Book Description
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, Johnson's Beat memoir is "the safe-deposit box that contains the last, precious scrolls of the New York '50s" (The Washington Post).

Jack Kerouac. Allen Ginsberg. William S. Burroughs. LeRoi Jones. Theirs are the names primarily associated with the Beat Generation. But what about Joyce Johnson (nee Glassman), Edie Parker, Elise Cowen, Diane Di Prima, and dozens of others? These female friends and lovers of the famous iconoclasts are now beginning to be recognized for their own roles in forging the Beat movement and for their daring attempts to live as freely as did the men in their circle a decade before Women's Liberation.

Twenty-one-year-old Joyce Johnson, an aspiring novelist and a secretary at a New York literary agency, fell in love with Jack Kerouac on a blind date arranged by Allen Ginsberg nine months before the publication of On the Road made Kerouac an instant celebrity. While Kerouac traveled to Tangiers, San Francisco, and Mexico City, Johnson roamed the streets of the East Village, where she found herself in the midst of the cultural revolution the Beats had created. Minor Characters portrays the turbulent years of her relationship with Kerouac with extraordinary wit and love and a cool, critical eye, introducing the reader to a lesser known but purely original American voice: her own.

"Rich and beautifully written, full of vivid portraits and evocations." --San Francisco Chronicle

"--A first-rate memoir, very beautiful, very sad." --E. L. Doctorow

"Realistic rather than flamboyant, [Johnson] succeeds in portraying the Beats not as oddities or celebrities but as individuals." --The New Yorker ... Read more

Customer Reviews (15)

Remarkable insights, with rumblings ofthe social revolutions of the '60s and '70s.
Baby boomers will recognize the freewheeling emotions and impulses described in this book about the late '50s, because these were ours in the '60s and '70s. Joyce Johnson's own transformation, and her close observations of her beat companions and the intellectual stew of NY in the late '50s, give hints of what will happen to America in the following 15 years.

In particular, the author has a unique ability to articulate the feelings female baby boomers absorbed growing up, before the feminist revolution swept us away in the early 70s.As a small example, she points out how girls reading adventurous novels (like On the Road) didn't separate themselves from the guys but fully inhabited the male characters.Male narrators are not a problem for women the way female narrators can be for men.

Pretty good...
This was the third book I bought at the City LIghts bookstore when I was there in 2005 or so.It was this one, a book of beat poety and a collection of San Francisco short stories. I read the beat poetry and this memoir at about the same time, which was a good way of doing so, as many of them dovetailed.I bought it for Joyce, not for Kerouac, as I'm not his biggest fan anyway and have never read On the Road. Was very impressed.It does a good job of showing the lives of the beats and how they lived and the insanity moments of them. Captured the feel of it. But sad. I liked Elise and Hettie a lot and kinda want to read Hettie's memoir too.And probably the dudes at some point too.I like when she's talking about beatnik as a commodification situation.

Well-written and Gripping
This memoir recounting a young woman's years spent in the inner circle of Jack Kerouac is well-written and gripping enough to hold its readers' attention. Placed firmly in the center of the Beat Generation, her story teems with indecision and insecurity, the desire to get up and go, leaving responsibilities at home to see the nation and experience life.

-- Reviewed by Jonathan Stephens

A Fascinating Account
Joyce Glassman's memoir is very well written and is truly a fascinating account.She manages to describe a scene and give the reader a glimpse of a particular era--long gone.I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to know more about the 1950's, the beat generation, women in the 1950's, and New York City at that time.

Horrible book!
All Joyce Johnson does in this book is drop names about people she knew and complain that she was born in the wrong generation.

Don't waste your money on this book. Just go to your nearest old folks home and hear about how they "knew" JFK. It's free and doesn't waste 5 hours of your life ... Read more

Amazon.com
They met in early 1957, eight months before the publication of On the Road made Jack Kerouac the most famous young writer in America. Some of the bitterest, saddest letters Kerouac wrote to his 21-year-old lover, Joyce Glassman, reveal the personal cost of the hysterical media attention that followed. Yet their early correspondence shows a side of Kerouac not always evident in his fiction: tender, spiritual, and supportive of Glassman's efforts to write her first novel. Now known as Joyce Johnson, she supplements the text of their epistles with commentary whose sensitive, rueful tone will be familiar to readers of her memoir, Minor Characters. The loving but independent air she assumed in her letters, Johnson notes, came from painful rewriting to eliminate all hints of hurt or need; as he wandered in and out of her life, Kerouac kept reminding her he didn't want to be tied down, even as he urged her to come visit whatever city he'd alighted in. Spiced with marvelously evocative period slang like dig and swing, and references to friends such as Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassady, this poignant epistolary record of a 22-month love affair also brings to life an exciting moment in American cultural history, when the Beat writers gave "powerful, irresistible voices to subversive longings." --Wendy Smith Book Description
On a blind date in Greenwich Village set up by Allen Ginsberg, Joyce Johnson (then Joyce Glassman) met Jack Kerouac in January 1957, nine months before he became famous overnight with the publication of On the Road. She was an adventurous, independent-minded twenty-one-year-old; Kerouac was already running on empty at thirty-five. This unique book, containing the many letters the two of them wrote to each other, reveals a surprisingly tender side of Kerouac. It also shares the vivid and unusual perspective of what it meant to be young, Beat, and a woman in the Cold War fifties. Reflecting on those tumultuous years, Johnson seamlessly interweaves letters and commentary, bringing to life her love affair with one of American letters' most fascinating and enigmatic figures. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (13)

Joyce Johnson is ruining my life.
And so is Jack Kerouac.He is also ruining my life.

I love Joyce Johnson.She is so amazingly insightful and humble and has this ability to tell a story without being competitive or passive aggressive.

These letters made me smile, frustrated me and made me cover my eyes in embarrassment.A great read!

Do what you want, Jerce...
That's something Jack told Joyce once and I think it sums about a great deal about his personal outlook on life. He wrote to Joyce in 1958: "Your salvation is within yourself, in your own essence of mind, it is not to be gotten grasping at external people like me" Overall, this book gave me pure enjoyment.It's filled with inspiration and advice written between two people one generation apart connected by their souls travelling similar paths. Joyce's social life is tied to the Beats; who are of course all over the globe living freely. She is the steadfast port-of-call in NYC holding all the pieces together. As Jack is travelling on his adventures throughout Tangiers, San Francisco, Mexico, and Orlando she keeps him up-to-date on news and gossip. As a fellow female, Joyce is someone I can relate to and enjoy spending time with. She is not your typical "girly" girl! She has talent, opinions and a strong grip on her feelings. Whenever she wrote how much she cared for Jack in her letters to him, I always ached inside because I could imagine what a trying situation this all was; loving such a roaming spirit as Kerouac. Still she was young at the time and it was an experience of a lifetime sharing her thoughts and feelings with a man who opened up to her in all honesty. Of course, there was no guidelines for the kind of relationship she had with JeanLouis. He would come and go in and out of her life, but they had a strong relationship through letters. Through her letters Joyce proves to be just as tough and free spirited as the men in her group ("...dexamyl pill has taken effect...and I better start on the novel now), but as a woman she longed for a committment and stability. An interesing combination. Ginsberg was a genius setting these two up that night in 1957. I'm just getting into the Kerouac world and I loved learning more about his personality (its ever-moving organic quality) and personal life. It adds more meat to his novels. I loved reading his thoughts on composing Dharma Bums and his literary advice to Joyce was priceless: Never Revise!!!
In the end Jack did what he wanted with their relationship and I think it was for the best. After all "unrequited love is a bore".
Joyce is a lovely writer and I'm gonna read Minor Characters as soon as possible! Onto more Kerouac...

