I'll Take You There

Description

Joyce Carol Oates is one of the world's most respected living novelists. Her new novel is an intense, deeply moving story of how a young woman finds her place in the world. 'In those days in the early 1960s we were not women yet but girls. This was, without irony perceived as our advantage.' So begins 'I'll Take You There', an astonishingly intimate and unsparing self-portrait of a young woman who comes of age in the most turbulent of American decades. 'Anellia' -- as she sometimes calls herself -- is a student at Syracuse University, the first time she has lived away from her family. Headstrong, passionate, occasionally obsessive, she is pitiless in exposing herself to her new life as she searches for a place in the world. In her quest for belonging, 'Anellia' discovers the risks, and curious rewards, of confronting the world: being taken in, and then cruelly rejected by a 'sisterhood' of her fellow students, falling recklessly in love with an older graduate student who happens to be black, making a journey westward when summoned by a figure from her past who she believed to be dead. Through this triptych of events, the atoms of 'Anellia's' life comes together as she begins her journey into adulthood. Joyce Carol Oates' new novel confirms her as one of America's most important writers. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our times. 'I'll Take You There' is a deeply moving, wry, intense examination of how a girl becomes a young woman.

Joyce Carol Oates is a writer of wide appeal for all readers, described as 'One of the Nation's finest writers': she has been a recipient of the National Book Award, PEN/Malamud Award for short fiction and was an Oprah Book Club Selection with WE WERE THE MULVANEYS. Her recent novels include BLONDE and MIDDLE AGE: A Romance. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and is the Roger S Berlind Distinguished Professor at Princeton University.

* 'Oates is a massive literary heavyweight, and many earnestly believe she could knock the other contenders for the title of Great American Novelist -- Updike, Roth, Wolfe, Mailer.' Helen Falconer, Guardian '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