Literary legend Joyce Carol Oates’s latest, “Carthage,” plunges us deep into the psyche of a wounded young Corporal, haunted by unspeakable acts of wartime aggression, while unraveling the story of a disaffected young girl’s disappearance. The author will now appear in Brooklyn to celebrate the launch of her book at DUMBO’s powerHouse Arena on Feb. 6, rescheduled from the original Jan. 22 date. At the event, she will sign any of her books with the purchase of “Carthage.”
In this eerie story, Zeno Mayfield’s daughter has disappeared into the night, gone missing in the wilds of the Adirondacks. But when the community of Carthage joins a father’s frantic search for the girl, they discover instead the unlikeliest of suspects — a decorated Iraq War veteran with close ties to the Mayfield family. As grisly evidence mounts against the troubled war hero, the family must wrestle with the possibility of having lost a daughter forever.
“Carthage” plunges us deep into the psyche of a wounded young Corporal, haunted by unspeakable acts of wartime aggression, while unraveling the story of a disaffected young girl whose exile from her family may have come long before her disappearance.
Dark and riveting, “Carthage” is a powerful addition to the Joyce Carol Oates canon, one that explores the human capacity for violence, love, and forgiveness, and asks if it’s ever truly possible to come home again.
Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Medal of Humanities, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Book Award and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction and has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the national bestsellers “We Were the Mulvaneys,” “Blonde,” which was nominated for the National Book Award, and the New York Times bestsellers “The Falls,” which won the 2005 Prix Femina, and “The Accursed.” She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978. In 2003 she received the Common Wealth Award for Distinguished Service in Literature, and in 2006 she received the Chicago Tribune Lifetime Achievement Award.