Author | Joyce Carol Oates |
---|---|
Language | English |
Genre | Novel |
Publisher | Ecco Press |
Publication date | 1 June 2007 |
Publication place | United States |
Media type | Print (hardback) |
Pages | 592 pp (first edition, hardback) |
ISBN | 0061236829 (first edition, hardback) |
OCLC | 70823287 |
813/.54 22 | |
LC Class | PS3565.A8 G73 2007 |
Preceded by | Black Girl / White Girl |
The Gravedigger's Daughter is a 2007 novel by Joyce Carol Oates. It is her 36th published novel. The novel was based on the life of Oates's grandmother, whose father, a gravedigger settled in rural America, injured his wife, threatened his daughter, and then committed suicide. [1] Oates explained that she decided to write about her family only after her parents died (in 2000 and 2003), adding that her "family history was filled with pockets of silence. I had to do a lot of imagining." [2]
The novel was completed in the early 2000s but its publication was repeatedly bumped in favor of releasing new Oates novels "her American publisher believed were more 'controversial', such as Missing Mom ." [1] The novel's epistolary epilogue was first published as a short story titled "The Cousins" in the July 2004 issue of Harper's Magazine , and was anthologized in The Best American Short Stories of 2005 and in Oates's 2006 collection High Lonesome: New & Selected Stories, 1966–2006 . [3] The Gravedigger's Daughter was published on June 1, 2007, and debuted at #17 on the New York Times Best Seller list. [4] The novel was a 2007 finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. [5]
Rebecca Tignor is mistaken for a woman named Hazel Jones one afternoon in the woods nearby Chatauqua Falls, New York in the fall of 1959. Over 20 years later, Rebecca finds out that the man who approached her is a serial killer.
In a secondary plot, Rebecca's parents escape from the Nazis in 1936, foreseeing the oncoming Holocaust; Rebecca is born in the boat crossing over. When Rebecca is 13, her father, Jacob Schwart, who has lost his intellectual dreams and has become a gravedigger and cemetery caretaker in Milburn, abruptly kills her mother, Anna, and nearly kills Rebecca, before committing suicide. At the time of the footpath crossing, Rebecca is just weeks away from being beaten and almost killed by her own husband, the brutal Niles Tignor. She and her only son, Niles Jr., flee, and she becomes the woman for whom she has been recently mistaken, purposefully adopting the identity of Hazel Jones. Niles Jr. assumes the alias of Zacharias. As Hazel, Rebecca seeks many livelihoods, as alternately a waitress, clerk and finally, the mistress of the overwhelmingly wealthy heir of the Gallagher media fortune, a man in whom she never felt the need to confide her past.
Joyce Carol Oates is an American writer. Oates published her first book in 1963, and has since published 58 novels, a number of plays and novellas, and many volumes of short stories, poetry, and non-fiction. Her novels Black Water (1992), What I Lived For (1994), and Blonde (2000), and her short story collections The Wheel of Love (1970) and Lovely, Dark, Deep: Stories (2014) were each finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. She has won many awards for her writing, including the National Book Award, for her novel Them (1969), two O. Henry Awards, the National Humanities Medal, and the Jerusalem Prize (2019).
Them is a novel by Joyce Carol Oates, the third in her "Wonderland Quartet" following A Garden of Earthly Delights (1967) and Expensive People (1968) and preceding Wonderland (1971). It was published by Vanguard in 1969 and it won the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction in 1970.
Laila Lalami is a Moroccan-American novelist, essayist, and professor. After earning her licence ès lettres degree in Morocco, she received a fellowship to study in the United Kingdom (UK), where she earned an MA in linguistics.
Black Water is a 1992 novella by the American writer and professor Joyce Carol Oates. It is a roman à clef based on the Chappaquiddick incident, in which U.S. senator Ted Kennedy crashed a car and caused the death by drowning of passenger Mary Jo Kopechne. The novella was a 1993 Pulitzer Prize finalist for fiction.
Blonde is a 2000 biographical fiction novel by Joyce Carol Oates that presents a fictionalized take on the life of American actress Marilyn Monroe. Oates insists that the novel is a work of fiction that should not be regarded as a biography. It was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize (2001) and the National Book Award (2000). Rocky Mountain News and Entertainment Weekly have listed Blonde as one of Joyce Carol Oates's best books. Oates regards Blonde as one of the two books she will be remembered for.
