The Gravedigger's Daughter
Joyce Carol Oates
(Author)Description
In 1936 the Schwarts, an immigrant family desperate to escape Nazi Germany, settle in a small town in upstate New York, where the father, a former high school teacher, is demeaned by the only job he can get: gravedigger and cemetery caretaker. After local prejudice and the family's own emotional frailty result in unspeakable tragedy, the gravedigger's daughter, Rebecca, begins her astonishing pilgrimage into America, an odyssey of erotic risk and imaginative daring, ingenious self-invention, and, in the end, a bittersweet—but very "American"—triumph. "You are born here, they will not hurt you"—so the gravedigger has predicted for his daughter, which will turn out to be true.
In The Gravedigger's Daughter, Oates has created a masterpiece of domestic yet mythic realism, at once emotionally engaging and intellectually provocative: an intimately observed testimony to the resilience of the individual to set beside such predecessors as The Falls, Blonde, and We Were the Mulvaneys.
Product Details
| Publisher | Ecco |
| Publish Date | May 29, 2007 |
| Pages | 592 |
| Language | English |
| Type |  Hardback |
| EAN/UPC | 9780061236822 |
| Dimensions | 9.0 X 6.1 X 1.4 inches | 29.8 pounds |
About the Author
Joyce Carol 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.
Reviews
“Joyce Carol Oates is a major one-woman industry. Constantly exploring new aspects of American life, Joyce Carol Oates has restlessly evolved as an artist.” — New York Review of Books
“Joyce Carol Oates’ uncompromising prose illuminates the stark landscape of our times” — Chicago Tribune
“The daughter of a Holocaust survivor (the gravedigger of the title) who commits an incredible murder, Oates’s heroine endures enough violence to fill a slasher movie. But she is able to reinvent herself as a peppy salesclerk with a jazz-musician lover and become ‘a living, breathing, complex presence on the page,’ our reviewer, Lee Siegel, wrote. Oates is sometimes compared to Theodore Dreiser, the author of Sister Carrie, Siegel continued, ‘but in the way her novels take off at the moment when her heroines break free, Oates is sometimes more like Carrie herself.’” — New York Times
“The Gravedigger’s Daughter is Joyce Carol Oates at her very best: mesmerizing, intense and unique in her vision and power.” — The New Yorker
“Oates’s characters are vivid and mulit-dimensional, and the book’s surprise ending is moving and hopeful. This is a saga worth savoring.” 4 out of 4 stars — People
“For many novelists, quantity is damaging to quality, but Oates’s power springs directly from her prodigality. Her genius – the only word for the alarming thing that so evidently possesses her – happens to be a giant. And the reader’s intimation that this huge-handed, league-striding, voracious monster is somehow speaking, whispering, howling through her is what gives to her writing the illusion that it’s all real…Oates succeeds here, as she often does, in making such judgements feel simple-minded. What it all seems is true and therefore moving and somewhat terrible, but in an exhilarating way. Every aspect of the ungainly plot feels right, including its ungainliness.” — Washington Post Book World
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