Groan...
I'm not sure why everyone else has rated this book so highly--I've found it to be quite banal, and sometimes down-right painful to read.Johnson comes across as a bland, naive and gullable girl who tries to play up to Kerouac in order to win his dubious affection.Her letters are written in a most childish and lame manner, and I can't believe that she was published a few years later.I hate to say such a thing, but it's true.Needless to say, their affair--calling it a love affir is streaching it a tad--eventually ends, and now forty years later she's decided to publish their exchange of letters in order to assure her fifteen minutes of fame.The fact that this book does provide a little insight into Kerouac keeps it from being two stars.

An Open Door Offering Insight To The Beat Generation & Love!
Jack Kerouac warned Joyce Johnson, nee Glassman, on the first night they spent together, back in 1957, "I don't like blondes." In spite of their inauspicious beginning, Kerouac kept returning to Glassman over a period of two years, during which time he restlessly wandered the US and Mexico. They met on a blind date set up by poet Allen Ginsberg, almost a year before Kerouac's name became a household word with the publication of "On The Road." She was an intelligent, talented, independent twenty-one year-old, and he was thirty-five, "pop-culture's guy's guy," "The King of the Beats," on the brink of enormous success.

This collection of letters, poems and postcards, between Kerouac and Ms. Glassman, written over a two-year period, are interspersed with Glassman's elegant, focused writing, as she poignantly comments on their relationship and the times. Glassman-Johnson wrote in her Beat Generation memoir, "Minor Characters," "If time were like a passage of music, you could keep going back to it till you got it right." This sense of sadness and longing permeates the book. She gives an insightful view of what it was like to be a "liberated woman" and an aspiring author back in the late 1950s. Her crowd may have been Beat Generation icons, but a double standard was still the norm. Glassman's struggle to be a writer of consequence, and her battle against the mores of the day, "illustrate the disparity between the myth and reality of the Beat experience." She really shows what it was like to be young, female and Beat during the Eisenhower years.

Kerouac's correspondence, filled with his spontaneous prose and 50s slang, gives the reader an amazing portrait of his struggle with fame and the attacks by his critics against his subsequent works. Throughout his travels, he tried, in a limited way, to balance this important relationship with a woman who truly understood him more than most people ever would. He did show a capacity for tenderness, as he formed a bond with Glassman, who shared his passion for writing. Yet Glassman wanted a more lasting relationship, which eventually caused their break-up. "You're nothing but a big bag of wind," she informed Kerouac before she left him. Eventually they did form a friendship. Most of the text is dominated by their romantic relationship. However, there are wonderful glimpses of the "beatnik scene," Greenwich Village in the 50s, Allen Ginsberg, the Orlovskys, Elise Cowan, and Neal Cassidy.

This is as much the story of Joyce Glassman Johnson's growth as a woman and writer, as it is about Jack Kerouac and the Beat generation. "Door Wide Open" is an extraordinarily sensitive portrayal of a man, a woman, a relationship and a time that strongly influenced, (and still does), the arts, literature and culture in the US - a wonderful book!
JANA

Door Wide Open
Beautiful and elegant.Any woman who's ever been in love with a difficult man will appreciate Joyce Johnson's bittersweet romance. ... Read more

Amazon.com
Ulysses has been labeled dirty, blasphemous, and unreadable. In a famous 1933 court decision, Judge John M. Woolsey declared it an emetic book--although he found it sufficiently unobscene to allow its importation into the United States--and Virginia Woolf was moved to decry James Joyce's "cloacal obsession." None of these adjectives, however, do the slightest justice to the novel. To this day it remains the modernist masterpiece, in which the author takes both Celtic lyricism and vulgarity to splendid extremes. It is funny, sorrowful, and even (in a close-focus sort of way) suspenseful. And despite the exegetical industry that has sprung up in the last 75 years, Ulysses is also a compulsively readable book. Even the verbal vaudeville of the final chapters can be navigated with relative ease, as long as you're willing to be buffeted, tickled, challenged, and (occasionally) vexed by Joyce's sheer command of the English language.

Among other things, a novel is simply a long story, and the first question about any story is: What happens?. In the case of Ulysses, the answer might be Everything. William Blake, one of literature's sublime myopics, saw the universe in a grain of sand. Joyce saw it in Dublin, Ireland, on June 16, 1904, a day distinguished by its utter normality. Two characters, Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom, go about their separate business, crossing paths with a gallery of indelible Dubliners. We watch them teach, eat, stroll the streets, argue, and (in Bloom's case) masturbate. And thanks to the book's stream-of-consciousness technique--which suggests no mere stream but an impossibly deep, swift-running river--we're privy to their thoughts, emotions, and memories. The result? Almost every variety of human experience is crammed into the accordian folds of a single day, which makes Ulysses not just an experimental work but the very last word in realism.

Both characters add their glorious intonations to the music of Joyce's prose. Dedalus's accent--that of a freelance aesthetician, who dabbles here and there in what we might call Early Yeats Lite--will be familiar to readers of Portrait of an Artist As a Young Man. But Bloom's wistful sensualism (and naive curiosity) is something else entirely. Seen through his eyes, a rundown corner of a Dublin graveyard is a figure for hope and hopelessness, mortality and dogged survival: "Mr Bloom walked unheeded along his grove by saddened angels, crosses, broken pillars, family vaults, stone hopes praying with upcast eyes, old Ireland's hearts and hands. More sensible to spend the money on some charity for the living. Pray for the repose of the soul of. Does anybody really?" --James Marcus Book Description
Ulysses has been the subject of controversy since copies of the first English edition were burned by the New York Post Office authorities. Today critical interest centres on the authority of the text, and this edition, complete with an invaluable Introduction, notes, and appendices, republishes for the first time, without interference, the original 1922 text.Download Description
The 1934 text, as corrected and reset in 1961. Ulysses is one of the most influential novels of the twentieth century. It was not easy to find a publisher in America willing to take it on, and when Jane Jeap and Margaret Anderson started printing extracts from the book their literary magazine The Little Review in 1918, they were arrested and charged with publishing obscenity. They were fined $100, and even The New York Times expressed satisfaction with their conviction. Ulysses was not published in book form until 1922, when another American woman, Sylvia Beach, published it in Paris for her Shakespeare & Company. Ulysses was not available legally in any English-speaking country until 1934, when Random House successfully defended Joyce against obscenity charges and published it in the Modern Library. This edition follows the complete and unabridged text as corrected and reset in 1961. Judge John Woolsey's decision lifting the ban against Ulysses is reprinted, along with a letter from Joyce to Bennett Cerf, the publisher of Random House, and the original foreword to the book by Morris L. Ernst, who defended Ulysses during the trial. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (383)

