‘Art is despair with dignity’

Mudwoman

Mudwoman

Joyce Carol Oates

A haunting new novel from Joyce Carol Oates.

Mudgirl is a child abandoned by her mother in the silty flats of the Black Snake River. Cast aside, Mudgirl survives by an accident of fate – or destiny. She is adopted by a Quaker family, and begins to suppress those painful memories.

Meredith ‘M.R.’ Neukirchen is the first woman president of a prestigious Ivy League university whose commitment to her career and moral fervor are all-consuming. But with an emergent political crisis and a prolonged secret love affair, M.R. has to confront challenges to her professional leadership which test her in ways she could not have expected. The fierce idealism and intelligence that delivered her from a more conventional life in her hometown now threaten to undo her.

When she makes a trip upstate, M.R. Neukirchen is thrust into an unexpected psychic collision with Mudgirl and the life M.R. believes she has left behind. A powerful exploration of the enduring claims of the past, Mudwoman is at once a psychic ghost story and the heartbreaking portrait of an individual who breaks – but finds a way to heal herself.

Reviews of Mudwoman

    • Praise for ‘Mudwoman’:
    • ‘Oates is the most agile and effective of poets, able to pin down a moment while never compromising on pacing or atmosphere … Oates is a dangerous writer in the best sense of the word, one who takes risks almost obsessively with energy and relish. For a writer in her early 70s, she continues to be wonderfully, unnervingly anarchic, experimental, angry. As if her aim were not to satisfy or entertain – though she always does both – but to do the vandalistic prose equivalent of spray-painting or setting fire to bins in public parks.’ New York Times
    • ‘There is no mistaking a Joyce Carol Oates story for anyone else’s… Not just their virtuosity, but also their aura of menace makes them hers… We think of Oates, like Poe, as a master of terror, but her real mastery is in almost never depicting a strong emotion in isolation… Oates [is]… a fearless experimenter forcing the reader ahead of her at knifepoint’ Los Angeles Times

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