A Fair Maiden

"... Oates's ability to plot is like no other writer's. It's as if she has a direct channel to the reader's mind. ... Like Kafka, Oates simply states that something happened and depicts it in a concrete way and leaves the reader to suspend disbelief or not.

The reward for suspending disbelief, of course, is that the next thing happens. Oates's second novel, published when she was 29, was titled "A Garden of Earthly Delights." Surely Oates knew that her world was and would continue to be as fascinating and detailed as a triptych by Hieronymus Bosch, that we would be invited to stand before it, repelled, intrigued, amazed, seduced, and that we would have never seen anything like her world before, at least in art."

—Jane Smiley, Washington Post Book World

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Little Bird of Heaven

"This is a powerful novel. Oates's feel for the rhythms of hardscrabble life and its sour mix of alcoholism, suicide, drug abuse, adultery and murder is as keen as ever. In Sparta she has created a fictional universe to stand beside Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County or Cheever's Shady Hill."

—Michael Lindgren, Washington Post

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