A waste of your time
Considered such a masterpiece - I HAD to read it. What a waste of time...
First - the language: extremely difficult and archaic. Even for English speaking people. Can one enjoy a book if one needs a dictionary every couple of lines ?
Then the allegedly 'cultural' riddles Joyce planted in the book for the sole purpose of torturing generations of English literature students and their teachers. Ask yourself - are you going to enjoy a book that neccesitates your literature teacher lie next to you and explain its 'sophistication' to you ? Every other page ?
Then the foreign languages quotes in latin, german, irish, italian and who knows what else...Did Joyce expect his readers to be THAT fluent in other dialects ?
Personally - I think Joyce wrote the book being completely drunk. Or worse.
Last but not least - the story, the time frame and the main characters - boring, boring and then boring again.
Your reading time could be used on much more pleasant, interesting books. Really.

A few suggestions..
If you intend to read Ulysses here are a few suggestions.

First off, read or reread Homer's The Odyssey, from which Joyce's seminal work is based. Aside from the Dedalus/Telemachus, Bloom/Odysseus, and Molly/Penelope parallels, each book in Joyce's novel reinvents equivalent parts of the Greek epic. You will gain a much greater appreciation of Joyce's achievement in transposing and reinterpreting a 10 year mythic and epic journey in ancient Greece to a 1 day journey in early 20th century Dublin.

Secondly, don't come in expecting to understand everything. Many have tried and quit after reading a few parts, daunted by the strange syntax, the disjointed time frames, the shifts from waking to dream states, andthe lack of traditional narrative replaced for the most part by stream of consciousness (or internal monologue) to develop the plot. Joyce plays around a lot in Ulysses, changing narrative styles, dialects, inventing words. It requires a lot of patience to get through Ulysses.

Finally, after getting through Ulysses (if you can), read the voluminous critiques on it. Read about the author. Do further exploration. Then read Ulysses again. Multiple readings certainly enhance the experience, and bear fruit which are hidden or unripe enough to initially enjoy.

I Did It!
There is no reason in the world for me to write a review for this except to say "I READ IT". I live in the boonies of SE Oklahoma where there's not a soul who has heard of Joyce much less care whether anyone has read him or not. So, reader of Amazon's reviews, you're my (un)lucky audience. Not only did I read it, but I have not moved it to my "Trade" shelf. I want it as a reminder of how damned goofy I can be.

If you are reading this because you are wondering whether to read it or not, then the answer is that you probably won't "get it" any more than I did. If you do read it and actually enjoy it, then you can consider yourself goofier than me.

Seriously: 1. I didn't particularly like it. 2. I AM glad I read it. 3. If I ever pick it up to read it again, shoot me.

Remarks on the object, not the work itself
Notwithstanding disputes on the editorial choices, the main reason to get this particular edition is the fact that the guide by Don Gifford makes reference to its line numbering. The Gifford book is an indispensable companion to Ulysses. However, the large format, relatively small print and miserable binding are deplorable. Once you get to Molly's monologue, you almost have to detach the pages one after the other. Maybe not so great for the inescapable rereading of this masterwork!

Abridged!!!
This review is specifically for the Naxos AudioBooks production of Ulysses. Nowhere on the Amazon website (although I have now requested this change) does it say that this audiobook is ABRIDGED! The quality of the performances are so far outstanding, but it was disconcerting, to say the least, to be in the middle of Book I and suddenly be transported to Book IV. I purchased the audiobook to help me as I read through the book itself, so to that extent the audiobook abandoned me just when I needed it most, as Book III is rather arduous. It is still worth it to me since the only other audiobook is going for almost $150, and as I'm reading the book in its entirety I will not be limited to the abridged story. However, I was disappointed and wanted to give others a heads up. ... Read more

Book Description
'I regret to see that my book has turned out un fiasco solenne'James Joyce's disillusion with the publication of Dubliners in 1914 was the result of ten years battling with publishers, resisting their demands to remove swear words, real place names and much else, including two entire stories.Although only 24 when he signed his first publishing contract for the book, Joyce already knew its worth: to alter it in any way would 'retard the course of civilisation in Ireland'.Joyce's aim was to tell the truth - to create a work of art that would reflect life in Ireland at the turn of the last century and by rejecting euphemism, reveal to the Irish the unromantic reality the recognition of which would lead to the spiritual liberation of the country. Each of the fifteen stories offers a glimpse of the lives of ordinary Dubliners - a death, an encounter, an opportunity not taken, a memory rekindled - and collectively they paint a portrait of a nation.Download Description
Dubliners was completed in 1905, but a series of British and Irish publishers and printers found it offensive and immoral, and it was suppressed. The book finally came out in London in 1914, just as Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man began to appear in the journal Egoist under the auspices of Ezra Pound. The first three stories in Dubliners might be incidents from a draft of Portrait of the Artist, and many of the characters who figure in Ulysses have their first appearance here, but this is not a book of interest only because of its relationship to Joyce's life and mature work. It is one of the greatest story collections in the English language--an unflinching, brilliant, often tragic portrait of early twentieth-century Dublin. The book, which begins and ends with a death, moves from "stories of my childhood" through tales of public life. Its larger purpose, Joyce said, was as a moral history of Ireland. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (104)

Irish Stew
Because "Ulysses" is so imposing with its epic length and pages of solid, tiny text I decided to get my feet wet with "Dubliners," which is not quite half the other's length.From what I read with "Dubliners", I'll have to give "Ulysses" a shot in the near future.

Normally I'd do an obligatory plot summary, but that would be a pointless exercise because A) There are 15 short stories that comprise the book and B) None of them really has a traditional "plot" to speak of.Rather, "Dubliners" is a serious of what we in modern parlance would call "character sketches."Think of it as each story being a portrait of some person or scene done in painstakingly vivid detail.Each story focuses on some small moment that often leads the character to discovering a melancholy truth about life.

The first stories focus on children encountering the harsh realities of the adult world--a priest dying and an encounter with a creepy, crazy old man--and then move on to teenage love and then more adult problems of marriage, family, and politics before a final meditation on death in the aptly-titled "The Dead."

The way Joyce captures the humanity of each character is so stunning; he taps into the soul of these people to expose the secrets, wishes, hopes, and fears that reside within each of us.It's hard not to see a part of yourself in one or more of these characters, almost as if Joyce knew you over 90 years ago better than you know yourself right now.Because while the technology may change, the human psyche remains the same.

The reason I can't give this four stars is that like any short story collection there's a fatigue that sets in upon reading "Dubliners."The longer the collection goes on, the more similarities can be seen in the characters and the situations, the descriptions and the dialog.It's like listening to an album of music and noting that song 10 sounds a lot like song 5, which sounds a lot like song 2.There's really no way to avoid that fatigue unless the writer uses a completely different style each time.

