American Melancholy, Joyce Carol Oates
American Melancholy, Joyce Carol Oates
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American Melancholy
Poems

Author: Joyce Carol Oates

Narrator: Cheryl Smith

Unabridged: 1 hr 53 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: HarperAudio

Published: 02/09/2021


Synopsis

A new collection of poetry from an American literary legend, her first in twenty-five yearsJoyce Carol Oates is one of our most insightful observers of the human heart and mind, and, with her acute social consciousness, one of the most insistent and inspired witnesses of a shared American history.Oates is perhaps best known for her prodigious output of novels and short stories, many of which have become contemporary classics. However, Oates has also always been a faithful writer of poetry. American Melancholy showcases some of her finest work of the last few decades.Covering subjects big and small, and written in an immediate and engaging style, this collection touches on both the personal and political. Loss, love, and memory are investigated, along with the upheavals of our modern age, the reality of our current predicaments, and the ravages of poverty, racism, and social unrest. Oates skillfully writes characters ranging from a former doctor at a Chinese People’s Liberation Army hospital to Little Albert, a six-month-old infant who took part in a famous study that revealed evidence of classical conditioning in human beings. 

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 Gerhard

This collection made me realise just how subjective reading poetry can be. In 2020, one of my reading goals was to read more poetry, especially modern writing. Strangely, this helped me focus during the worst of our lockdown, resulting in me achieving a record reading goal that year. Since then, I ha......more

Goodreads review by Kasa

This is the fourth publication this year alone that I've reviewed of the work of Joyce Carol Oates, but the very first book of her poetry I've read. Each of the other books was different in style from the others (a short story collection, a 4-part novella compilation, an 800-page masterwork novel).......more