You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed,

or you are the only animal,

who can think, who can reason, who can read.

Hi, this is Michael Silverblatt, and welcome to Bookworm. Today my guest is Joyce Carol

Oates, the author most recently of Foxfire Confessions of a Girl Gang, Published by Dutton. Also

recently published is an anthology of her selected early stories called Where Are You Going,

Where Have You Been? Where have you been

from the Ontario Review Press?

And I wanted to talk about the books together

because Foxfire is very much a novel

of girlhood, young womanhood.

And it seems as if gathering up your early stories may have

crystallized this novel or Foxfire may have crystallized the gathering? I wondered if there was

a sort of return. I think probably there was a kind of confluence of motives there.

When we look back upon our earlier lives, it's amazing the wisdom that perspective can give us. And certain themes seem to recur that at the time were felt almost invisibly.

But looking back, I think you're quite right. Putting these things

together had that effect upon me. We've spoken before of the sense that your books

group themselves into clusters, and I found myself thinking that Blackwater, which is dedicated to all the Kellys, it's a book that takes its inspiration from the tragedy at Chautauqua,

that this, that that book was the voice of a victim rising out of the water,

and here Foxfire is the voice of previous victims turned aggressors, turned revengers.

And I began to wonder if you're working on a revenge cycle.

...