Patricide: A Novella (Google eBook)

Joyce Carol Oates

HarperCollins, Jul 3, 2012 - Fiction - 100 pages

Roland Marks is a Nobel Prize winning novelist with a penchant for younger women and four marriages behind him. Lou-Lou Marks, his grown daughter, is a successful academic in her own right. But her real career lies in attending to her father. An egomaniacal and emotionally manipulative man, he demands of her absolute filial loyalty and an uncompromising acquiescence to his every need—her only reward is his approval, which she feels she never fully receives, but desperately desires. When Roland falls in love with a woman fifty years his junior, Lou-Lou senses the precarious decline of her power. Intent on preventing Roland from marrying for a fifth time and signing away his estate—and her inheritance—the relationship takes a darkly comical turn. Astute, insightful, and mordantly hilarious, Patricide is Joyce Carol Oates at her best.

What people are saying

Review: Patricide: A Novella

User Review  - Ted Cornwell - Goodreads

Interesting tale of a famous writer (seems reminiscent of Saul Bellow), his daughter and his much younger fiance. Lots of room for jealousy and intrigue.

Review: Patricide: A Novella

User Review - Goodreads

I've always enjoyed Oates' storytelling techniques. She draws the reader in with dark and disturbing view of human nature.

About the author

Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Medal of Humanities, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the Chicago Tribune 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 bestseller The Falls, which won the 2005 Prix Femina. 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.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Patricide: A Novella
• Author: Joyce Carol Oates
• Publisher: HarperCollins, 2012
• ISBN: 0062227424, 9780062227423
• Length: 100 pages
• Subjects: Fiction / Family Life; Fiction / Short Stories (single author)