BROKE HEART BLUES

It's hard to think of another writer with as fecund and protean an imagination as the eighty-five-year-old Joyce Carol Oates, who is surely on any short list of America's greatest living writers.

Densely layered, meticulously imagined . . . [a] shared coming-of-age tale fraught with the absurd comedy and uproarious sadness of adolescent obsession . . . among the most entertaining of Oates's novels.

Joyce Carol Oates's stunning novel about one town's ramped passion for a boy accused of murder, Broke Heart Blues, feels more resonant than ever in this reissue with a thoughtful afterword.

A sharp, funny look at how memories can warp reality . . . heart-wrenching and beautifully written.

With Broke Heart Blues, Oates does for high school reunions what Huckleberry Finn did for the Mississippi . . . Great authors have a way of rendering common things extraordinary . . . This dry satire of America's thirst for scandal is perfectly calibrated.

A sparkling comic hit.

Funny and playful . . . displays great inventiveness and a justified belief in its relevance to our emotional lives.

Oates uses her astonishingly plentiful imagination to paint the portrait of . . . virtually an entire generation of a town . . . Rife with life.

Huge, humorous, manic, and multilayered, Oates's twenty-ninth novel will rank high among the best work she has produced in her prolific career.