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Book Summary and Reviews of The Female of the Species by Joyce Carol Oates

The Female of the Species by Joyce Carol Oates

The Female of the Species

Tales of Mystery and Suspense

by Joyce Carol Oates

  • Published:
  • Jan 2006, 288 pages
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About this book

Book Summary

With wicked insight, Joyce Carol Oates demonstrates why the females of the species - be they six-year-old girls, seemingly devoted wives, or aging mothers - are by nature more deadly than the males.

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Reviews

Media Reviews

'As evidenced in this collection of nine stories, Oates's imagination is still fertile, feverish and macabre.' - PW.
'Oates' prose is luminous, but some readers might find her femmes a bit too fatale.' - Booklist.
'Those who can weather the Oates tics (the overused parentheses; the words that repeat, repeat, repeat; all those candles and flames) will savor this clever mind stooping to middlebrow level.' - Kirkus.

This information about The Female of the Species was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

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Author Information

Joyce Carol Oates Author Biography

Photo by Dustin Cohen

Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of a National Humanities Medal awarded by President Barack Obama, the National Book Critics Circle's Ivan Sandrof Life Achievement Award, the National Book Award in Fiction, the Jerusalem Prize, the Prix Femina, the Cino Del Duca World Prize, and is a five-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the bestsellers Blonde and We Were the Mulvaneys. She is the Roger S. Berlind '52 Distinguished Professor of the Humanities Emerita at Princeton University and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2024 she won the Raymond Chandler Lifetime Achievement Award given to "a master of the thriller and noir literary genre."

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Read-Alikes

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    A fierce, funny, and revolutionary look at the queens of the animal kingdom.

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