[This entry was updated by Sarah Catlin Barnhart (University of South Carolina) from the update by Nancy Barendse (Charleston Southern University) in the Concise Dictionary of American Literary Biography, volume 6, pp. 216-241, of the entries by Michael...

Joyce Carol Oates was born in the small town of Lockport, New York, on 16 June 1938 and grew up in a rural setting nearby in Erie County. Together with her brother, Frederic, and sister, Lynn Ann, she was raised as a Roman Catholic in a home free from th...

In 1990 Joyce Carol Oates won both the Elmer Holmes Bobst Lifetime Achievement Award in Fiction and the Rea Award for the Short Story, a twenty-five-thousand-dollar prize that honors living American writers "who have made significant contributions to the...

Michael Cunningham. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $22 (230p), ISBN 0-374-17289-7 At first blush, the structural and thematic conceits of this novel--three interwoven novellas in varying degrees connected to Virginia Woolf--seem like the stuff of a graduate student's pipe dream: a great idea...

**** The Dead Hour By Denise Mina Getting wiser. In Mina's A Field of Blood (*** 1/2 Nov/Dec 2005), young cub reporter Paddy Mehan got involved in a grisly murder. This sequel, next in a planned five-part series, opens with Paddy,...