As well, reading a book written over 90 years ago that's set in Ireland can be a challenge for a modern (not quite 90) year old American.Footnotes and such can be helpful, but it also interrupts the flow of the reading.

Still, Joyce's uncanny knowledge of humanity is well worth any fatigue or nuisances.

That is all.

Beautifully written but underwhelming
I enjoyed four of the fifteen stories in this book immensely. The others were great for their prose, depiction of people at certain junctures in their life, and reflection of Dublin at the turn of the Century, but otherwise not compelling.

"The Dead," his most enduring and evocative piece of short fiction, did nothing for me. I loved A Little Cloud, Couterparts, A Painful Case, and Eveline.

I read the Barnes&Noble Classic edition. The maps at the beginning of each story added no value.

After reading this book I'm ready for some contemporary fiction.

Great Vignettes Of Dublin Life and A Great way to introduce yourself to James Joyce
Admittedly Joyce's better known works can seem quite daunting to the uninitiated but here in these short character sketches a reader can begin to understand what all fuss is about and enjoy some wonderfully written short stories in the bargain.

The stories are consistently good and from the very first where a young boy encounters the death of someone he knows for the first time the tales and the characters are engaging. Highly recommended !

Untitled
I don't really have anything thoughtful to say exept that after reading this book multiple times, I think that it is tight, but breathes, and is choreographed as best as a human being could do, and in that regard, it is very much like a Beatles album, and should be esteemed in like manner.

Frustratingly short short stories
I had given up on James Joyce after finding "Ulysses" too murky and disorienting.When I mentioned this to a young handsome literature student in a Dublin pub, he suggested I try "Dubliners" instead.When I got back home I checked a copy out of the library and found it hard to believe this collection of stories was written by the same man who confounded me before. I found each story almost instantly engaging (except the one about the election; too far removed from my modern American experience, I guess), and most seemed to end abruptly.This may be why another reviewer wrote that the stories had no climax, but I simply wanted more.I'm here on Amazon to buy a copy because I still want more.

So did Joyce write these stories and then hit the Absinthe before writing "Ulysses"?Or am I thinking of Oscar Wilde...? ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Fantastic read!
I picked this book up at a used bookstore in Brooklyn and had no idea who Joyce Johnson was at the time. It's an amazing tale of love, adventure, alcoholism...you name it, it's in there and it's all woven together in a believable, relatible way. Numerous times I was brought to tears by the the simplicity of emotion stated. Johnson has a gift that stands alone, without her history of JK and the beats. ... Read more

Amazon.com
Joyce Johnson has led the kind of life the rest of us only see in novels; who else gets to share a childhood stage with Marlon Brando dressed up as a bear? In her first two works of nonfiction, Door Wide Open and the award-winning Minor Characters, Johnson chronicled a beat coming of age through the lens of her brief relationship with Jack Kerouac. Missing Men fills in the gaps in this bohemian life story even as it highlights them. Fittingly enough for a woman who married two abstract painters, it's a book about negative space. Three extended reminiscences--one for her childhood, one for each of her marriages--tease out the patterns in a life that "shaped itself around absences." Missing men defined those she loved: her iron-willed mother, whose immigrant father killed himself when she was five; her two husbands, each fatherless, each with his own burden of tragedy and rage; Johnson herself, left behind with her freedom and her art. The writing, as always, is lovely and precise. Whether she is recounting the home-sewn dresses of her mother's lonely girlhood or the "metallic sputter" of the old red motorbike that ends her first marriage, Johnson breaks your heart with the tellingly chosen detail. --Mary ParkBook Description
Joyce Johnson’s classic Minor Characters is valued not only for its portrayal of her relationship with Jack Kerouac but also for its stunning evocation of what it meant to grow up female in the 1950s. In Missing Men, Johnson gives us an even more revelatory self-portrait as she examines—from a unique woman’s perspective—the far-reaching reverberations of fatherlessness.

Born in 1935, she was an orphan’s daughter, named for her grandfather, an immigrant poet from Warsaw who killed himself when her mother was only five. Johnson would marry two artists who were also fatherless. James Johnson died in a motorcycle accident, making her a widow at twenty-seven. Peter Pinchbeck, obsessed with reinventing abstract painting, was unable to commit himself to marriage and fatherhood. Telling a compelling story that has “shaped itself around absences,” Missing Men presents us with the arc and the flavor of a unique New York life—from the author’s adventures as a Broadway stage child managed by her implacable mother to the fateful encounters that later brought her love and ultimately left her to make her way alone as an artist in her own right. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (9)

I haven't read a more affecting memoir
If you enjoy the genre of memoir---and especially like reading about the art world, the 1950s and 60s, and the lives of women---you should thoroughly enjoy this book.Joyce Johnson writes with real intimacy---she truly draws the reader into her life---and leaves you at the end wishing for more.Perhaps she will write one more memoir---about her life in publishing.We can all hope!

Unlike some of the other reviewers, I didn't find this book sad or wistful--just honest and affecting.Joyce Johnson is a gifted writer and her choice of words and descriptions always seems perfectly on the mark.I'm just left wishing that her three memoirs were longer---and more plentiful.

Portrait of the Artist in an affordable Manhattan
Joyce Johnson pays an eloquent tribute to the two men she married in the fifties and early sixties. Both men, Jim Johnson (who died in a motorcycle crash and left Joyce a widow at 27) and Peter Pinchback were, in a sense, "failed" abstract expressionists whose work never was commercially successful. And both were temperamental men who frankly, sounded impossible to live with. Joyce gave her husbands both financial and emotional support, in addition to working full time as an editor and raising a son alone after her marriage with Pinchback ended. Johnson describes a rich artistic life in what now is a lost and faraway world--a grubby, but affordable Manhattan where even impoverished artists could casually move from the Bowery to the East Village or Soho in search of the perfect space. "In those days it was still possible to be gracefully poor in New York," she writes. From what's been written about the lives of artists like Pollack and deKooning, we know what it was like to be a successful painter in New York in the fifties. Johnson's book is valuable in another way; she chronicles what it was like to be part of the second wave of abstract expressionists. These artists were, by and large, ignored by dealers and critics and their fragile careers were dealt a final blow by the conceptual and Pop art movements.

Johnson writes that she was raisedin a family of women, mostly without men, andthat the emotional absence she experienced in both of her difficult marriages replicated the male absences of her childhood. Ironically, it's Joyce Johnson herself who has achieved the fame and recognition that so eluded both of her husbands. But the loving (and exasperated) portraits she paints of them here show that she is a powerful artist in her own right.

a sweetheart of a writer
If you read "Missing Men", no doubt you'll be drawn to Joyce Johnson's other two memoirs, "Minor Characters" and "Door Wide Open".All three books are wonderfully intimate sketches of people and places.Whereas "Minor Characters" and "Door Wide Open" focus on Joyce's friendships with notable personalities within the "Beat Movement"(especially her romantic involvement with Jack Kerouac), "Missing Men" addresses her relationships to her father and her two husbands, artists James Johnson and Peter Pinchbeck.

