The Internet Book Database of Fiction

#	Date	Publisher	Binding	Cover
1	1981-00-00	Dutton

Blurb:: The publication of her novel Bellefleur has brought Joyce Carol Oates -- already established as one of America"s most significant contemporary writers -- the broad readership her wonderfully rewarding work deserves. In this new book, she explores the secrets of the human heart in superbly crafted stories and a novella. Whether writing about women or men, young or old, she makes us witness to those moments of extremity when the passions burn brightest, when desire and reality collide: a vain divorcee too hastily marries her young lover; a radio program director, witness to a shooting, becomes obsessed with his own mortality; a professor"s mild manner somehow inevitably leads to violence; an eminent poet finds her luminous past shattered by the revelations of her lover"s son. Perhaps nowhere has the region where love borders violence been so fully explored as in the title novella. It is an exquisite portrayal of the erotic love that flowers when nineteen-year-old Duncan spends a summer on the Maine coast with his younger cousin Antoinette. In the vastness of inexperience, imagination provides the only boundaries. "A Sentimental Education" is charged with an intensity which many of us experienced at the edge of adolescence, but few have remembered so vividly since.