Joyce Carol Oates

Discover the darker side of the Garden State with this anthology of gritty mystery stories.
Akashic Books continues its award-winning series of original noir anthologies, launched in 2004 with Brooklyn Noir. Each volume is compromised of all-new stories, each one set in a distinct location within the geographical area of the book. In New Jersey Noir, a star-studded cast of authors sifts through the hidden dirt of the Garden...

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 except a mutual desire to escape the stifling confines of the home they grew up in and the parents they left behind. But when Lydia's estranged parents call her to say Harvey has mysteriously dropped out...

A female serial killer reconnects with her twin sister in this novel by an acclaimed National Book Award winner and "first-rate thriller writer" (The New York Times Book Review). Demure Lily Merrick is a dutiful housewife and mother who teaches pottery classes in upstate New York. Then, out of the blue, her estranged sister, Sharon, shows up after fifteen years, seeking refuge from her life as a Las Vegas stripper. At first Lily is overwhelmed and...

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 innocent of murder has paid off. The lawyer has not only gotten the convicted inmate released from death row at Connecticut State Prison, but also procured an artist's residency in Mount Orion, New Jersey, for the rehabilitated...

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 affluent New Jersey suburb, and for his marriage to a minister's beautiful and wealthy daughter. He's also envied for his successful career as director of an arts foundation. But all of that changes when Terence is...

New York Times bestselling author Joyce Carol Oates' imaginative look at the last days of five giants of American literature. Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson, Samuel Clemens ('Mark Twain'), Henry James, Ernest Hemingway-Joyce Carol Oates evokes each of these American literary icons in this work of prose fiction, poignantly and audaciously reinventing the climactic events of their lives. In subtly nuanced language suggestive of each of these writers,...

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 rest of her life. Medical students bring a severed foot to a college party. Five-time Pulitzer Prize finalist Joyce Carol Oates has made a career of exploring the forbidden corners of human experience, and the stories collected here, spanning her first three decades as a writer, are among her most unsettling...

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 'survivors.'"

So begins the unexpurgated first-person narrative of nineteen-year-old Skyler Rampike, the only surviving child of an "infamous" American family. A decade ago

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Joyce Carol Oates uses her award-winning talents to spin a masterful tale of Gothic horror for the second part of her mesmerizing trilogy. In The Devil's Half Acre, an eerie, supernatural setting and a host of eccentric characters combine to fill this spellbinding novel with tantalizing suspense. After more than a decade, the handsome amateur detective Xavier Kilgarvan has returned to Winterthurn just in time to see the fifth young woman's body carried...

In this first part of her Gothic mystery trillogy, best-selling author Joyce Carol Oates introduces Xavier Kilgarvan: romantic hero and amateur detective. He must discover who has murdered an innocent babe while it slept in his mother's arms. This turn-of-the-century tale of monstrous deeds and heart-stopping suspense will leave you eagerly looking for the next Kilgarvan case.