Tales of Mystery and Suspense
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.
'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.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
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."

If you liked The Female of the Species, try these:
by Cat Bohannon
Published 2025
The real origin of our species: a myth-busting, eye-opening landmark account of how humans evolved, offering a paradigm shift in our thinking about what the female body is, how it came to be, and how this evolution still shapes all our lives today
by Ramona Ausubel
Published 2024
A playful, witty, and resonant novel in which a single mother and her two teen daughters engage in a wild scientific experiment and discover themselves in the process, from the award-winning writer of Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty
by Lucy Cooke
Published 2023
A fierce, funny, and revolutionary look at the queens of the animal kingdom.
Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought.
Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!
Your guide toexceptional books
BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.