"Missing Men" is beautifully written.Johnson's economy with language is always worth savoring, tracing scenes which stay with the reader forever--be it gathering apples for a pie with her friends,Jack Kerouac in a sleeping bag in your spare room, or (in this volume) the haunting trip to her deceased husband Peter's pitifully small, loudly-colored house in the country.

Joyce Johnson is simply too good of a writer to miss.Do yourself a favor and go quickly to the nearest bookstore or library to find out for yourself (...or just use that friendly little clicker in your hand.)

sadly and sweetly written
Joyce Johnson's "Missing Men" is a wrenchingly sad account of her life, coming of age in 1950s Bohemia. An only child, she details her mother's unhappy journey as an orphan who made a late and unfulfilling marriage and who became a "stage mother," lavishing her daughter with love.

Joyce Johnson broke away from the homelife that stifled her, and gave her heart, several times, to abstract artists: This book is about blankness and absence. Although she writes without excessive self-pity, nevertheless bleakness, sorrow, and longing permeate its pages.There is little here about her successful career, her life in publishing, which might mitigate the wistful tone of her memoir.

A Very Dear Book
It's 2am and I meant to be in bed by 10 tonight but couldn't put Missing Men down until it was done. And now it is done, and I'm sad that it is.

Like Minor Characters and In the Night Cafe, two other truly wonderful books, Joyce Johnson writes so personally that the book's end feels like the end of a visit with a dear friend, a friend you see much too rarely. She captures so well that hunger to replay life's moments -- painful and joyous both, over and over like a song, as she put it -- to feel what they have meant, to hear them right, to savor and take them inside you and somehow keep living them long after they're gone.

And she shares the scary lack of fulfilling resolution when the little enlightenments don't simply add up to resolution and love. She doesn't hide her fear of dying alone, and the three books of hers that I have read all bring me home to my own fear of this too. And that's something so few writers have the courage or ability to really share. And that's very honest. And that's something very dear. ... Read more

Book Description
An incisive collection of interviews with one of the leading lights of American writing.

Joyce Carol Oates has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the national bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys and Blonde, which was nominated for the National Book Award.

In her acceptance speech for the National Book Award in 1970, Joyce Carol Oates remarked that "language is all we have to pit against death and silence." In this remarkable new collection of interviews spanning more than 35 years of Oates's career, she talks candidly and insightfully about literature, the writing life, her background, and many other topics. These interviews should interest not only Oates's many fans but anyone who cares about contemporary American literature.

The interviews range from Robert Phillip's in The Paris Review to Lawrence Grobel's in Playboy. Though previously published, often in literary magazines, the majority have never appeared in book form.

From the Interviews:
"If art is, as I believe it to be, a genuinely transcendental function—a means by which we rise out of limited, parochial states of mind—then it should not matter very much what states of mind or emotion we are in. Generally I've found this to be true: I have forced myself to begin writing when I've been utterly exhausted, when I've felt my soul as thin as a playing card, when nothing has seemed worth enduring for another five minutes…and somehow the activity of writing changes everything."
"I take my writing seriously, but I don't take myself seriously…that is, I don't feel pontifical or dogmatic. Writing is an absolutely fascinating activity, an immersion in drama, language, and vision." ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

A Long-Awaited Updating
It had been years since anyone gathered Oates' recent interviews and discussions under one cover, and this collection is a good one. Drawing for its subject matter the texts of articles and conversations regarding (but mostly by) Oates, from such sources as The Atlantic Monthly, The Paris Review, Playboy, and more than a dozen other publications, Johnson, Oates' second most ardent fan after me, has done a sound job as editor of this project. These discussions show Oates as a thoughtful individual, often puzzled by the state of human society, and it is easy to see from her words how her efforts to comprehend the goings-on in this life manifest so often in her books. Within "Conversations" one can learn of Oates's views on Marilyn Monroe, subject of her novel Blonde, her attitudes on race, religion, violence, politics, family, love, the supernatural, and contemporary and past America. Most of all anyone who reads this book will become better informed about Oates' masterful insights into the malleable craft of writing. At times it is desirable to know little about a writer and therefore to have a more filtered and directed experience in reading her or his material, and at other times it is not (such as Sylvia Plath, whose life story has been fried into her works to the point a neutral reading is an impossibility)but with an iconic figure such as Joyce Carol Oates, background knowledge can greatly enhance an appreciation of her nearly one-hundred published books. I really enjoyed Joyce Carol Oates: Conversations, and I'm very glad Mr. Johnson took the time to put this work out there. He has my appreciation. ... Read more

Book Description
This easy-to-use reference offers quick and convenient access to theprocedures most commonly used in home health care nursing. Every procedure reflects the home perspective, including a Documentation section, whichreviews requirements necessary for home health reimbursement and an"instructions for care giver" area. The book's versatile format followsthe nursing process, yet is highly usable for actual practice. Coverage of hot topics includes environmental assessment, communication, and hospiceprocedures. Students and practicing nurses will appreciate the benefits of this useful reference for years to come. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Nurses Guide to Home Health Procedures
Very comprehensive procedure manual. Includes IV procedures and management of central and peripheral lines. Some helpful illustrations. Small enough so field nurses can carry a copy in there bags. Staff reviewed many manuals and overwhelmingly preferred this book. ... Read more

Book Description
Winner of the National Book Award and in print for more than thirty years, them ranks as one of the most masterly portraits of postwar America ever written by a novelist. Including several new pages and text substantially revised and updated by the author, this Modern Library edition is the most current and accurate version available of Oates' seminal work.
        
A novel about class, race, and the horrific, glassy sparkle of urban life, them chronicles the lives of the Wendalls, a family on the steep edge of poverty in the windy, riotous Detroit slums. Loretta, beautiful and dreamy and full of regret by age sixteen, and her two children, Maureen and Jules, make up Oates' vision of the American fam-ily--broken, marginal, and romantically proud. The novel's title, pointedly uncapitalized, refers to those Americans who inhabit the outskirts of society--men and women, mothers and children--whose lives many authors in the 1960s had left unexamined. Alfred Kazin called her subject "the sheer rich chaos of American life." The Nation wrote, "When Miss Oates' potent, life-gripping imagination and her skill at narrative are conjoined, as they are preeminently in them, she is a prodigious writer."
        
In addition to the text revisions, this--new edition contains an Afterword by the author and a new Introduction by Greg Johnson, Oates' biographer and the author of two monographs on the work of Joyce Carol Oates. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (22)

Realism stretched like putty
Perhaps the greatest trick which Oates performs in Them is her ability to take emotions which human beings have been examining for centuries, like love, and pull them apart, elongate them to such an extent that they are barely recognizable from their pedestrian definitions.There is an excruciating, unrelenting quality to Them, and it is found in this inscrutable ability to take the banal and make it rich, painful, grotesque.This novel of great pain laid bare is not so much an exercise in exposing human universals, but showing how distressingly small human concerns are;in the great sweep of events little people remain little, no matter how large their emotions.

