Kathleen a onze ans. Sa mère vient de les quitter pour disparaître à jamais. Son père, dans une crise de démence alcoolique, a battu à mort sa sœur Nola et blessé si grièvement la petite Kathleen qu'elle doit être hospitalisée. Un mois d'hôpital avant l'Assistance publique. Un mois vécu comme un rêve interrompu. Ce rêve, elle croit le reprendre en devenant infirmière et pense trouver le bonheur dans l'amour qu'elle voue à un médecin. Mais le destin, dans une infernale et implacable logique, va la ramener au commencement de sa vie marquée par l'abandon et la mort.

Au commencement était la vie

A personal novel about mothers and daughters. It tells the story of a woman coming to terms with the death of her mother, and uncovering all the secrets stowed away over the years. When her mother fails to return her phone calls, Nikki Eaton calls in to check up on her. She finds the house turned upside-down, and her mother lying dead, murdered.

Mother, missing

Quentin P_ è un enigma per i suoi genitori, anche se non credono affatto all'accusa di molestie sessuali mossa da un minore nei suoi confronti. Quentin P_ è un enigma per il suo psichiatra, che comunque lo incoraggia, apprezzando le potenzialità positive dei suoi sogni, di cui parla tanto apertamente. Per sua nonna, Quentin P_ è solo un ragazzo dolcissimo, cui è impossibile dire di no. Ma Quentin P_ in verità è l'assassino psicopatico più terrificante del Michigan. Condannato alla libertà vigilata, Quentin è accondiscendente, ma rimane insensibile a tutto: alla famiglia, ai controlli giudiziari, ai medici. Un giorno, per caso, scopre la lobotomia, e d'un tratto le sue ossessioni prendono forma concreta. Una a una, sceglie le sue vittime obbedendo a una volontà di potenza, il bisogno insopprimibile di creare uno « zombie » tutto per sé che, passivo e remissivo, lo supplichi e lo gratifichi. Esagitato da varie sostanze e dalle sue stesse perversioni sessuali, assolve con zelo ogni sanguinoso compito e, nella meccanicità, acquisisce sempre maggiore astuzia e perizia. Zombie è il romanzo della mente psicotica di un killer seriale che, nel delirio impermeabile del suo monologo, riproduce i movimenti automatici di una società disumanizzata. Joyce Carol Oates descrive con rara maestria efferatezze difficili anche solo da immaginare, in una prosa rapida, tagliente, che evoca il male con una manciata di pensieri dissociati - la sintassi nevrotica di una coscienza che rimane mistero. Leggere questo libro è un'esperienza disturbante: facendo rivivere i nostri peggiori incubi, nella sua tensione nerissima ci tiene prigionieri della mente del mostro, fino a quando vorremo implorare pietà.

Zombie

Six nouvelles explorent les univers troubles de personnages au bord de la folie. Inspirée d'un tableau d'Edward Hopper, celle qui ouvre le recueil a pour protagoniste une femme qui chaque matin, nue et chaussée d'escarpins, attend son mari, le regard vide tourné vers une fenêtre. Lorsque ce dernier arrive, le lecteur pénètre leurs pensées où se mêlent désir, dégoût et haine... Joyce Carol Oates ausculte brillamment les thèmes de l'abus physique, psychologique et émotionnel.

Femme à la fenêtre et autres histoires à suspense

A momentous memoir of childhood and adolescence from one of our finest and most beloved writers, as we've never seen her before.

 In The Lost Landscape, Joyce Carol Oates vividly recreates the early years of her life in western New York state, powerfully evoking the romance of childhood and the way it colors everything that comes after. From early memories of her relatives to remembrances of a particularly poignant friendship with a red hen, from her first friendships to her first experiences with death, The Lost Landscape is an arresting account of the ways in which Oates's life (and her life as a writer) was shaped by early childhood and how her later work was influenced by a hard-scrabble rural upbringing.

 In this exceptionally candid, moving, and richly reflective recounting of her early years, Oates explores the world through the eyes of her younger self and reveals her nascent experiences of wanting to tell stories about the world and the people she meets. If Alice in Wonderland was the book that changed a young Joyce forever and inspired her to look at life as offering endless adventures, she describes just as unforgettably the harsh lessons of growing up on a farm. With searing detail and an acutely perceptive eye, Oates renders her memories and emotions with exquisite precision to truly transport the reader to a bygone place and time, the lost landscape of the writer's past but also to the lost landscapes of our own earliest, and most essential, lives.

The Lost Landscape

This eerie tale of psychological horror sees the real inhabitants of turn-of-the-century Princeton fall under the influence of a supernatural power. New Jersey, 1905: soon-to-be commander-in-chief Woodrow Wilson is president of Princeton University. On a nearby farm, Socialist author Upton Sinclair, enjoying the success of his novel 'The Jungle', has taken up residence with his family. This is a quiet, bookish community - elite, intellectual and indisputably privileged. But when a savage lynching in a nearby town is hushed up, a horrifying chain of events is initiated - until it becomes apparent that the families of Princeton have been beset by a powerful curse. The Devil has come to this little town and not a soul will be spared. 'The Accursed' marks new territory for the masterful Joyce Carol Oates - narrated with her unmistakable psychological insight, it combines beautifully transporting historical detail with chilling fantastical elements to stunning effect.

Maudits

The bonds of family are tested in the wake of a profound tragedy, providing a look at the darker side of our society by one of our most enduringly popular and important writers     Night Sleep Death The Stars  is a gripping examination of contemporary America through the prism of a family tragedy: when a powerful parent dies, each of his adult children reacts in startling and unexpected ways, and his grieving widow in the most surprising way of all.   Stark and penetrating, Joyce Carol Oates's latest novel is a vivid exploration of race, psychological trauma, class warfare, grief, and eventual healing, as well as an intimate family novel in the tradition of the author's bestselling  We Were the Mulvaneys.

NIGHT. SLEEP. DEATH. THE STARS. - A NOVEL

Little Bird of Heaven by Joyce Carol Oates is a riveting story of love violently lost and found in late 20th century America. In this novel, Oates returns to the Buffalo, New York, region to brilliantly explore the dangerous intersections of romance and eroticism, guilt and obsession, desire and murder. Little Bird of Heaven, a soaring work by the New York Times bestselling author and a nominee for the 2009 Man Booker Prize-one of the world's most prestigious literary awards-is as powerful and unforgettable as Joyce Carol Oates's previous acclaimed novels The Gravedigger's Daughter and We Were the Mulvaneys.

Little Bird of Heaven - A Novel

A Mont-Ephraim, petite ville de l'Etat de New York, tout le monde connaît les Mulvaney, leur bonheur et leur réussite. Michael, le père, d'origine modeste, a su à force de travail se faire accepter par la bonne société de la ville. Grâce à sa femme qu'il adore, la ferme qu'ils habitent est un coin de paradis, une maison de contes de fées où, au milieu d'une nature splendide, entourés de chiens, de chats, d'oiseaux, de chevaux - et immensément d'amour -, leurs trois fils et leur fille Marianne vivent une enfance inoubliable. Jusqu'au drame de la Saint-Valentin 1976, qui vient mettre un terme à cette existence idyllique, fait voler la famille en éclats et marque à jamais chacun de ses membres... 

 Née en 1938, auteur d'une trentaine de romans et de recueils de nouvelles qui l'ont portée au premier rang des écrivains américains contemporains, Joyce Carol Oates vit et enseigne à Princeton.

Au commencement était la vie

Résumé

Plus de livres de Joyce Carol Oates

Critiques

Ce livre n'a pas encore de critiques