Joyce Carol Oates's Reading List
The author, most recently, of “Two or Three Things I Forgot to Tell You” and “Black Dahlia & White Rose” admits that she first found Walt Whitman disappointing: “Please don’t send contemptuous e-mails.”
Open in WellRead Daily app →By the Book: Joyce Carol Oates (2012)
NYT By the Book column (2012-09-06).
Source: www.nytimes.com
James Joyce · 1922 · Buy on Amazon
"James Joyce’s “Ulysses.” In June of this year I reread this ever astonishing classic with my neuroscientist husband, who had not read it before, in preparation for a trip to Dublin, which overlapped, just barely, with the annual Bloomsday celebration."
Henry David Thoreau · 1854 · Buy on Amazon
"I first read Henry David Thoreau’s “Walden” when I was 15 years old, and if I’d been told that it was a young man’s autobiographical novel, I would not have been surprised."
Lewis Carroll · 1865 · Buy on Amazon
"Lewis Carroll’s “Alice in Wonderland” and “Through the Looking-Glass,” which my grandmother gave me when I was 9 years old and very impressionable. These were surely the books that inspired me to write, and Alice is the protagonist with whom I’ve most identified over the years."
Lewis Carroll · Buy on Amazon
"Lewis Carroll’s “Alice in Wonderland” and “Through the Looking-Glass,” which my grandmother gave me when I was 9 years old and very impressionable."
Herman Melville · 1851 · Buy on Amazon
"Our great American tragic-epic, Melville’s “Moby-Dick.” This truly contains multitudes of meanings: the Pequod is the ship of state, the radiantly mad Captain Ahab a dangerous “leader,” the ethnically diverse crew our American citizenry."
Emily Dickinson · Buy on Amazon
"And to balance this all-male adventure, “The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson.”"
Edgar Allan Poe · Buy on Amazon
"Probably at too young an age I was reading “The Gold-Bug and Other Stories,” by Edgar Allan Poe."
Unknown · Buy on Amazon
"such classics as “Huckleberry Finn,” “The Call of the Wild,” “The Member of the Wedding,” “To Kill a Mockingbird,” “The Catcher in the Rye,” “Lord of the Flies” are all great Y.A. novels."
Unknown · Buy on Amazon
"such classics as “Huckleberry Finn,” “The Call of the Wild,” “The Member of the Wedding,” “To Kill a Mockingbird,” “The Catcher in the Rye,” “Lord of the Flies” are all great Y.A. novels."
Unknown · Buy on Amazon
"such classics as “Huckleberry Finn,” “The Call of the Wild,” “The Member of the Wedding,” “To Kill a Mockingbird,” “The Catcher in the Rye,” “Lord of the Flies” are all great Y.A. novels."
Unknown · Buy on Amazon
"such classics as “Huckleberry Finn,” “The Call of the Wild,” “The Member of the Wedding,” “To Kill a Mockingbird,” “The Catcher in the Rye,” “Lord of the Flies” are all great Y.A. novels."
Unknown · Buy on Amazon
"such classics as “Huckleberry Finn,” “The Call of the Wild,” “The Member of the Wedding,” “To Kill a Mockingbird,” “The Catcher in the Rye,” “Lord of the Flies” are all great Y.A. novels."
Unknown · Buy on Amazon
"such classics as “Huckleberry Finn,” “The Call of the Wild,” “The Member of the Wedding,” “To Kill a Mockingbird,” “The Catcher in the Rye,” “Lord of the Flies” are all great Y.A. novels."
Joyce Carol Oates · Buy on Amazon
"I’ve assembled my favorite short stories and prose pieces into several anthologies, which I often teach in my fiction workshops. These include “The Oxford Book of American Short Stories,” “The Ecco Anthology of Contemporary American Short Fiction” and “Telling Stories: An Anthology for Writers.”"
Joyce Carol Oates · Buy on Amazon
"These include “The Oxford Book of American Short Stories,” “The Ecco Anthology of Contemporary American Short Fiction” and “Telling Stories: An Anthology for Writers.”"
Joyce Carol Oates · Buy on Amazon
"These include “The Oxford Book of American Short Stories,” “The Ecco Anthology of Contemporary American Short Fiction” and “Telling Stories: An Anthology for Writers.”"
Joyce Carol Oates · 2000 · Buy on Amazon
"But I can say that the novel that exhausted me the most, wrung my emotions the most and left me determined never again to write a thousand-page novel with a sympathetic protagonist who must die on the last page is “Blonde,” imagined as a tragic-epic of the life of Norma Jeane Baker/“Marilyn Monroe.”"
Favorite books (2022)
Favorite books recommended by Joyce Carol Oates, as compiled by radicalreads.com. Source article: https://radicalreads.com/joyce-carol-oates-favorite-books/.
Source: radicalreads.com
Atticus Lish · Buy on Amazon
"Atticus Lish’s award-winning first novel is, in part, an extraordinary immersion in the interior life of a female Chinese “illegal immigrant” in the Flushing section of Queens, N.Y."
Whitney Terrell · Buy on Amazon
"Before writing his third novel, Whitney Terrell twice worked as an embedded reporter during the recent U.S. war in Iraq. The Good Lieutenant , published last year, explores the tragic complexities of the war from the perspective of a young female Army lieutenant from the Midwest."
T. Geronimo Johnson · Buy on Amazon
"This extravagantly inventive, linguistically daring work skewers two different American cultures. Johnson, who is African-American, conjures the voice of a naïve young white student who arrives at the University of California, Berkeley, from the deepest of the Deep South."
Dexter Palmer · Buy on Amazon
"Version Control is perhaps the strangest fictional work of appropriated voices and subjects. It’s set in a surreal near future — or several near futures — as well as in several pasts. Though issues of race play virtually no role in the stories, one character, an African-American physicist, recalls dropping out of a writing course because the professor thought he should be mining his heritage instead of inventing science fiction."