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.
""Blonde is a true mythic blowout, in which Marilyn is everything and nothing--a Great White Whale of significance, standing not for the blind power of nature but for the blind power of artifice." --"GQ "Ms. Oates has hit another one of her targets. This vengeful history is about the majesty of imagination. Marilyn's self-imaginings were cruelly curtaied. Come now the artist to accord Marilyn her rightful status, as artist. The artist uses flesh and fact, the artist transcends them." --"The New York Observer "Joyce Carol Oates takes the boldest path to comprehending 'the riddle, the curse of Monroe' by proceeding directly and frankly to fiction. Her novel "Blonde is fat, messy and fierce. It's part Gothic, part kaleidoscopic novel of ideas, part lurid celebrity potboiler, and is seldom less than engrossing." --Laura Miller, "The New York Times "In Oates' corpus, "Blonde lands near the top. It is an ambitious, complex, and powerful novel." --"Greensboro News and Record "At 61, Oates may have created the most important novel of her career." --"Newsday "If you are prejudiced against biographical fiction...or if you simply think that there are too many books about MarilynMonroe...now is the time to lay aside your prejudices--or, rather, to allow them to be swept aside by a torrentially imaginative, compulsively readable "tour de force..."Blonde brings this near mythic tale triumphantly and terribly to psychological life."Joyce Carol Oates' precise and inspired writing is close to witchcraft. With mastery, she unravels the story of the mthical blonde, the overly adored and despised Marilyn Monroe. Breathlessly, I followed the intricate and passionate emotions surrounding the sweet and complex Norma Jeane, whose blazing 'aura' suffused the whole world and frightened the men who loved her most." --Jeanne Moreau"The novel may be more than 700 pages long, but you're hard pressed to put it down from the moment you turn to the first page. Oates has forged a book of irresistable and terrible locomotion, and it little matters that we know--oh how sorrowfully we know--how it will end." --"The Commercial Appeal "Joyce Carol Oates' scary and rhapsodic novel about the life of Marilyn Monroe is saturated with the mysteried of eye and camera...It's eccentric, exhausting--and remarkable." --salon.com "In "Blonde, OAtes has found a character and a narrative mode that exploit all her strengths as a writer: the ability to inhabit the psyche of a troubled individual with total conviction; themythmaking power that presents 'Marilyn' as a multidimensional iconic figure; a narrative intensity often found in her stories but never sustained so successfully in a long novel' and an exuberant mastery of language that suggests a writer at the peak of her power." --"The Atlanta Journal and Constitution ""Blonde is at once epic and impressionistic, even lyrical, all snippets that seem intimate, a catalog that accumulates into something public and grand." --Brian Bouldrey"Oates is as diverse as she is driven. She has tackled topics ranging from the aesthetics of boxing tot he misadventures of toxic twins. But rarely is she so intriguing as when she strays into a genre best described as "faction." It's as unsettling as it is worthwhile to take a fresh look at a much-publicized event or personality through Oates' eyes." --"Times "Grimly compelling...a portrait of Hollywood as terrifyingly hallucinatory as Nathaniel West's "The Day of the Locust." --"Wall Street Journal"["Blonde]...resembles a massive stone sculpture, like Rodin's "Balzac...an overwhelmingly vivid and powerful rendering of a human being who outlived her life."--"The New York Review of Books
Atkinson narrates Oates's fictional biography of Marilyn Monroe in an intense, slightly husky voice that immediately grabs and holds the listener's attention. Film actress Atkinson deftly switches back and forth between Oates's prose, a breathy Monroe (who "comments" periodically throughout the novel), Monroe's brassy mother, Gladys (who soon succumbs to mental illness), and a series of powerful, impatient men who callously exploit the vulnerable young actress. Her only false note is the dialogue of John F. Kennedy, which she reads without any attempt at the president's distinctive Massachusetts accent. Abridging Oates's epic is no small feat, but all the major events in Monroe's life remain in vivid and often heartbreaking detail. The audio also includes an exclusive interview with Oates, who talks about her impressions of Monroe as a person and as an icon, and discusses how she came to write the 700-plus- page novel, which she originally intended as a 175-page novella. Based on the HarperCollins/ Ecco hardcover (Forecasts, Feb. 14). (Apr.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.
""Blonde is a true mythic blowout, in which Marilyn is everything and nothing--a Great White Whale of significance, standing not for the blind power of nature but for the blind power of artifice." --"GQ "Ms. Oates has hit another one of her targets. This vengeful history is about the majesty of imagination. Marilyn's self-imaginings were cruelly curtaied. Come now the artist to accord Marilyn her rightful status, as artist. The artist uses flesh and fact, the artist transcends them." --"The New York Observer "Joyce Carol Oates takes the boldest path to comprehending 'the riddle, the curse of Monroe' by proceeding directly and frankly to fiction. Her novel "Blonde is fat, messy and fierce. It's part Gothic, part kaleidoscopic novel of ideas, part lurid celebrity potboiler, and is seldom less than engrossing." --Laura Miller, "The New York Times "In Oates' corpus, "Blonde lands near the top. It is an ambitious, complex, and powerful novel." --"Greensboro News and Record "At 61, Oates may have created the most important novel of her career." --"Newsday "If you are prejudiced against biographical fiction...or if you simply think that there are too many books about MarilynMonroe...now is the time to lay aside your prejudices--or, rather, to allow them to be swept aside by a torrentially imaginative, compulsively readable "tour de force..."Blonde brings this near mythic tale triumphantly and terribly to psychological life."Joyce Carol Oates' precise and inspired writing is close to witchcraft. With mastery, she unravels the story of the mthical blonde, the overly adored and despised Marilyn Monroe. Breathlessly, I followed the intricate and passionate emotions surrounding the sweet and complex Norma Jeane, whose blazing 'aura' suffused the whole world and frightened the men who loved her most." --Jeanne Moreau"The novel may be more than 700 pages long, but you're hard pressed to put it down from the moment you turn to the first page. Oates has forged a book of irresistable and terrible locomotion, and it little matters that we know--oh how sorrowfully we know--how it will end." --"The Commercial Appeal "Joyce Carol Oates' scary and rhapsodic novel about the life of Marilyn Monroe is saturated with the mysteried of eye and camera...It's eccentric, exhausting--and remarkable." --salon.com "In "Blonde, OAtes has found a character and a narrative mode that exploit all her strengths as a writer: the ability to inhabit the psyche of a troubled individual with total conviction; themythmaking power that presents 'Marilyn' as a multidimensional iconic figure; a narrative intensity often found in her stories but never sustained so successfully in a long novel' and an exuberant mastery of language that suggests a writer at the peak of her power." --"The Atlanta Journal and Constitution ""Blonde is at once epic and impressionistic, even lyrical, all snippets that seem intimate, a catalog that accumulates into something public and grand." --Brian Bouldrey"Oates is as diverse as she is driven. She has tackled topics ranging from the aesthetics of boxing tot he misadventures of toxic twins. But rarely is she so intriguing as when she strays into a genre best described as "faction." It's as unsettling as it is worthwhile to take a fresh look at a much-publicized event or personality through Oates' eyes." --"Times "Grimly compelling...a portrait of Hollywood as terrifyingly hallucinatory as Nathaniel West's "The Day of the Locust." --"Wall Street Journal"["Blonde]...resembles a massive stone sculpture, like Rodin's "Balzac...an overwhelmingly vivid and powerful rendering of a human being who outlived her life."--"The New York Review of Books
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