Joyce Carol Oates | The New York Review of Books

Death in the Air

In Murderland, Caroline Fraser traces the correlations between rapacious industrial pollution and sadistic serial killers.

Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers

by Caroline Fraser

July 24, 2025 issue

None-Too-Gay Divorcées

Ursula Parrott’s 1929 novel Ex-Wife was a scandalous, best-selling portrayal of the era’s “new woman,” but in her own life she remained trapped in conventional views of marriage and relationships.

Ex-Wife

by Ursula Parrott, with a foreword by Alissa Bennett and an afterword by Marc Parrott

Becoming the Ex-Wife: The Unconventional Life and Forgotten Writings of Ursula Parrott

by Marsha Gordon

July 20, 2023 issue

Disaster Was Her Element

Miranda Seymour’s I Used to Live Here Once is a richly detailed and warmly sympathetic look at Jean Rhys’s turbulent, disjointed life.

I Used to Live Here Once: The Haunted Life of Jean Rhys

by Miranda Seymour

September 22, 2022 issue

‘See What You Can Make of It’

“I am not so interested in the voice of the essayist, precisely because it is my ‘own’ voice—yet there is a kind of pleasure in speaking directly and without a mask.”

February 19, 2022

Left Behind in Lisbon

Maria Judite de Carvalho’s depiction of the lives of women in mid-twentieth-century Portugal is executed as precisely and without sentiment as an autopsy.

Empty Wardrobes

by Maria Judite de Carvalho, translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa, with an introduction by Kate Zambreno

February 10, 2022 issue

Chronicle of a Death Ignored

Becky Cooper’s We Keep the Dead Close is as much a study of corrosive institutional patriarchy as it is an investigation into an unsolved 1969 murder at Harvard.

We Keep the Dead Close: A Murder at Harvard and a Half Century of Silence

by Becky Cooper

February 11, 2021 issue

Loney

a poem

May 9, 2019 issue

Sleeping Beauty

My Year of Rest and Relaxation

by Ottessa Moshfegh

October 11, 2018 issue