Night. Sleep. Death. The Stars.
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Night. Sleep. Death. The Stars.
Buy Now for $43.99
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Narrated by:
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Cheryl Smith
About this listen
The bonds of family are tested in the wake of a profound tragedy, providing a look at the darker side of our society
Night Sleep Death The Stars is a gripping examination of contemporary America through the prism of a family tragedy: when a powerful parent dies, each of his adult children reacts in startling and unexpected ways, and his grieving widow in the most surprising way of all.
Stark and penetrating, Joyce Carol Oates’s latest novel is a vivid exploration of race, psychological trauma, class warfare, grief, and eventual healing, as well as an intimate family novel in the tradition of the author’s bestselling We Were the Mulvaneys.
©2020 Joyce Carol Oates (P)2020 HarperCollins Publishers LimitedCritic Reviews
"The most consistently inventive, brilliant, curious and creative writer going." (Gillian Flynn, author of Gone Girl)
"Novelists such as John Updike, Philip Roth, Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer slug it out for the title of the Great American Novelist. But maybe they’re wrong. Maybe, just maybe, the Great American Novelist is a woman." (The Herald)
"Oates is an inspired writer, and a formidable psychologist. She has a thrilling way of grasping an emotion, wasting no time and launching herself straight at the aching heart of the matter." (Independent)
"Whitey", as the slain mayor is aptly called, is the symbol of a certain American way of life --a civic-minded, well respected, WASP, family man with a business. As the novel develops, it exposes a family desperately trying to keep in tact their idealised version of "Whitey". There are exquisite descriptions of grief, anger and anxiety -- but also, more distinctively, of a shared desperation enacted with the oblivious viciousness of entitlement. Whitey is not just the beloved patriarch but a cipher for a class and race privilege that is sustained by racism, snobbery, greed and self delusion. All of this surfaces as the most grotesque characters unravel.
The pleasure in this exceptional writing and brilliant reading is mitigated just a tiny bit by the fact that the characters are so unlikable. Either they are self-serving, racist, deceitful manipulators or they are slightly pathetic enablers. Anyway, Joyce Carol Oates is unrelenting in her dissection of a family that in clever ways embodies the predicament of America itself.
Great American Novel - grotesque American family
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