Fox - by Joyce Carol Oates (Hardcover)

About the Book

"Who is Francis Fox? A charming English teacher new to the idyllic Langhorne Academy, Fox beguiles many of his students, their parents, and his colleagues at the elite boarding school, while leaving others wondering where he came from and why his biography is so enigmatic. When two brothers discover Fox's car half-submerged in a pond in a local nature preserve and parts of an unidentified body strewn about the nearby woods, the entire community, including Detective Horace Zwender and his deputy, begins to ask disturbing questions about Francis Fox and who he might really be"--]cProvided by publisher.

Book Synopsis

A spellbinding novel of literary and psychological suspense about the dark secrets that surface after the shocking disappearance of a charismatic, mercurial teacher at an elite boarding school--by the legendary author "who is surely on any shortlist of America's greatest living writers" (The New York Times Magazine)

"Eerie, shocking, provoking, and beautifully written, Fox is yet further proof Oates is one of the greatest writers among us today."--Gillian Flynn
"I found it mesmerizing front to back."--Michael Connelly
"I can't remember the last time I read something so (darkly, disconcertingly) addictive."--Rebecca Makkai
"An extraordinary novel . . . unlike any other mystery I've read."--Joseph Finder
"Fox is poised to be the big escape a lot of us are looking for right about now."--The Boston Globe

A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK: The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Seattle Times, Vulture, Esquire, Publishers Weekly, Lit Hub, AV Club, AARP

Who is Francis Fox? A charming English teacher new to the idyllic Langhorne Academy, Fox beguiles many of his students, their parents, and his colleagues at the elite boarding school, while leaving others wondering where he came from and why his biography is so enigmatic. When two brothers discover Fox's car half-submerged in a pond in a local nature preserve and parts of an unidentified body strewn about the nearby woods, the entire community, including Detective Horace Zwender and his deputy, begins to ask disturbing questions about Francis Fox and who he might really be.

A hypnotic, galloping tale of crime and complicity, revenge and restitution, victim vs. predator, Joyce Carol Oates's Fox illuminates the darkest corners of the human psyche while asking profound moral questions about justice and the response evil demands. A character as magnetically diabolical as Patricia Highsmith's Tom Ripley and Vladimir Nabokov's Humbert Humbert, Francis Fox enchants and manipulates nearly everyone around him, until at last he meets someone he can't outfox. Written in Oates's trademark intimate, sweeping style, and interweaving multiple points of view, Fox is a triumph of craftsmanship and artistry, a novel as profound as it is propulsive, as moving as it is full of mystery.

Review Quotes

"Reading Fox is like being spellbound by a hypnotist who may not wish you well, who leads you, with a deceptively gentle hand, toward that dark forest you fear. Joyce Carol Oates has created a sinister fable all the more chilling for persuading its readers to collude in the unthinkable. Eerie, shocking, provoking, and beautifully written, Fox is yet further proof that Oates is one of the greatest writers among us today."--#1 New York Times bestselling author Gillian Flynn

"What a gift this book is! As beautifully written and brilliantly constructed as this story is, as wonderful as the mystery is, Fox's power is in the many depths of character Joyce Carol Oates explores and how she captures the nuances of the choices people make. I found it mesmerizing front to back--another master class from one of America's greatest writers."--#1 New York Times bestselling author Michael Connelly

"I can't remember the last time I read something so (darkly, disconcertingly) addictive that yet bears so much realism and nuance and depth. Oates is a genius in the truest sense of the word--fearing nothing, including radical reinvention--and Fox is, to my mind, her most compelling book in her remarkable career."--Rebecca Makkai, New York Times bestselling author of I Have Some Questions For You

"Enthralling . . . chilling . . . Fox opens in October of 2013 with the grisly discovery of a wrecked white Acura and a dismembered body at the bottom of a South Jersey ravine. Joyce Carol Oates calmly winds the mystery backward through the repulsive actions of the deceased before he meets an untimely death, building fear alongside fascination . . . Fox has the bones of a potboiler but is supported by the sinew of the author's elegant structure and syntax . . . Oates wants us to turn pages and squirm."--Los Angeles Times

"[A] psychological thriller about a private school teacher whose disturbing past is uncovered when his car is found submerged in the swampy wetlands . . . a probing analysis of the mind of a predatory person . . . [and] a straightforward murder mystery, with the identification of a dead body leading to stories and clues that would otherwise not have come to light."--Hartford Courant

"I just finished an extraordinary novel and am still in its spell. [Fox is] unlike any other mystery I've read. It's so fully imagined, in the way that only Oates can do, powerful and sinister and beautifully written in her mesmerizing prose. Nobody else writes like the great Joyce Carol Oates. It's remarkable."--New York Times bestselling author Joseph Finder

"A dark, daring plunge into literary suspense, and it's absolutely chilling . . . a hypnotic portrait of a man who beguiles everyone--until he doesn't. . . . Told in shifting perspectives and with signature intensity, Fox is as much about the horrors we witness as the ones we choose to ignore. Uneasy, unflinching and unforgettable, this is Oates at her most disturbing and masterful."--The Seattle Times

"Charming but mysterious English teacher . . . dead body . . . dogged detective . . . deep questions about what it means to be human . . . and Oates. Yes please."--Esquire

"It's no surprise [Oates has] written a big summer book. . . . Fox is poised to be the big escape a lot of us are looking for right about now."--The Boston Globe

"[Oates] is at her best here: insightful, unrelenting, and devastating."--Library Journal, starred review

"Menacing, mesmerizing, and thoroughly provocative."--Booklist, starred review

"A tautly wound procedural, elegantly written (and with a Nabokovian in-joke that joins Lolita to [Oates's] tale), with an expertly constructed surprise ending . . . [a] moody, often shocking mystery."--Kirkus Reviews, starred review

"A master of her craft."--AARP

About the Author

Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of a National Humanities Medal awarded by President Barack Obama, the National Book Critics Circle's Ivan Sandrof Life Achievement Award, the National Book Award in Fiction, the Jerusalem Prize, the Prix Femina, the Cino Del Duca World Prize, and is a five-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the bestsellers Blonde and We Were the Mulvaneys. She is the Roger S. Berlind '52 Distinguished Professor of the Humanities Emerita at Princeton University and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2024 she won the Raymond Chandler Lifetime Achievement Award given to "a master of the thriller and noir literary genre."