Mudwoman: A Novel
&#8220;[A] powerful novel&#8230;[Oates] deftly interweaves M.R.&#8217;s present, memories of her troubled childhood, and her feverish hallucinations&#8230;This hypnotic novel suggests that forgetting the past may be the heavy cost that success demands.&#8221; (The New Yorker)&#8220;Uniquely personal&#8230; an intriguing departure from token Oates tales.&#8221; (Huffington Post)&#8220;Madness and malevolence squirm on almost every page in Joyce Carol Oates&#8217; 38th novel&#8230; Oates&#8217; dark brilliance is ever evident in her main characters, complex souls with mysterious corners in their psyches&#8230;&#8221; (Minneapolis Star Tribune)&#8220;This chilling novel opens with a child left to die in a silty riverbed, a memory that no amount of later life success can erase.&#8221; (O, the Oprah Magazine)&#8220;&#8230;The Oates style, with its fractious barrage of dashes, suggests what [Emily] Dickenson might have produced if she had written doorstop novels instead of short poems&#8230;[Oates] is especially perceptive in showing the political tightrope that M.R. has to walk in her powerful but fragile position at the university&#8230;&#8221; (Wall Street Journal)&#8220;[A] disturbing, psychological thriller.&#8221; (New York Post)&#8220;Extraordinarily intense, racking, and resonant... Masterfully enmeshing nightmare with reality, Oates has created a resolute, incisive, and galvanizing drama about our deep connection to place, the persistence of the past, and the battles of a resilient soul under siege&#8230; A major, controversy-ready novel from high-profile, protean Oates.&#8221; (Booklist (starred review))&#8220;Oates [displays] the insights into human bonds that make her brilliant....Oates makes [her character&#8217;s] torment come alive. We grasp her compulsion to return to the mud of the past in order find her true self.&#8221; (USA Today)&#8220;[A] disturbing exploration of selfhood&#8230;As always, Joyce Carol Oates masterfully evokes a sense of menace, if not malevolence, while drawing her readers deep into the psychology of her characters&#8230; a dark, intelligent and deeply compelling novel... which will hold you in its thrall until the end.&#8221; (Washington Independent Review of Books)&#8220;There&#8217;s a freshness to this novel, a sense of some new, more personal beginning. It&#8217;s bold... to paint achievement... as just the flip side of victimization--and it&#8217;s perhaps even bolder to make such visceral drama from the story of a workaholic who finally confronts life unhooked from a keyboard.&#8221; (New York Times Book Review)&#8220;Oates is an extremely visceral writer&#8230;Mudwoman is a genuinely unsettling book in which Oates pays her readers the compliment of never letting them settle or even being entirely sure about what they have just read.&#8221; (Financial Times)&#8220;Mudwoman is very good at the performance of the public life of the woman president&#8230;The unraveling of this performance is grippingly horrible.&#8221; (New York Review of Books)&#8220;Joyce Carol Oates&#8217; latest novel is about many things, but first and foremost it is about the complications of being a high-achieving woman in the 21st century&#8230;Oates tells [her protagonist&#8217;s story] with a detail and relish that&#8217;s both heartbreaking and fascinating.&#8221; (Ms. magazine)