Joyce Carol Oates reads from her new novel “Little Bird of Heaven” on Wednesday December 2nd at Labyrinth Books

Posted on 24. Nov, 2009 by PNN Editor in Books, Events, News

Set in the mythical small city of Sparta, New York, this searing exploration of the mysterious conjunction of erotic romance and tragic violence in late-twentieth-century America returns to the emotional and geographical terrain of Oates’s previous bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys and The Gravedigger’s Daughter.

When a young wife and mother named Zoe Kruller is found brutally murdered, the Sparta police target two primary suspects, her estranged husband, Delray Kruller, and her longtime lover, Eddy Diehl. In turn, the Krullers’ son, Aaron , and Eddy Diehl’s daughter, Krista, become obsessed with each other, each believing the other’s father is guilty.

Told in halves in the very different voices of Krista and Aaron, Little Bird of Heaven is a classic Oates novel in which the lyricism of intense sexual love is intertwined with the anguish of loss, and tenderness is barely distinguishable from cruelty. By the novel’s end, the fated lovers, meeting again as adults, are at last ready to exorcise the ghosts of the past and come to terms with their legacy of guilt, misplaced love, and redemptive yearning.

Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Book Award and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time. She is Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor for the Humanities at Princeton University. In 2003, she received the Common Wealth Award for Distinguished Service in Literature and the Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement, and in 2006 she received the Chicago Tribune Lifetime Achievement Award.