Series: P.S.

From the author of ‘Blonde’, ‘The Falls’ and ‘We Were the Mulvaneys’, this new novel takes in the themes of race, immigration, family and social mobility, and is Joyce Carol Oates at her storytelling best.

‘The Gravedigger’s Daughter’ tells the tale of Rebecca Schwart, born in the late 1930s to an immigrant family from Nazi Germany, just as they are arriving to America. The family settles in a small, bleak town in upstate New York, where the only job the father can get is as the town gravedigger and caretaker of the cemetery. Soon the town's prejudice and the family's own emotional frailty results in unspeakable tragedy. In the wake of this loss, and in an attempt to put her past behind her, young Rebecca Schwart moves on, across America and through a series of listless marriages, in search of somewhere, and someone, to whom she can belong.

Blonde

by Joyce Carol Oates

Published 5 April 2000

A sweeping, mesmerising novel of the most enduring and evocative cultural icon of the 20th century. 'Nobody has ever caught Marilyn more brilliantly than Oates' -- John Sutherland Who was Norma Jeane Baker? In Blonde we are given an intimate, unsparing vision of the woman who became Marilyn Monroe like no other: the child who visits the cinema with her mother; the orphan whose mother is declared mad; the woman who changes her name to become an actress; the fated celebrity, lover, comedienne, muse and icon. Joyce Carol Oates tells an epic American story of how a fragile, gifted young woman makes and remakes her identity, surviving against crushing odds, perpetually in conflict and intensely driven. Here is the very essence of the individual hungry and needy for love: from an elusive mother; from a mysterious, distant father and from a succession of lovers and husbands. In her most ambitious work to date Joyce Carol Oates sympathetically explores the inner life of the woman destined to become Hollywood's most compelling legend.
Blonde is a brilliant and deeply moving portrait of a culture hypnotised by its own myths and the shattering reality of the personal effects it had on the woman who became Marilyn Monroe.

Tales of H. P. Lovecraft

by Joyce Carol Oates

Published 18 September 2007