Foxfire - by Joyce Carol Oates (Paperback)

About the Book

Oates's most powerful work yet, now in a trade paper edition. Foxfire chronicles the life of five unforgettably real teenage girls in upstate New York in the 1950s. This controversial, topical tale captures the exhilaration of conspiracy, the blaze of youth, and the inevitable end of violence.

Book Synopsis

New York Times bestselling author Joyce Carol Oates's strongest and most unsparing novel yet--an always engrossing, often shocking evocation of female rage, gallantry, and grit.

The time is the 1950s. The place is a blue-collar town in upstate New York, where five high school girls join a gang dedicated to pride, power, and vengeance on a world that seems made to denigrate and destroy them.

Here is the secret history of a sisterhood of blood, a haven from a world of male oppressors, marked by a liberating fury that burns too hot to last. Above all, it is the story of Legs Sadovsky, with her lean, on-the-edge, icy beauty, whose nerve, muscle, hate, and hurt make her the spark of Foxfire: its guiding spirit, its burning core.

At once brutal and lyrical, this is a careening joyride of a novel--charged with outlaw energy and lit by intense emotion. Amid scenes of violence and vengeance lies this novel's greatest power: the exquisite, astonishing rendering of the bonds that link the Foxfire girls together. Foxfire reaffirms Joyce Carol Oates's place at the very summit of American writing.

Review Quotes

Praise for Foxfire

"Brilliant...Foxfire burns brightly...exhilarating."--The New York Times Book Review

"Wonderful, beautiful, a vivid novel."--Washington Post

"Profound...a riveting whirlwind of a novel."--Los Angeles Times

About the Author

In addition to many prize-winning and bestselling novels, including We Were the Mulvaneys, A Book of American Martyrs, Black Water, Because It Is Bitter and Because It Is My Heart, and Broke Heart Blues, Joyce Carol Oates is the author of a number of works of gothic fiction including Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque, a World Fantasy Award nominee; and Zombie, winner of the Bram Stoker Award for Best Horror Novel, awarded by the Horror Writers' Association. In 1994, Oates received the Bram Stoker Lifetime Achievement Award in Horror Fiction. She is the editor of American Gothic Tales. She lives in Princeton, New Jersey.