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A Reading by Joyce Carol Oates
Monday, October 26, 2015
3:00 pm – 4:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Olin Hall
 [A Reading by Joyce Carol Oates] The National Book Award winner, two-time Pulitzer nominee, and widely acclaimed fiction writer and essayist reads "Walking Wounded," an new, unpublished story specially commissioned for its world premiere at this event.

Introduced by Bradford Morrow and followed by a Q&A, this event is free and open to the public; no tickets or reservations required.

Praise for Lovely, Dark, Deep

“Oates, one of few writers who achieves excellence in both the novel and the short story, has more than two dozen story collections to her name and she continues to inject new, ambushing power into the form. Oates’ stories seethe and blaze.” —Booklist

“With every new book Oates proves anew that she is perhaps our greatest contemporary American writer.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune

Praise for Carthage

“Knotted, tense, digressive and brilliant.” —Kirkus Reviews

“Joyce Carol Oates has outdone herself.” —NPR

“Brilliant … amazing. A compassionate tenderness suffuses the final sections of the book, as palpable as the cold irony with which the book begins. It’s a breathtaking effect.” —Washington Post

Praise for Evil Eye: Four Novellas of Love Gone Wrong

“An extraordinarily vivid depiction of lives gone awry ... A creepy, macabre thrill from start to finish. Terrific stuff.” —Independent

“Oates at her best—spare, swift, beautifully observed and quietly lethal.”—Times

Contact: Micaela Morrissette, [email protected], 845-758-7054

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In Print

Vol. 79
Onword
Fall 2022
Edited by Bradford Morrow

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March 15, 2023
He’s been coming around a lot but I’ve only recently started calling the dog Jesus because if Jesus were to return, this is how he would do it. In this shape, in this form, in these times. I’m sure of it. My best and only friend, Holy Amy, who thinks of herself as a kind of very powerful and sexually budding nun, disagrees. She says Jesus would return in the form of a handsome kisser, not some ugly mutt. Someone with a beautiful face, so we would know it was him. I say he’s not ugly. She says I am “vexed,” “cursed,” and that I am doomed to repeat the mistakes of those before me, though I’m not sure whom she’s talking about. All I know is it’s true: he’s not ugly. The dog suit he wears isn’t even a dog suit. 
March 8, 2023
When the Reverend Houston was seventy he was retired from the ministry with a pension, paid by the national church organization, that was slightly in excess of the salary he had been receiving for nearly fifty years from his parish at New Babylon, Missouri. There were no strings attached to this pension. He could do with it and with himself, thereafter, practically anything that pleased his rational fancy. Naturally enough, he quit preaching. He had been preaching for nearly fifty years and he was getting just as tired of it as his congregation was. One Sunday morning during the summer of his seventieth year he shook hands with his successor, a vigorous young man who would attract plenty of spinsters to the Sunday-school faculty, walked calmly out of the church and never returned.
March 1, 2023
He walked for two years across the putrid surface of the solid crust: he learned how not to die by gnawing on it and how not to dissolve in its salt at night; he healed his own bones when the wind whipped him through the air like a rag and flung him onto the stiff waves.
       He was perpetually dazzled by the glare, but every once in a while he glimpsed shadows beneath the crust, brooding their bodies from one side to another and bashing themselves against the surface.
       Once he caught sight of an old man, inexplicably gleeful, jigging from one little plastic islet to the next. They waved at each other, arms aloft; he managed to make out the other man’s silhouette, stretched tall against the glare of the crust, and at that precise moment an enormous, jagged mouth rose up around the old man’s feet and carried him down to the depths of that filthy chowder.