The only kind of fiction that is real
As writer Joyce Carol Oates states in the introduction of her "them", this book is `the only kind of fiction that is real'. The gimmick in this book is that she tells the story as if it were reality. According to her early note, the narrative is based on some letters she received from a former student. This so-called student wasn't a good writer, but she thought her story worthy telling therefore her teacher assumed the task.

The student is Maureen Wendal, one of `them'. The narrative is about her and her mother, Loretta, and her older brother Jules. Oates follows a couple of years in the lives of these people. In their lives there are many ingredients that could turn the novel into a soap opera -- rape, love, lies, prostitution --, but this writer does not deals with the cheap prose. Her sentences are crafted, and her characters thoroughly developed, making all of them very real.

Political and historic background lend the book more relevance. The famous Detroit riots in the middle 60's are part of these lives. Oates seems to be interested in the subtle relationship between reality and fiction. She borrows `real' lives to construct fiction that has as basis real facts that change the lives of her characters.

As she points out in her introduction, nothing in the novel was exaggerated in order to increase the drama. Not matter if her work is real or not -- this is not her point, after all -- the fact is that she wrote an incredibly good book populated with fictional characters that read like real. And this is more than any reader can long for.

Possibly The Novel Upon Which Oates Built Her Reputation
Jules, Loretta, and Maureen Wendall are three of the most tormented and tormenting characters from modern American literature. These people, even Loretta but especially Maureen, have the capacity to advance themselves beyond their lower-class roots, yet each allows himself or herself to be doomed not just by the turmoil of events outside their lives, but by the limitations of their own personalities.

When Oates composed this aggressively frustrating novel some forty years ago, the material about which she wrote--whites living in poverty relocating from a rural setting to the Mecca of Detroit--was revolutionary and ground-breaking. The murders, sexual assaults, cruelty, kidnapping, government corruption, even the undermining of the American Dream, was all presented without dramatic enhancement or judgment, it was simply spoken of as any other event would be. This lack of commentary on the part of the author makes all that comes to pass within "them" so much more startling. Unlike many of her later forays into fantasy, this novel aches within the confines of the realism with which she wrote it.

Beginning with a cold blooded slaying in a bed and ending thirty years later in the ashes of the Detroit riots, "them" reconstructs much of the unpleasant side of mid-century American lower class life. Time and again we see glimmers of hope for Jules and Maureen, and (starting with the move to Detroit itself) for Loretta, and in every case---but one---we watch as the characters themselves let the chances go unused, or worse, warp them past recognition.

The novel "them" is powerful and disconcertingly real. The fact its author tells us about such terrible things in literary prose makes it seem all the more offensive to our sense of complacency.

The chapter near the end in which Maureen Wendall writes a letter to her teacher, Joyce Carol Oates, might confuse many, but this, too, is a literary construct, and represents an unusual Oatesean technique, a kind of letting the story rupture and protrude outward into what we think of as "our" world.

It's been a dozen years since I first read this novel and to this day I think it stands out more than any other Oates work as her most alluring trip into the superconsciousness of the twentieth-century American nation.

Great Writing, so-so story
To read this book is a pure pleasure. The writing is amazing, descriptive but not so much that your imagination is constricted.The characters are so complex and well developed, it makes reading along with them realistic and enjoyable.However, this is one of those "good" books with a depressing plot.That's how I would describe it, depressing.Over the course of the book things just keep getting worse, and at the very end - well, I won't give anything away.If you're the type of person who likes to watch movies like "Schindler's List", extremely well done but emotionally taxing, then you'll love this book.
One thing I was amazed at, however, was how Oates talked about things I have never before read in a book for school.She doesn't use any euphimisms, that's for sure.I suggest you read it, overall the writing and powerful emotions conveyed to the reader are far more amazing than anything else I have ever read.

makes me want to shoot myself...
... but I love this book.jules, maureen and loretta are the most foolish, pathetic and delusional narrarators that you will ever come across.almost every sentence is painful and will make you want to slap some sense into them.unfortunately, after a while you wind up thinking like them, and in the end you actually agree with their unsettling point of view. This book will haunt you.. ... Read more

Book Description
This digital document, covering the life and work of Joyce Johnson, is an entry from Contemporary Authors, a reference volume published by Thompson Gale. The length of the entry is 3505 words. The page length listed above is based on a typical 300-word page. Although the exact content of each entry from this volume can vary, typical entries include the following information:

• Place and date of birth and death (if deceased)
• Family members
• Education
• Professional associations and honors
• Employment
• Writings, including books and periodicals
• A description of the author's work
• References to further readings about the author

Book Description
'Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo 'So begins one of the most significant literary works of the twentieth century, and one of the most innovative.Its originality shocked contemporary readers on its publication in 1916 who found its treating of the minutiae of daily life indecorous, and its central character unappealing.Was it art or was it filth?The novel charts the intellectual, moral, and sexual development of Stephen Dedalus, from his childhood listening to his father's stories through his schooldays and adolescence to the brink of adulthood and independence, and his awakening as an artist.Growing up in a Catholic family in Dublin in the final years of the nineteenth century, Stephen's consciousness is forged by Irish history and politics, by Catholicism and culture, language and art.Stephen's story mirrors that of Joyce himself, and the novel is both startlingly realistic and brilliantly crafted.For this edition Jeri Johnson, editor of the acclaimed Ulysses 1922 text, has written an introduction and notes which together provide a comprehensive and illuminating appreciation of Joyce's artistry.Download Description
Published in 1916 to immediate acclaim, James Joyce's semi-autobiographical tale of his alterego, Stephen Dedalus, is a coming-of-age story like no other. A bold, innovative experiment with both language and structure, the work has exerted a lasting influence on the contemporary novel. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (232)

A Classic-?
This book contains some of the most horridly tedious prose in the English language.Joyce is known for his stylistic innovations, yet his books go mostly unread because they art monumentally dull.Allegedly, the author could account for every line in his books.Unfortunately, he could not account for how soporific his prose is.This is one of those books that makes people hate literature--even people who like literature.

Nicely put
With "Portrait", Joyce puts significant demands on the readers. To enjoy the book wholly, they should know Irish history of the late XIX century and the catholic doctrine. They should be attentive and sensitive to languages and their interplay. They should also be able to relate to the outsized sentiments of a boy and a teenager. In short, the book's readers should have an old mind and a young heart: a tall order. Maybe this is why this book appears so unsettling to many readers, young and old.

The story is not overly complicated: a boy grows up in a family whose members are ferociously nationalist, or religious, or both, is sent to Jesuit schools, and in a typical teenage fashion rejects the values of his environment - "his home, his fatherland and his church" - and embraces solitude and a firm belief in looking for a vague notion: beauty expressed through art.

Of the values he rejected religion was the hardest to let go. Stephen has never been close to his kin folk. The Ireland that he yearned for was long lost or not conceived yet. But religious he was. He abandons religion because in his mind it is incompatible with being a creator: a creator of his soul no less, god-like himself. He does it even in the face of the original sin, without denying god's existence and with full understanding of the possible consequences. Stephen is a revolutionary Hero, burning all his bridges in the name of a future better world: the world of yet uncreated beauty promised by no one but by his solitary ardent soul.

