Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart

by Joyce Carol Oates

Overview

Joyce Carol Oates adds to her extraordinary body of work with this stunning National Book Award Finalist filled with violence, love, racism, and a shared secret in mid-century New York.

In the early 1950s in an industrial town, racial boundaries may keep people apart—or bring them together explosively. Iris Courtney, who is white, is the only witness when handsome Jinx Fairchild, a black basketball player, kills a white man in order to protect her.

The secret link between Iris and Jinx is not only their attraction to each other, but a bond of passion and guilt that has formed between them. This one irrevocable, tragic act shapes their lives and alters their destinies in Joyce Carol Oates’s finest, emotion-packed novel—a work critics call a masterpiece, the best work of America’s best writer of contemporary realism.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780452265813
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	03/30/1991
Edition description:	Reissue
Pages:	416
Product dimensions:	5.16(w) x 7.91(h) x 0.89(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

In addition to many prize-winning and bestselling novels, including We Were the Mulvaneys, A Book of American Martyrs, Black Water, Because It Is Bitter and Because It Is My Heart, and Broke Heart Blues, Joyce Carol Oates is the author of a number of works of gothic fiction including Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque, a World Fantasy Award nominee; and Zombie, winner of the Bram Stoker Award for Best Horror Novel, awarded by the Horror Writers’ Association. In 1994, Oates received the Bram Stoker Lifetime Achievement Award in Horror Fiction. She is the editor of American Gothic Tales.

Hometown:

Princeton, New Jersey

Date of Birth:

June 16, 1938

Place of Birth:

Lockport, New York

Education:

B.A., Syracuse University, 1960; M.A., University of Wisconsin, 1961

Editorial Reviews

Praise for Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart

“Fiction of extraordinary imaginative power.”—Marilynne Robinson, The New York Times Book Review

“An impressive performance...fearless....There seems to be no erotic passion, no violence of act or language, no addiction, no fatal failure of nerve that is beyond Oates’s reach when it comes to rendering it in fiction.”—Seattle Times/Post-Intelligencer

“Oates is a master novelist....Thrilling momentum...it’s hard to stop reading.”—USA Today

From the Publisher

Racial disharmony from the mid-'50s to mid-'60s propels this tale of the love that binds a black man and a white woman in an upstate New York industrial town wracked by violence and murder. Protagonists Jinx and Iris are ``brilliantly portrayed,'' said PW. ``Oates is a master at realizing the social forces that twist the fates of her characters.'' 50,000 first printing. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

The ever-prolific Oates is on familiar ground in her newest novel, which treats the seedy side of a working-class city in upstate New York in the 1950s. Her heroine will be familiar to Oates fans, too: Iris Courtney is the only child of a broken home, gambling father, and alcoholic mother; she's waif-like, intelligent, and sensitive and carries with her the air of a victim. When a black classmate--handsome, academic, athletic Jinx Fairchild--murders mean ``white trash'' Little Red Garlock to protect Iris from Red's lewd advances, Iris carries the secret through her adolescence. The Courtney, Garlock, and Fairchild families are here used to explore racism at a time of awakening social consciousness, but Iris alone seems fully imagined. A large, significant work that will please Oates fans. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 12/89.-- Ann H. Fisher, Radford P.L., Va.

Library Journal

Fiction of extraordinarily imaginative power. -- The New York Times

Marilynne Robinson