A Garden of Earthly Delights is a novel by Joyce Carol Oates, published by Vanguard in 1967. Her second book published, it is the first in her "Wonderland Quartet" followed by Expensive People (1968), them (1969), and Wonderland (1971). It was a finalist for the 1968 annual U.S. National Book Award for Fiction.
Helen Frances Barolini was an American writer, editor, and translator. As a second-generation Italian American, Barolini often wrote on issues of Italian-American identity. Among her notable works are Umbertina (1979), a novel which tells the story of four generations of women in one Italian-American family; and an anthology, The Dream Book: An Anthology of Writings by Italian American Women (1985), which called attention to an emerging, and previously unnoticed, class of writers.
Wonderland is a 1971 novel by Joyce Carol Oates, the fourth in her "Wonderland Quartet" following A Garden of Earthly Delights (1967), Expensive People (1968), and them (1969). It was a finalist for the annual U.S. National Book Award for Fiction and it has been called one of the author's best books.
After the Wreck, I Picked Myself Up, Spread My Wings, and Flew Away is a young adult novel written by Joyce Carol Oates. First published in 2006, it is her fifth novel for teenagers.
Little Bird of Heaven is a 2009 novel by Joyce Carol Oates. It is her 38th published novel. The novel is the third set in the fictional city of Sparta, NY, which was also a main setting for her two previous best-sellers We Were the Mulvaneys and The Gravedigger's Daughter.
Freaky Green Eyes (2003) is the third young adult fiction novel written by Joyce Carol Oates. The story follows the life of 15-year-old Francesca "Franky" Pierson as she reflects on the events leading to her mother's mysterious disappearance. Through what she calls Freaky's thoughts, Franky accepts the truth about her mother's disappearance and her father's hand in it.
List of the published work of Joyce Carol Oates, American writer.
Son of the Morning is a 1978 novel by American author Joyce Carol Oates. The book was first published on August 1, 1978 through Vanguard Press.
Dear Husband is a collection of 14 fictional short stories written by Joyce Carol Oates. It was published in 2009 by Ecco Press.
Freud's Sister is a novel written about the life of Sigmund Freud’s sister, Adolfina. Written by Goce Smilevski, it was originally published in Macedonia in 2011 and won the EU Prize for Literature in 2010 before it was published. It was subsequently translated by Christiana Kramer into English and published in the United States of America in 2012. This novel follows the life story of Adolfina from childhood until her death in a concentration camp in 1938 at Terezin.
Crossing the Border: Fifteen Tales is a collection of short stories by Joyce Carol Oates written while the author was residing in Canada. Published simultaneously by Vanguard Press in the United States and by Cage Publishing Company, Agincourt, Canada in 1976. The stories had appeared previously in different US and Canadian magazines, often in different versions. Seven of the stories, "Crossing the Border", "Hello Fine Day Isn’t It", "Natural Boundaries", "Customs", "The Scream", "An Incident in The Park", and "River Rising" depict conjugal life of an American couple, Reneé and Evan Maynard, in Canada. The characters in "The Transformation of Vincent Scoville" and "The Liberation of Jake Hanley" are instructors at the same Canadian college. The rest of the stories are not connected to each other.
The Sacrifice is a 2015 novel by the American writer Joyce Carol Oates. Set in blighted urban New Jersey in the 1980s, it follows a young Black woman, Sybilla, who is discovered in a degraded condition in an abandoned factory after going missing. When she alleges that she was kidnapped, assaulted, and left for dead by a group of white police officers, her cause is taken up by an ambitious and unscrupulous civil rights activist and his lawyer brother, despite evidence of deceit in her story. The events of the novel are based on the real-life Tawana Brawley case, and takes place in a part of New Jersey still suffering from the aftermath of post-war deindustrialization and the 1967 Newark riots.
Marie-Helene Bertino is an American novelist and short story writer. She is the author of three novels, Beautyland (2024), Parakeet (2020) and 2AM at the Cat's Pajamas (2014), and one short story collection, Safe as Houses (2012). She has been awarded a Pushcart Prize and an O. Henry Prize for her short stories.
Pursuit is a 2019 thriller and suspense novel by Joyce Carol Oates. It was published in the United States by Mysterious Press on October 1, 2019.
My Life as a Rat is a novel by American writer Joyce Carol Oates, published by Ecco Press, an imprint of HarperCollins, on June 4, 2019. It follows the life of Violet Rue Kerrigan, who is disowned from her family at the age of 12 after she reveals that her brothers were responsible for the murder of an African American teenager.