viii, 212 pp. A collection of essays and reviews by the National Book Award winner and Pulitzer Prize nominee. CONTENTS: Introduction; ESSAYS: Imaginary Cities: America; 'At Least I Have Made a Woman of Her': Images of Women in Yeats, Lawrence, Faulkner; The Magnanimity of Wuthering Heights; Charles Dodgson's Golden Hours; John Updike's American Comedies; Notes on Failure; REVIEWS: The Interior Castle: The Art of Jean Stafford's Short Fiction; Before God Was Love: The Short Stories of Paul Bowles; Colette's Purgatory; Geza Csath's Garden: The Contours of Surrealism; The 'Mysticism' of Simone Weil; Legendary Jung; Anne Sexton: Self-Portrait in Poetry and Letters; Sacred and Profane Iris Murdoch; Flannery O'Connor: A Self-Portrait in Letters; Notes to Essays. ABOUT THE AUTHOR: "Joyce Carol Oates (born June 16, 1938) is an American author. Raised in rural, working-class New York, Oates published her first book in 1963 and has since published over fifty novels, as well as many volumes of short stories, poetry, and non-fiction. Her novel them (1969) won the National Book Award, and her novels Black Water (1992), What I Lived For (1994), and Blonde (2000) were nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. With a reputation for prolificacy, Oates is one of the leading American novelists since the 1960s. As of 2008, Oates is the Roger S. Berlind '52 Professor in the Humanities with the Program in Creative Writing at Princeton University, where she has taught since 1978. Oates has also written under the pseudonyms 'Rosamond Smith' and 'Lauren Kelly.'"
