I'll Take You There - by Joyce Carol Oates (Paperback)

About the Book

In her bewitching 30th novel, Oates returns again to neurotic female post-adolescence. With deftly cast philosophical meditations--on love, death, identity, the body--this is a portrait of a woman surprised to discover strength in simply enduring.

From the Back Cover

"Anellia" is a young student who, though gifted with a penetrating intelligence, is drastically inclined to obsession. Funny, mordant, and compulsive, she falls passionately in love with a brilliant yet elusive black philosophy student. But she is tested most severely by a figure out of her past she'd long believed dead.

Astonishingly intimate and unsparing, and pitiless in exposing the follies of the time, I'll Take You There is a dramatic revelation of the risks--and curious rewards--of the obsessive personality as well as a testament to the stubborn strength of a certain type of contemporary female intellectual.

Review Quotes

"Oates knows few contemporary rivals for her expertise at conjuring up the frenetic compulsion of forbidden desires."" - New York Times Book Review
"Young women who don't quite know where they fit in--and anyone who has known women like them--will find recognition and understanding in this latest piece in the novelistic quilt of one of America's most accomplished writers" - St. Louis Post-Dispatch
"Oates writes with a sustained eloquence that will keep most readers riveted to her pages. This is Oates's finest novel in many years, executed with the practiced hand of a master." - Atlanta Journal-Constitution
"Among contemporary American novelists, only John Updike and Philip Roth can be compared in any meaningful way to Oates in terms of her body of work, and she's consistently better than either.... One might say she's our Trollope.... I'll Take You There...is shot through with brilliant insights, wonderful writing and, occasionally, some very funny if absurd moments." - Rocky Mountain News
"Seethes with Oates's trademark intellect and psychological insight." - Elle
"I'll Take You There is sharp, vivid, first-person storytelling. Oates veers between strikingly precise images and feelings recounted in eloquent prose and bluntly direct incomplete sentences that jab at the reader with knifelike edges." - Boston Globe
"If the phrase 'woman of letters' existed, Joyce Carol Oates would be, foremost in this country, entitled to it." - John Updike