Wheel of Love and Other Stories [Hardcover]

Joyce Carol Oates (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 440 pages
• Publisher: Vanguard Pr; First Edition edition (October 1970)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0814906761
• ISBN-13: 978-0814906767
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.9 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,111,324 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Joyce Carol Oates is the author of more than 70 books, including novels, short story collections, poetry volumes, plays, essays, and criticism, including the national bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys and Blonde. Among her many honors are the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction and the National Book Award. Oates is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University, and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A key short story collection of the last 30 years., May 20, 1999

By 

A Customer - See all my reviews

This review is from: Wheel of Love and Other Stories (Hardcover)

It's a shame this collection is no longer in print. When it came out in 1970, it created a huge stir (Oates had just won the National Book Award for the novel "them") and signalled the full flowering of a brilliant short story writer. Oates has released several fine collections over the years--my second favorite by her is "Last Days" (1984)--but this one has the strongest impact. Anyone who wants to know the soul of America in the 1950s and 1960s should read it. The title story (about a failed marriage told backwards--she beat Pinter's "Betrayal" by over a decade), "In the Region of Ice," "Accomplished Desires," "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been," and several other stories are among the best an American short story writer has produced since WWII. I am not just raving here. The only post-WWII collections (not career retrospectives but collections gathering recent publications) I know that hold up to it are Flannery O'Connor's A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955) and John Updike's Pigeon Feathers and Other Stories (1962). Oates has an uncanny way of getting into the psyches of her characters, particularly her women, and anatomizing them in short order. She has a dark view of human nature, but an artist is entitled to a view--and anyway, as D. H. Lawrence said (of Cooper), "The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer." You will see why I quote this statement when you read the stories in this book.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Oates at home in the short story, July 26, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Wheel of Love and Other Stories (Hardcover)

Oates is a better short story writer than novelist. Her writing style is best described as a manic rush, as clauses and phrases and complete sentences bump into each other, without punctuation, to recreate the fever pitch of life on edge. This style, naturally, works better in compressed form than when dragged out across a 700 page narrative. (Believe me, I've tried reading many of her novels.) In the WHEEL OF LOVE she is a little more restrained. This is an early collection of hers and contains some of her best and best-known stories. Forget "In the Region of Ice," the first story, but "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been" is a classic. It's frightening and can be read on so many levels. Oates is very good at describing the seamy side of otherwise "normal" people, but after a point I began to wonder what she thinks the point of her writing is. More interesting as a pschologist and sociologist than literary writer.