Books like First person singular by Joyce Carol Oates

Jonah P., a troubled young man accused of sexual molestation, navigates the harsh scrutiny of his family, a court-appointed psychiatrist, and his own haunting dreams, while his grandmother’s indulgence blurs the lines between protection and complicity.

A close‑knit family and their surrounding community unravel when a traumatic act of sexual violence disrupts their unity.

Joyce Carol Oates gives a biographical fiction portrait of Marilyn Monroe, tracing her life from birth to death against the backdrop of Hollywood's glittering yet tragic world.

In Upstate New York, a family’s tangled history intertwines with the environmental disaster of Love Canal as nuclear waste threatens the working poor and dark secrets surface.

In 20th‑century Princeton, New Jersey, a powerful curse snuffs out a wealthy family’s brightest hope when a bride disappears, and her brother’s quest leads him into the city’s darkest underbelly and its most outspoken figures.

Conversations with M. F. K. Fisher offers a lively collection of interviews that showcase the celebrated American food writer’s sharp wit, provocative views on gastronomy, and the personal experiences that shaped her literary voice.

Publisher description: In Winged Words Laura Coltelli interviews some of America's foremost Indian poets and novelists, including Paula Gunn Allen, Michael Dorris, Louise Erdrich, Joy Harjo, Linda Hogan, N. Scott Momaday, Simon Ortiz, Wendy Rose, Leslie Marmon Silko, Gerald Vizenor; and James Welch. They candidly discuss the debt to old and the creation of new traditions, the proprieties of age and gender; and the relations between Indian writers and non-Indian readers and critics, and between writers and anthropologists and histo-rians. In exploring a wide range of topics, each writer arrives at his or her own moment of truth.

A Jewish immigrant family struggles in 1930s upstate New York; after tragedy, daughter Rebecca embarks on an odyssey of self‑invention that culminates in a bittersweet, distinctly American triumph.

The haunting novel "Them" explores class, race, and the glittering edge of poverty in 1960s Detroit, following the Wendall family—Loretta, Maureen, and Jules—as they confront love, loss, and the harsh realities of the American urban landscape.

A reclusive novelist, Joshua Seigl, hires the tattooed assistant Alma Busch, and their uneasy, anti‑Jewish encounter unfolds into a tense exploration of desire, isolation, and prejudice.

These interviews showcase three Native writers in dialogue with a European critic who becomes their partner in exploring individual and tribal identity, cultural survival and exploitation, and writing techniques. From Hartwig Isernhagen's unique perspective, readers survey the growth of Native writing in the United States and Canada within the context of indigenous world literature. All three writers responded to the same series of questions by their European interviewer. The dialogues show how three major figures assess the contribution of modernism, post-modernism, and the realist tradition to contemporary Native literature.

For the sixth edition, James D. Hart and Phillip Leininger have updated the Companion in light of what has happened in American literature since 1982. To this end, they have revised the entries on such established authors as Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, and Joyce Carol Oates, and they have added more than 180 new entries on novelists (T. Coraghessan Boyle, Tim O'Brien, Louise Erdrich, Don De Lillo), poets (Rita Dove, Weldon Kees), playwrights (Wendy Wasserstein, August Wilson), popular writers (Stephen King, Louis L'Amour), historians (James M. McPherson, David Herbert Donald, William Manchester), naturalists (Aldo Leopold, Edward Abbey), and literary critics (Camille Paglia, Richard Ellmann). In addition, the Companion boasts more women's, African-American, and ethnic voices, with new entries on such luminaries as Charlotte Perkins Gilman, M. F. K. Fisher, William Least Heat-Moon, Ursula Le Guin, and Oscar Hijuelos, among many others. With over 5,000 total entries, The Oxford Companion to American Literature reflects a dynamic balance between past and contemporary literature, surveying virtually every aspect of our national literature, from the Pulitzer Prize to pulp fiction, and from Walt Whitman to William F. Buckley, Jr. There are over 2,000 biographical profiles of important American authors (with information regarding their styles, subjects, and major works) and influential foreign writers as well as other figures who have been important in the nation's social and cultural history. There are more than 1,100 full summaries of important American novels, stories, essays, poems (with verse form noted), plays, biographies and autobiographies, tracts, narratives, and histories. The new edition provides historical background and astute commentary on literary schools and movements, literary awards, magazines, newspapers, and a wide variety of other matters directly related to writing in America. Finally, the book is thoroughly cross-referenced and features an extensive and fully updated index of literary and social history.

Joyce Carol Oates opens the pages of her own life to reveal the deep grief and resilience that followed the end of a 49‑year marriage, offering an intimate look at loss, family and survival.