The Lost Landscape

Description

A momentous memoir of childhood and adolescence from one of our finest and most beloved writers, as we've never seen her before. In The Lost Landscape, Joyce Carol Oates vividly recreates the early years of her life, powerfully evoking the romance of childhood and the way it colours everything that comes after. With memories ranging from her first friendships to her first experiences with death, this is an arresting account of the ways in which Oates's life (and her life as a writer) was shaped by early childhood and how her later work was influenced by a hard rural upbringing. Oates renders her memories and emotions with exquisite precision and transports the reader to a bygone place and time - the lost landscape of the writer's past but also the lost landscapes of our own earliest, and most essential, lives.

Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Book Award and the PEN / Malamud Award, and has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Her books include We Were the Mulvaneys, Blonde, Carthage, A Book of American Martyrs and Hazards of Time Travel. She is Professor of Humanities at Princeton University.

'A compelling and at times mysterious testimony to a life of letters like no other I know' Richard Ford 'Every piece merits re-issue ... here and there we glimpse the gothic seam Oates has since mined in her fiction' Suzi Feay, Financial Times 'The spareness of the prose belies a hinterland of suffering . . Steely, lean and bleakly allusive, The Lost Landscape gives an unsettling insight into the ways in which Oates's writing career has emerged' Times Literary Supplement Praise for Joyce Carol Oates: 'Simply the most consistently inventive, brilliant, curious and creative writer going' Gillian Flynn, author of "Gone Girl" 'Oates's prose contains a deep felt rawness which hovers between hope, despair and love' Guardian 'Joyce Carol Oates is an writer who always takes your breath away' Mail on Sunday 'Oates is a writer of extraordinary strengths. Her great subject, naturally, is love' Guardian '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