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Published Jun 2020
800 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
The bonds of family are tested in the wake of a profound tragedy, providing a look at the darker side of our society by one of our most enduringly popular and important writers.
Night. Sleep. Death. The Stars. is a gripping examination of contemporary America through the prism of a family tragedy: when a powerful parent dies, each of his adult children reacts in startling and unexpected ways, and his grieving widow in the most surprising way of all.
Stark and penetrating, Joyce Carol Oates's latest novel is a vivid exploration of race, psychological trauma, class warfare, grief, and eventual healing, as well as an intimate family novel in the tradition of the author's bestselling We Were the Mulvaneys.
"With precise, authoritative prose that reads like an inquest written by a poet, Oates keep[s] the reader engaged throughout the sprawling narrative. This is a significant and admirable entry in the Oates canon." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"While Oates purposefully plumbs the depths of each family member's agonizing loss, her perceptive study of Jessalyn's widowhood stands out as an impressive and impassioned portrait of this distressing life journey." - Booklist (starred review)
"[A] brooding, thoughtful study of how people respond to stress and loss, which is not always well and not always nicely. Yet, somehow, everyone endures, some experience unexpected happiness, and the story ends on a note that finds hope amid sorrow and division. Long and diffuse, but, as with all Oates, well worth reading." - Kirkus Reviews
"A poetic meditation on psychological trauma and a complex and nuanced portrait of a grieving family." - Library Journal
This information about Night. Sleep. Death. The Stars. was first featured
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Photo by Dustin Cohen
Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Humanities Medal, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Book Award, and the 2019 Jerusalem Prize for Lifetime Achievement, and has been nominated several times 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; and the New York Times bestseller The Falls, which won the 2005 Prix Femina. In 2020 she was awarded the Cino Del Duca World Prize for Literature. She is the Roger S. Berlind '52 Distinguished Professor of the Humanities emerita at Princeton University and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978.
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