Country is a sterling collection of essays, reviews, and criticism from Joyce Carol Oates that focuses on a wide array of books and writers—from Poe to Nabokov, from Flannery O’Connor to Phillip Roth. One of our foremost novelists, National Book Award and PEN/Malamud Award winner Oates demonstrates an unparalleled understanding and appreciation of great works of literature with In Rough Country, and offers unique and breathtaking insights into the writer’s art.
In twenty-nine provocative essays, Joyce Carol Oates maps the "rough country" that is both the treacherous geographical and psychological terrain of the writers she so cogently analyzes—Flannery O'Connor, Cormac McCarthy, Philip Roth, E. L. Doctorow, and Margaret Atwood, among others—and the emotional terrain of Oates's own life following the unexpected death of her husband, Raymond Smith, after forty-eight years of marriage.
"As literature is a traditional solace to the bereft, so writing about literature can be a solace, as it was to me when the effort of writing fiction seemed beyond me, as if belonging to another lifetime," Oates writes. "Reading and taking notes, especially late at night when I can't sleep, has been the solace, for me, that saying the Rosary or reading The Book of Common Prayer might be for another." The results of those meditations are the essays of In Rough Country—balanced and illuminating investigations that demonstrate an artist working at the top of her form.
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Critical Praise for
In Rough Country
“Oates writes like a woman who walks into rough country and doesn’t look back...long sentences unfold with great beauty, and [Oates’s] line of argument follows not an artificial arc but the natural course of thought.”
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New York Times Book Review
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Two or Three Things I Forgot to Tell You
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Mudwoman
A riveting novel that explores the high price of success in the life of one woman—the first female president of a lauded ivy league institution—and her hold upon her self-identity in the face of personal and professional demons, from Joyce Carol Oates, author of the New York Times bestseller A...
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Sourland
Joyce Carol Oates is not only one of our most important novelists and literary critics, she is also an unparalleled master of the short story. Sourland —sixteen previously uncollected stories that explore the power of violence, loss, and grief to shape the psyche as well as the soul—shows us an...
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