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.
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
JOYCE CAROL OATES is a recipient of the National Humanities Medal, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Life Achievement Award, the National Book Award, and the 2019 Jerusalem Prize for Lifetime Achievement, and has been nominated several times for the Pulitzer Prize. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the national best sellers We Were the Mulvaneys; Blonde; and the New York Times best seller The Falls, which won the 2005 Prix Femina. In 2020 she was awarded the Cino Del Duca World Prize for Literature. She is the Roger S. Berlind ’52 Distinguished Professor of the Humanities emerita at Princeton University and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978.
View titles by Joyce Carol Oates
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About
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.
Praise
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
JOYCE CAROL OATES is a recipient of the National Humanities Medal, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Life Achievement Award, the National Book Award, and the 2019 Jerusalem Prize for Lifetime Achievement, and has been nominated several times for the Pulitzer Prize. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the national best sellers We Were the Mulvaneys; Blonde; and the New York Times best seller The Falls, which won the 2005 Prix Femina. In 2020 she was awarded the Cino Del Duca World Prize for Literature. She is the Roger S. Berlind ’52 Distinguished Professor of the Humanities emerita at Princeton University and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978.
View titles by Joyce Carol Oates
