About this product

Product Identifiers

PublisherHarperCollins

ISBN-100062269194

ISBN-139780062269195

eBay Product ID (ePID)160061304

Product Key Features

Book TitleBloodsmoor Romance

Number of Pages768 Pages

LanguageEnglish

Publication Year2013

TopicContemporary Women, Family Life, Literary, Historical

GenreFiction

AuthorJoyce Carol Oates

FormatTrade Paperback

Dimensions

Item Height1.2 in

Item Weight21.5 Oz

Item Length8 in

Item Width5.3 in

Additional Product Features

Intended AudienceTrade

TitleLeadingA

Dewey Edition19

Reviews"Satire is always implicit in the reworking of an old story or a moribund genre. But in A Bloodsmoor Romance it is explicit: The unself-consciously plotted events are presented in a tone newly animated by the philosophical and political point of view. And the whole work is enlivened by a great deal of lore about life in the 19th century...Even those who find balloon abductions thin should be satisfied by this richness of detail." -- New York Times "Readers with a taste for whimsical historical-novel sendups will find this mildly, thickly entertaining." -- Kirkus Reviews

Dewey Decimal813/.54

SynopsisFinally returned to print in a beautiful new trade paperback edition, comes Joyce Carol Oates' lost classic: a satirical, often surreal, and beautifully plotted Gothic Romance that follows the exploits of the audacious Zinn sisters, whose 19th century pursuit of adventurous lives turns a lens on contemporary American culture. Set in a nineteenth century similar to our own, A Bloodsmoor Romance follows the beautiful Zinn sisters, five young women who refuse--for the most part--"the obligations of Christian marriage." Full of Oates's mordant wit and breathlessly told in the Victorian style by an unnamed narrator shocked by the Zinn sisters' sexuality, impulsivity, and rude rejection of the mores of their time, A Bloodsmoor Romance is a delicious filigree of literary conventions, "a novel of manners" in the tradition of Austen, Dickens, and Alcott which Oates turns on its head. Oates's dark romp interweaves murder and mayhem, ghosts, and abductions, substance abuse and gender identity, women's suffrage, the American spiritualist movement, and sexual aberration, as the Zinn sisters come into contact with some of the 19th century's greatest characters, from Mark Twain to Oscar Wilde. A biting assessment of the American landscape and a virtuosic transformation of a literary genre, A Bloodsmoor Romance is a compelling, hilarious, and magical anti-romance--Little Women by way of Stephen King.