Joyce Carol Oates
Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Book Award and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction. She is also the recipient of the 2005 Prix Femina for The Falls. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University, and she has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978.
Joyce Carol Oates on Granta.com
Fiction | The Online Edition
Soft Core
Joyce Carol Oates
‘They were two sisters of youthful middle age with three breasts between them and a history that might be summed up as much left unsaid. Maggie, the elder, who'd had a mastectomy eighteen months before, rarely alluded to the fact in her younger sister's company and spoke with an air of startled reproach if Esther brought up the subject of her health; as if Maggie's breast cancer were a symptom of a moral weakness, a deficiency of character, about which Esther had no right to know.’
Fiction | The Online Edition
Lover
Joyce Carol Oates
‘You won't know me, won't see my face. Unless you see my face. And then it will be too late.’
Fiction | Issue 1
from Son of the Morning
Joyce Carol Oates
‘The livingness of the rifle and the bullet and the death spasm and his own bright quickening blood: never would he forget.’