American Appetites is a novel by Joyce Carol Oates, © Harper & Row 1989
-
Brand New
Back in the Archives…
-
Taggies
- America
- apocalypse
- apocalypse fiction
- art
- awkward
- book review
- books
- boredom
- change
- childhood
- children
- classic literature
- classics
- coming of age
- contemporary
- contemporary fiction
- contemporary poetry
- death
- debut
- emotional weight
- fantasy
- female perspective
- feminism
- fiction
- fragments
- frames
- funny
- gender
- global warming
- growing up
- guilt
- historical fiction
- history
- inventor
- iraq war
- knowledge
- language
- lens
- loneliness
- lonely
- loss
- love
- memory
- nature
- new york city
- nihilism
- novel
- pain
- perspective
- philosophy
- poetry
- postmodernism
- power
- power dynamics
- prose poetry
- readers
- reading
- reading process
- reality
- religion
- retrospective
- second person
- short stories
- stream of consciousness
- supernatural
- translation
- travel
- urban space
- violence
- war
- women
- women's issues
- writers
- writing
- writing process
feeling your Oates – well cast, Katie:
I write, as you note on American Appetites,
with bloats
of running, punctuating, preying and praying to be elevated,
spiraling up,
not
down,
out of control
or goal:
Cambodia,
Shangrila,
America,
Biblia (brave little books) —
look:
a brave little lamb
or the great I Am
or a passing
Tom
Fancy cheese!
It’s interesting to me that this was published in the end of the eighties beginning nineties. It seems like the theme is something that would have come out of a 1950s era, or our current time, which I think tends towards more disillusionment. Is there that sense in the book?