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“... How aptly named: Grace Paley. For ‘grace’ is perhaps the most accurate, if somewhat poetic, term to employ in speaking of this gifted writer who has concentrated on short, spare fiction through a career of nearly five decades. First published in 1959 with The Little Disturbances of Man, Grace Paley immediately drew an audience of readers who were not only admiring but loving ...”

“... As in one of Escher’s visual paradoxes, where infinity opens up vertiginously within a single geometric figure, object and anti-object define each other, and ‘foreground’ and ‘background’ are made to shift according to one’s perspective, the highly combustible issue of race in America, and its consequences in terms of the academic-literary canon, depend almost entirely on one’s position ...”

“... The wedding was like a dream outside her power, or like a show unmanaged by her in which she was to have no part. The Member of the Wedding How to account for the vagaries of literary reputation? In the Forties and early Fifties, such disparate, talented young writers as Carson McCullers, Truman Capote and Flannery O’Connor were perceived as kindred; there was a highly publicised vogue of American Southern Gothic writing, abetted by photographs of the very camp Truman Capote reclining on a chaise-longue like a delicious dream of Oscar Wilde’s, and by lurid tales of the erratic, often inebriated behaviour of Carson McCullers, a literary prodigy to set beside Scott Fitzgerald in the previous generation ...”

“... The title of Joyce CarolOates’s new novel is well-chosen, being itself both a fragment of popular culture (‘As time goes by’ seems to be lodged there pretty firmly by now) and an imperative which forces readers towards a confrontation with the very past to which it belongs ...”

“... Joyce CarolOates is fascinated by the seedy corners of American life. Her recent novels are narrated by orphans, mutilated girls, the abused, the impoverished, celebrities destroyed by fame, children from families destroyed by rape. Oates’s books often open with a riddling exposition which implies a hidden trauma ...”

“... turns out to be especially harsh about people making things up, especially if they happen to be Joyce CarolOates or Norman Mailer, fiction writers who have shown an interest in making up the life of Marilyn Monroe. One could go on all day like this, and people do, which is why Churchwell’s book turns out to be a ...”

“... their publishers, as sensitive. Not that any publisher would have tried that with Mary McCarthy. Joyce CarolOates, interviewed in 1976, takes the lack of a social tradition for the woman writer as a form of freedom, however inadvertently bestowed. ‘Since, being a woman, I can’t be taken altogether seriously by ...”

“... she and we learned in literature classes – and, every so often, something else. In her new novel Joyce CarolOates appears to make use of some of her own background and history in forming her heroine’s life, but, rather puzzlingly, the thing doesn’t work. It tells of the experiences of Marya Stokes, an intelligent ...”

“... especially when the subject is a woman. In a review of a book about Jean Stafford in 1988, Joyce CarolOates declared her disgust with ‘pathography’, a narrative focused on dysfunction, breakdown, addiction and disaster, rather than on the mysterious process whereby artists spin their dirty straw into ...”

“... woman who gets singled out for murder in slasher films, from Psycho to Silence of the Lambs. Carol Clover, in a 1987 essay on gender issues in slasher movies, analyzed the conventions and taboos that have made these horror films about psychokillers so successful, and which now seem to have moved from pulp cinema to feminist literary fiction. According to ...”

“... chance!’ Jackson, whose best work has now appeared in a Library of America volume edited by Joyce CarolOates, was born in San Francisco in December 1916, though she liked to shed three years. Her father, Leslie, whose English family had lost their money, changed their name and emigrated after a mysterious ...”

“... rundown of Jonathan Franzen’s feud with Oprah Winfrey? Do the Feds keep track of how many words Joyce CarolOates writes in a day? Do they monitor Karl Ove Knausgaard’s border crossings? Did they know who Elena Ferrante was before the editors of the New York Review of Books did? Or how much Martin Amis drinks these ...”

“... though the story wends its way from Thomas Wolfe through Nabokov and John Barth, Philip Roth and Joyce CarolOates, all the way to Raymond Carver), nor those of traditional aesthetics and literary criticism, which raise issues of value and try to define true art as this rather than that. The dialectical problems come ...”

“... is true of most ‘nasty’ stories written now in England or America – for example, those of Joyce CarolOates or Ian McEwan. Indeed, there seems to be a whole genre of repulsive literature in our time written by mild, serious, high-minded people who strike one as not so much indulging in personal fantasies as ...”

“... but ... forget it. Bernard Malamud? Unreadable. What about someone as prolific as Joyce CarolOates? She’s a joke monster who ought to be beheaded in a public auditorium or in Shea or in a field with hundreds of thousands (laughs). She does all the graffiti in the men’s room and the women’s room ...”