Dark Energy

The prolific writer, who has taught at Princeton University since 1978, is scary in more ways than one. She produces novels at the formidable rate of one or two a year, and her dark-hued works often take on subjects like rape, incest, and murder. Them (the saga of a dysfunctional lower-class Detroit family) won a National Book Award in 1970. Black Water (1993), an imagining of a Chappaquiddick-like drowning, won a Pulitzer, and Oprah’s Book Club recommended We Were the Mulvaneys, her 1996 novel about a rape’s aftermath. Not bad for a writer who has said, “I’m drawn to failure. I feel that I’m contending with it constantly in my own life.” This fall’s two new books are The Museum of Dr. Moses: Tales of Mystery and Suspense and The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates, 1973–1982.