Contributors

Joyce Carol Oates
Contributor History

Biography
Joyce Carol Oates
JOYCE CAROL OATES is a recipient of the National Medal of the Humanities, the
National Book Critics Circle Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Book Award,
and the Jerusalem Prize. She is the author of the forthcoming novel Butcher (Knopf) as
well as the national bestsellers We Were The Mulvaneys, Blonde, The Falls, The
Gravedigger’s Daughter,
and The Accursed. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished
Professor of the Humanities emerita at Princeton University and has been a member of
the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978.

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In Print

Vol. 82
Works & Days
Spring 2024
Bradford Morrow

Online

April 24, 2024
The July morning was alive with a sound in the air, strange communications, the acoustics of the big yard amplifying each rustle, each wave. Odd creatures glittering on the ground. Herds spread lavishly, a wilderness of transparent wings, bug eyes, a mosaic of glassy fragments. Glinting. They covered the grass, the sidewalk, covered the branches of the trees.
April 17, 2024
The sound reverberated in my sense of what was right and reliable in the world like drone weaponry, and what I wanted to ask was: what business have you left undone, and did you do a thing you so regretted that you can’t let go of it, was there a person you cut off, when sympathy would have been the better gesture, was there a person you trod on to get ahead in your sales job, speaking ill of them, so that they were forever harmed, did you say something awful about a friend in school, did you call a friend the worst of names in middle school, because it was a thing they said then, the boys did that, only to find, later on, that you loved that boy in a way . . . .
April 10, 2024
I do not like old water.

The water in the ocean is old

The lake is old

But maybe it’s not

Subject to the logic of time, of old and new.

Water.