Overview

National Book Award winner Joyce Carol Oates joins Gillian Flynn, author of Gone Girl, for a reading and conversation between two masters of psychological suspense about Oates’ extraordinary career — and her gripping new novel, Fox.

A shapeshifting master of genre and form — working in historical fiction, short stories, critical essays, poetry, and more — Joyce Carol Oates has perhaps above all spent her career amassing a body of work rooted in thrilling, gothic suspense. For decades, she has been a towering influence on younger writers like Gillian Flynn, providing a roadmap for the haunting lapses of memory and personal history that define the contemporary mystery novel.

Following a detective investigating a suspicious death at an elite boarding school, Oates’ new novel is a hypnotic tale of crime and complicity, revenge and restitution, victim and predator — illuminating the darkest corners of the human psyche while asking profound moral questions about justice and the response evil demands. It is a novel as profound as it is propulsive, as moving as it is full of mystery.

In a special reading and conversation in celebration of Fox’s launch between two virtuosic storytellers, hear Oates and Flynn discuss the art of the page-turner, how Oates has opened new terrain in the literature of suspense, how Flynn has reinvented the genre for a new generation, and much more.

“Reading Fox is like being spellbound by a hypnotist who may not wish you well, who leads you, with a deceptively gentle hand, toward that dark forest you fear.” — #1 New York Times bestselling author Gillian Flynn

“I just finished an extraordinary novel and am still in its spell. It’s Fox by Joyce Carol Oates, her first ‘whodunit’ or mystery thriller, and it’s unlike any other mystery I’ve read. It’s Remarkable.” — New York Times bestselling author Joseph Finder