What I Lived For

Name: What I Lived For
Brand: Harper Audio
Availability: InStock
Author: Joyce Carol Oates
ISBN: 9780062917898

Author: Joyce Carol Oates

Narrator: Charlie Thurston

Unabridged: 28 hr 1 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: HarperAudio

Published: 07/23/2019

Categories: Fiction, Literary Fiction, Psychological, Cultural Fiction

Synopsis

The stunning, classic portrait of a powerful man's downward spiral to moral ruinJerome ""Corky"" Corcorn. A money-juggling wheeler dealer, rising politico, popular man's man, and successful womanizer. It is a Memorial Day weekend, and we are about to live with him, breathe with him, and sweat with him in a nonstop marathon of mounting desperation as he tries to keep his financial empire from unraveling, his love life from shredding, and his rebellious daughter from destroying both herself and him. Seldom in fiction has a man been brought so vividly to life in all his strength and weakness, hunger and ambition, carnality and corruption. Rarely has the complex web of American society been revealed so rivetingly. And never has one of today's supreme writers, Joyce Carol Oates, written a bolder and better novel than this mesmerizing masterpiece.

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 Paul

Nobody wants to speak up for this book but I will. It's a huge breathless painful headlong dangerous full-pelt rush, all 600 pages of it. So accurate about the awfulness of the male mind that many pages were for me excruciating reading. It's horribly compelling. Quite brilliant. So naturally I thoug......more

Goodreads review by Leo

Skimmed like mad. It's weird: I think Oblivion is one of my favourite books, and those stories are the most dense with detail I've ever read: what everyone's wearing, what's on the table, the lighting, weird things the characters did that day... but in Oblivion these details are captured in the narra......more

Goodreads review by Marjorie

A day in the life of Jerome “Corky” Corcoran is quite a day indeed. It’s Memorial Day, 1992. Marilee Plummer, a black woman who had recently accused a black city council member of raping her, has apparently committed suicide. Corky doesn’t make any political friends when he calls for a full investig......more

Goodreads review by C

This is one of the best books I have ever read, but it is NOT for the faint of heart. If you like your books clean, run. Fast. Now. This is Joyce Carol Oates at her best, because she seems to step out of her own comfort zone to tell the story of a hard-drinking young Irishman who loves 'em and leave......more