Joyce's eye zooms past appearance and in on his characters' soul: a "bat-like" soul waking up alone in the night makes a housewife call a stranger to her bed; a classmate's soul peeks out, self-embittered,through his eyes; Stephen's watchful guarding of his soul ends up making him abandon his religion. In creating his portraits, Joyce is much more cerebral than visual. Even though he tells most of the book in the third person neither Stephen's nor anyone else's appearance is made apparent. People are perceived by what they say rather than by how they look. Someone's Ulster accent or equine facial features will be the only supplement to their thoughts.

The book's structure is uneven. Robert Louis Stephenson wrote "That style is most perfect which attains the highest degree of elegant and pregnant implication unobtrusively ". The beginning and the middle parts, such as the family Christmas dinner and Stephen's personal triumph of mustering his courage in the scene with the rector, fit this definition quite nicely. The end of the book feels less so. It seems that by the end of the book Joyce still had some Tolstoyan lecturing to do and just made Stephen grab in succession three of his friends (not counting the sparring with the dean of studies) and confess his thoughts on religion, beauty and art.

Joyce is a master of economical expression. Some times he highlights the object's appearance: the cork-covered water splashing against the docks or the rainlaiden trees may be highlighted with a droplet of a single word, but a word so evocative that it promptly colors the phrase. Or he could mask the object completely behind a (beautiful) metaphor: "Trinity... set heavily in the city's ignorance like a great dull stone set in a cumbrous ring". I much enjoyed the book for these moments of elegant and concentrated phrasing.

remarkable
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man relates the mental growth of Stephen Dedalus, who represents the author James Joyce. Very little actually happens in this book. It is almost completely a reference to the changes that occur in Dedalus as he grows from an innocent, somewhat oblivious boy, to the psychologically restless young man all too aware of the forces that buffet the Ireland of his day. It is a remarkable work that should not be missed by the serious reader.

The notes at the end by Seamus Deane do present points of clarification and interest, but for anyone who can't pass on a footnote without reading it (ahem), it does interrupt the flow of the narrative a great deal.

Somewhat Dated, But Incredibly Applicable to Modern Ireland [3][14][57]
Good fiction uses narrative story to describe details of a character's life. Great literature does the same, but with the description, it capably details broader concepts and greater concepts.

This book revolves around Stephen Dedalus, but really tells us about the Ireland of his time.Stephen is almost unanimously known to be the author. Joyce's depiction of his emotional and intellectual growth - preteen, teen and young man - paints a broad picture of Ireland - at least Joyce's Ireland. His Irish Catholic Ireland, where issues compound over religion, language and rite. He is confused as he questions the unquestionable -- Catholic religion's centuries-old traditions. And, his questions are eloquently asked on the pages of this novel.

One friend of Stephen comments on this young man's realization of possible non-belief in religion: "It is a curious thing ... how your mind is supersaturated with religion in which you say you disbelieve."And, so this may accurately depict Ireland's strange and hypocritical relationship with the Roman Catholic Church.

And, this book is chock full of Catholic quotations, recitations, and references.So much so, that my Penguin edition of this novel immensely aided me with its extensive endnotes (over 600 in total) describing the words (sometimes archaic or colloquial) and often describes people (often Irish history's leaders for or against the Catholic Church) or statements (often relating to the Bible). I highly recommend that all readers get such edition or a similar publication as the nearly 100-year gap in time and continent's division have made many passages herein obscure to modern American readers.

As much as Stephan is confused about religion, he is confused about Ireland - not surprising as much of Ireland's confusions stem from religion. At one time, young Stephen says, "Do you know what Ireland is?. . . Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow." Of course, this a curt response made impulsively in discussion when men are tired, inebriated, or both.But, it probably reflects what others felt, what others thought, and what others publicly proclaimed. Note: most of the other provisions regarding Ireland show pride - immense pride.

Joyce admits Ireland had its faults. Inequitable and overly cruel torture placed upon the parochial students is described in detail.Religious zealots overstated their arguments to audiences too young to receive such extreme philosophy.Chapter III's amazingly well written speech of purgatory can only be deemed as provocative and funny.The humor comes from teenage Stephan's response: "thinking of sin" is a sin; and committing any one sin is the equivalent to committing all of the sins; and committing one sin is enough to prevent anyone from being free of purgatory. Hence, little Stephen concludes that his lustful thoughts of a girl guaranteed purgatory. He was a marked man. Then he goes to a confessional and discovers there are exceptions to the rule promulgated in the lecture.Catholicism, he discovers, is laden with exceptions to the rules. Grey lines, not black lines, define acceptable behavior. To a teenager this is perplexing, to the young man this is blasphemy.

Incredibly insightful. Incredibly long lasting. Amazingly applicable to even today's Ireland. This book has lasted for decades for these reasons.

Have a good measure of patience ready to exchange for keen insight and impeccable writing
Actually, I listened to an audio version of this book - it was the only way I was able to finish it. Even so, it still took me quite a while to get through it. The writing is very dense, and self-absorbed. The book offers many rewarding insights into stream of consciousness thought processes, and typical youthful struggles with issues like religion, good and evil, aesthetics, books and learning, family relations, nationalism and politics, sex and love, asserting one's independence, and getting along with teachers and peers. The detailed accounts of Roman Catholic dogma were a bit tedious, yet I ran into references to them in other works soon after finishing those sections. Having been brought up Protestant, I was spared a lot of the gory details created by the human imagination regarding what hell must be like.

A rather profound insight that came in handy one day while teaching was that people who work hard to live pious lives often end up with a short temper, impatient with the visible weaknesses of others. That also was confirmed in a separate context soon after I listened to that part.

I had to give this work five stars - it is acknowledged great literature - but I wasn't so sure I liked the narrator that much the further I got into it. I guess anybody can be hard to like when they make an effort to be brutally honest about their thoughts and feelings. The narrator's ambivalence about things like his teachers and his interactions with them were sometimes disorienting, but that was certainly his purpose - to show that there are many possible views of the same interaction, and you have to make your own calls. The question posed to the narrator toward the end, about whether he had actually ever loved anyone in his life so far, put the entire work in a perspective worth pondering.

