Joyce Carol Oates In Exile

Joyce Carol Oates, the outstanding American novelist and short-story writer, has been appearing every year in Exile, the literary quarterly published in Toronto, since 1973.

Oates in Exile is a collection of sixteen of these stories, some classically shaped, some in the form of “miniature narratives” — as Ms. Oates has come to call her short short fictions.

They have all her range of tone and temper, fugitive lives that seem so strange in their intense ordinariness, driven lives haunted by the insidious stillness of another “self” — lives that always seem on the verge of eruption. These stories, even when close to reverie, are peopled by characters, one person in relation with another, and therefore they are always charged by drama, and give the oldest and boldest of pleasures, a tale well told.

Joyce Carol Oates has provided a preface, describing her admiration for and relationship with Exile, and placing these stories in the development of her work.