A Bloodsmoor Romance

Name: A Bloodsmoor Romance
Brand: Harper Audio
Availability: InStock
Rating: 5 (1 reviews)
Author: Joyce Carol Oates
ISBN: 9780063022423

Author: Joyce Carol Oates

Narrator: Tavia Gilbert

Unabridged: 29 hr 2 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: HarperAudio

Published: 04/28/2020

Categories: Fiction, Literary Fiction, Historical Fiction, Gothic

Synopsis

Finally returned to print in a beautiful new trade paperback edition, comes Joyce Carol Oates’ lost classic: a satirical, often surreal, and beautifully plotted Gothic Romance that follows the exploits of the audacious Zinn sisters, whose 19th century pursuit of adventurous lives turns a lens on contemporary American culture.Set in a nineteenth century similar to our own, A Bloodsmoor Romance follows the beautiful Zinn sisters, five young women who refuse—for the most part—”the obligations of Christian marriage.” Full of Oates’s mordant wit and breathlessly told in the Victorian style by an unnamed narrator shocked by the Zinn sisters’ sexuality, impulsivity, and rude rejection of the mores of their time, A Bloodsmoor Romance is a delicious filigree of literary conventions, “a novel of manners” in the tradition of Austen, Dickens, and Alcott which Oates turns on its head. Oates’s dark romp interweaves murder and mayhem, ghosts, and abductions, substance abuse and gender identity, women’s suffrage, the American spiritualist movement, and sexual aberration, as the Zinn sisters come into contact with some of the 19th century’s greatest characters, from Mark Twain to Oscar Wilde.A biting assessment of the American landscape and a virtuosic transformation of a literary genre, A Bloodsmoor Romance is a compelling, hilarious, and magical anti-romance—Little Women by way of Stephen King.

About Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Medal of Humanities, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Book Award, and the 2019 Jerusalem Prize, and has been several times nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the national bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys; Blonde, which was nominated for the National Book Award; and the New York Times bestseller The Falls, which won the 2005 Prix Femina. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Lolly K Dandeneau on May 05, 2012

For those who think it's an actual ROMANCE, it's not. What a satire, someone on amazon likened it to an Edward Gorey cartoon, I think that nails it beautifully! Finished it last night, what a long journey. I can understand how there were readers that could not get through it, knowing many people like......more

Goodreads review by Northpapers on March 04, 2011

Joyce Carol Oates comes off as humorless most of the time. Not that I expect her tales of rape, hauntings, violence, isolation, infidelity, and despair to be lighthearted. But just as I expect any good humor writing to depict a kind of pain, I expect depictions of pain to have their own sense of hum......more

Goodreads review by Judy on November 04, 2021

I knew this one would require a huge investment of my reading time. It took me 10 days. It was time well spent. The first thing that slowed me down was the style: 19th century Gothic romance with long and winding sentences. Just could not read quickly. The book did not sell well when published in 19......more

Goodreads review by Laura on November 11, 2010

Wow...well, my goodness, this one is downright odd, at times bizarre, yet delightful with language that is unique and contemplative, beautiful at the same time as grotesque, and loaded with interesting humor... it's a typical JCO novel. A Bloodsmoor Romance follows Bellefleur in the "American Gothic......more

Goodreads review by Daniel on January 31, 2010

This wasn't the first thing I read by Oates, but it was the first that showed me her vicious sense of humor, and it started me on a many-year jag. Someone described it as Little Women as written by Stephen King, which is about right. Very weird 19th-century New England family saga.......more