IN ROUGH COUNTRY

 

IN ROUGH COUNTRY

Essays and Reviews

By Joyce Carol Oates

396 pp. Ecco/HarperCollins Publishers.

  "But taken as a whole, this collection is a rich gathering of insights from a mind consecrated to books  -- both as a writer, and as a reader."

Bron: Salon

"The temptation in reading criticism by an author better known for her novels and stories is to inspect it for clues to her own work. And you’ll find them here, in Oates’s attention to the claustrophobia of small towns and families, the warping influences of class and sex, the power and powerlessness of women, the persistent distrust of organized religion and of American mythologizing. But Oates seems to take special, even unusual, pains not to bend her subjects into her own narrative. She is, instead, intensely focused on the books at hand, marking highlights, supplying context, guiding the reader through passage after passage. Her attention, even in a critic’s mode, is unfailingly generous."

Bron: The New York Times