2000
First Published
3.57
Average Rating
241
Number of Pages
The stories in this volume are literary snapshots from Isabel Allende, Margaret Atwood, Mary Gordon, Jamaica Kincaid, Gloria Naylor, Alice Walker, and Joyce Carol Oates, among others. All seventeen stories deal with a single, central, and vital the relationship of mothers to daughters and daughters to mothers, and it is the interplay of this dynamic that provides the focus of these wonderfully felt and beautifully told stories. The permutations and variations on this theme are marvelously intricate and the loss of a mother to madness; the loss of a daughter to drugs; the mother who feels she has sacrificed her life to an ungrateful child; the daughter who finally sees her mother as a person in her own right. They all, in the words of Janet Berliner, “present motherhood in microcosm and affirm the truth that, while we do not all like being daughters or like our mothers, women are inextricably bonded by something that neither ethnicity nor age nor stage of life can remove. Thus, those of us who call ourselves writers inevitably turn to exploring, in words, the mother-daughter relationship.”
Avg Rating
3.57
Number of Ratings
49
5 STARS
16%
4 STARS
45%
3 STARS
27%
2 STARS
4%
1 STARS
8%
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Author
Joyce Carol Oates
Author · 177 books
Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Book Award and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction. She is also the recipient of the 2005 Prix Femina for The Falls. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University, and she has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978. Pseudonyms ... Rosamond Smith and Lauren Kelly.