I think for the razor-sharp insights and the utterly lucid writing, this work is eminently worth reading. But you may have to push yourself to make it to the end - I did, anyway. ... Read more

Book Description
Granted privileged access to Joyce Carol Oates's letters and journals, as well as extensive interviews with family, friends, colleagues, and Oates herself, Greg Johnson examines the relationship between Oates's life and work in this fascinating exploration of a complex and gifted artist.Johnson reveals little known facts about Oates's personal and family history and debunks many of the myths that have arisen about this brilliant, enigmatic woman.From her impoverished childhood in rural upstate New York and the birth of her autistic sister, through Oates's studies at Syracuse University, where her talent was immediately recognized, and the full-breadth of her astonishingly productive career; despite bouts with depression and ill-health, Johnson's astute examination of Oates's novels, short stories, and plays demonstrates how her art has been informed by-and transformed-her life.
•The first complete and only authorized biography of Joyce Carol Oates.
•Includes discussion of We Were the Mulvaneys, Joyce Carol Oates's highly acclaimed 1996 bestseller.
•Joyce Carol Oates's reputation has never been greater, and the time is right for an in-depth look at her astonishing career and fascinating personal story. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (14)

I Wish I Could Go Back And Tell Myself, "Do Not Read This Book."
A few years ago I broke my own rule in reading this book, and that is I try to concentrate on the works of a writer (or musician or artist) and not the figure who created them. Even so, this was not an impressive work of biography, and served more as an outlet for the fawning Mr. Johnson's furtive desire to churn out a volume of literary criticism than it fulfilled his ambition to detail the life story of a great writer. There is background information on Joyce Carol Oates here, particularly her childhood in upstate New York, but it's far better to leave this woman as the beautifully described "invisible writer" than to deal with Greg Johnson's tiring prose and attempts to delve into why Oates is as she is. Why is comprehension of motivation in the case of Joyce Carol Oates either desirable or possible? Does any theory that could be presented alter one word she had ever penned? I reject the trite of twentieth-century psychological arguments that would have us believe Oates' frequent forays into violent and sexual topics reflect some trauma within her psyche. Human beings are innately complex, and one with a mind like Oates' is imminently so. Joyce Carol Oates is and ought to remain the invisible writer, and Mr. Johnson should stick to compiling and editing her interviews. That's a more valid form of investigation into this living treasure, as well as a more polite one.

Excellent personal biography

I have to admit that I'm not a big fan of Joyce Carol Oates's work (there was a time in my life when I thought her early short stories were fantastic, but her later work never impressed me), but I found this biography extremely satisfying. Johnson writes about Oates as an admiring friend (almost like Boswell to his Johnson), relating all the stages of her life and career: her childhood in Niagara County, NY; her college days; her marriage; teaching in Detroit; her move to Princeton. He writes about Oates's work, of course, but never in an analytical way - it's not a literary biography, but a biography about a writer. He is a most appealing writer in this regard, and he makes us interested in his subject as a person/teacher/writer in a most compelling fashion. Johnson is a very impelling writer; I found the book a real joy to read - and informative, too.

Very Readable Biography, Yet JCO Still Mysterious to Me
Invisible Writer is throughly researched and well written. I found it very readable, even though I was not a fan of JCO's. I'm still not a fan of hers. Greg Johnson manages to create a fair portrait of JCO as a human who is sometimes prickly and vain. I understand other reviewers' comments that he's too soft on her, but I see it as him being careful to be fair in writing about someone who is still producing some of her best work. Oddly I didn't find that his treatment made her more likeable, only that it made JCO someone with whom I can empathize.

The greatest question remaining about JCO is the violence, especially sexual, in her work. A childhood sexual incident is mentioned, but it seems rather mundane. Johnson refers to some of the hardships suffered by JCO's family, but those hardships doesn't seem to explain well enough how this quiet, intellectual woman lives in such another world in her writer's imagination. Perhaps that's the intrigue of JCO.

Disappointing
I looked forward to reading a biography of this important writer. Instead, I felt as if I was reading literary criticsm. Mr. Johnson had incredible access to Oates, via journals and interviews. Instead of using this access to bring us vibrant insight into the process of creation as Oates brings a book from idea to the page, we get pages of dense literary analysis jumping back in forth in time within one page. Perhaps I need to read the Reader's Digest version...

a good, if somehow biased, visit to Oates' personal world
I believe JCO is arguably the best writer to emerge in America in the second half of the 20th century. That said, I read this biography with much interest and found in it plenty of information about the elusive, invisiblepersona of JCO. However, as much as I appreciatted Mr.Johnson's obviouslabour-of-love research and detailed account of the life and times of JCO,I found the whole thing somehow biased as a overly soft and timid portraitof a mysterious, enigmatic woman. I found many of the elements mentioned inthe book suggested tremendously interesing points of entry into JCO'spersonal and psychological universe. None of them were explored. It seemslike Mr.Johnson always stops at the threshold of the dark cave and thenpoints his typewriter at some nice, peculiar social event. As I wasreading, I felt Mr.Johnson limited his approach to recount little knowfacts with admirable accuracy and attention to detail, but reading anynovel of JCO tells us more about her mind and soul that recounts of manydinner parties at Princeton. If you're interested in this wonderful writer,this book is surely helpful in reconstructing the outside of her life, andmost interesting in its depiction of the inner workings of the literaryworld mafia, but I'd say very far from being the truly meaningful journeyinto JCO's mind that I'd like to read.I wouldn't like to discourageanyone interested in JCO to reads this, because it is a worthy and valuableread and Mr.Johnson deserves credit for taking on a difficult subject andrendering a never faltering narrative, but I believe JCO, and her readers,deserve even better (and specially braver) and will feel wanting for it. Agood first look at this fascinating writer, sure, but she remains asinvisible as she was before we opened this biography. Since JCO is afterall still very much alive and kicking (her last BLONDE proves she as goodas ever or even better), maybe it is a matter of time and perspective.Maybe Mr.Johnson himself, given time and distance, will offer us a deeperreading of JCO. He is surely an able writer and a keen researcher. I'llsurely be there to check all the fascinating stuff about one of my favoriteauthors that this time, somehow, proved invisible, but smellable. ... Read more

Book Description
The study guide for Maternal and Child Health Nursing, Fourth Edition is a perfect companion to the text. This practical workbook promotescomprehension and retention of important concepts and terms from the text. It also reinforces a sound theoretical foundation for nursing assessmentand interventions. Chapter overviews, key terms, and learning objectivesare included as well as case studies and a range of practiceexercises--matching, multiple-choice, true/false, fill-in-the-blank, andshort answer. You will also learn to develop nursing care plans andpatient teaching plans with confidence and explore nursing care priorities for clinical and community settings! ... Read more

Book Description
The Blackberry and The Rose poem was entered in the Washington State Poets contest in 2003 and was a finalist in the Bart Baxter Poetry in Performance portion of that contest. This was an adventure for me to actually recite my poem tosuch an illustrious group and though I didn't win I received compliments and encouragement. (Perhaps my poem was more worthy than my performance.) Therefore, I am naming my book "The Blackberry and the Rose" as a story in rhyme of my life with its sorrows and its joys. I have included sad poetry, happy poetry and a few in the humorous vein. My love of gardening and the beautiful fields of flowering bulbs surrounding me in the spring has inspired me to include several of my nature poems in this offering. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

What A Gifted Writer
Joyce Johnson writes stories of life with clarity that draws the reader into the realm of her life~

She is a gifted writer that I've had the pleasure of having read for several years now~

Her life has been touched with happiness, sadness and the combination of the two has given her the ability to reach out and touch the reader and leave them wanting MORE~

I can heartedly recommend this book to anyone who knows that life, though not always fair, leaves us with blessings to count~
And count them Joyce Johnson does ! ... Read more