WORDTheatre’s 2023 Storyteller Award Winner Joyce Carol Oates will have her latest novel, Butcher, published in May 2024. Penguin Random House describes the book as “an extraordinary and arresting novel about a women’s asylum in the nineteenth century, and a terrifying doctor who wants to change the world.”
In this engaging article from Financial Times, Madison Darbyshire interviews Joyce Carol Oates about Twitter, writing, and Butcher. She also discusses the benefits of becoming a teacher after her husband of 47 years passed away: “The students are not aware of the teacher’s emotional life . . . so the focus shifted from my internal self to the students’ work. I would just eagerly read their stories and focus on them because I knew what was waiting for me back home was just this, this emptiness.” Read the full article here on the Financial Times Website.
Joyce Carol Oates is an accomplished novelist, poet, short story writer, essayist, and professor. Oates is a recipient of the National Medal of Humanities, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Book Award, and the 2019 Jerusalem Prize, and has been several times nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the national bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys; Blonde, which was nominated for the National Book Award; and the New York Times bestseller The Falls, which won the 2005 Prix Femina. She 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. Pre-order Butcher here.