American Gothic Tales – Ed. Joyce Carol Oates 5/5 Stars Joyce Carol Oates knows her stuff. Her introduction to this collection her focus on the Gothic as the selection process makes this an incredibly satisfying collection because it’s not all one type of story. So while on the one had you do in fact get a bunch of ghost stories, you also get stories that are eerie or disturbing or full of murder, and you get stories that are off-putting but not directly scary stories, […]
Ugh Part two
This is also not a very good play at all. Here’s the setup…..a head of research institute is farcically driven. He’s got a daughter who wants to eschew college to be an actor and a son who wants to drop out of college and might be a rapist. David Schwimmer plays the maybe rapist. But it’s ok, you guys, it’s a comedy. It’s every so slightly better than the other play of hers I read. But it’s not good. What do you think goes through […]
Ugh and slightly less Ugh
The Truth-Teller: Joyce Carol Oates is not a playwright. And I mean this, after listening to two of her plays. These are both really really bad. There’s kind of a long history of established writers working in different fields. Find a successful novelist who has written a ton of work and then see if they don’t have their “poetry” phase. It’s usually very bad. There’s plenty of writers who are able to work in multiple media, but I think when someone excels at the hardest […]
The title makes me want to hate this.
I don’t know if I trust Joyce Carol Oates. This collection of short stories was better than the title of the title story made it seem like it should. One of the issues that made me distrustful in general is that this collection had a “theme” to it, that is Tales of Suspense. But in reality the stories were better than that made it seem like they might be. So of the stories, several stood out as being fairly strong. The opening story “Hi How […]