Dear Husband - by Joyce Carol Oates (Paperback)

About the Book

With the unflinching candor and sympathy for which Oates is celebrated, the 14 stories of "Dear Husband," examine the intimate lives of contemporary American families.

From the Back Cover

Replete with the emotional intensity and pathos for which Joyce Carol Oates is lauded, these fourteen stories explore the intimate lives of contemporary American families: the tangled relationship between generations, the desperation of loving more than one is loved in return. In "Cutty Sark" and "Landfill," the bond between adolescent son and mother reverberates with the force of an unspoken passion. The gripping title story finds Oates boldly reimagining the true-crime story of Andrea Yates, the Texas mother who drowned her children in 2001. Several stories offer a more lighthearted reprieve, examining with dark humor the shadowy intersection between self-awareness and delusion.

Review Quotes

"The family ties that bind (and choke) are the overarching theme of Oates's grim but incisive collection...Oates seamlessly enters the minds of disparate characters to find both the exalted and depraved aspects of real American families." - Publishers Weekly (Lead fiction review)
"Oates's stories have a certain doomed poignancy . . . if there's a moral here, it's the anything-can-happen wisdom of what Oates calls 'brutal and horrific' fairy tales." - New York Times Book Review
"Although nearly all 14 stories have been published elsewhere, they merit a book of their own. Admirers of Oates' literary fiction will find this collection a transcendent read. Dear Husband is likely to win Oates new fans as well. Oates' characters are masterfully rendered." - Lisa Ko, author of The Leavers
"Oates explores incest, death by fitness center, accidental death; it's not light reading, but twined into these human tragedies are bits and pieces found in all our lives." - Philadelphia City Paper
"Joyce Carol Oates' startling new collection of stories brings us back to familiar Oates territory. Lurking everywhere is a palpable sense of violence and fear, broken hearts and souls, shattered families. . . . This astonishingly talented writer understands that the nexus of family life is bloodstained and bitter but, like a restless insomniac, she can't avert her gaze." - New Jersey Star-Ledger
"America simmers in the writings of Joyce Carol Oates, going through the motions of everyday life as best it can, but prone to boiling over at any moment. Oates... has once again held a haunting mirror up to America, revealing who we are." - Boston Globe
"Admirers of Oates' literary fiction will find this collection a transcendent read. "Dear Husband" is likely to win Oates new fans as well. Oates' characters are masterfully rendered, but she is particularly gifted at creating a certain type: The appallingly egocentric, sometimes to the point of unwitting hostility." - Boston Herald
"Savage, poetic and ruthless...[Oates's] touch has never been surer, her insights never more piercing....several of the [stories], astonishingly, are among the best things she's ever done...we are witnessing the steady unfolding of one of the towering careers in American letters." - Washington Post
"Her latest volume, Dear Husband, comprises 14 character-driven short stories that range from the almost unimaginably tragic to the twisted-but-hilarious . . . [Oates] is still fresh as ever, not just cruising the postmillennial zeitgeist from the Iraq war to the BlackBerry but also finding new ways to illuminate the human condition, a skill that never loses relevance. . . . Dear Husband, like most of Oates' work, is vigorously dark, and it reminds us why we keep reading her in the first place: because we just can't turn away." - Elle