Them

Joyce Carol Oates

Modern Library, 2006 - Fiction - 546 pages

Joyce Carol Oates’s Wonderland Quartet comprises four remarkable novels that explore social class in America and the inner lives of young Americans. As powerful and relevant today as it on its initial publication, them chronicles the tumultuous lives of a family living on the edge of ruin in the Detroit slums, from the 1930s to the 1967 race riots. Praised by The Nation for her “potent, life-gripping imagination,” Oates traces the aspirations and struggles of Loretta Wendall, a dreamy young mother who is filled with regret by the age of sixteen, and the subsequent destinies of her children, Maureen and Jules, who must fight to survive in a world of violence and danger.

Winner of the National Book Award, them is an enthralling novel about love, class, race, and the inhumanity of urban life. It is, raves The New York Times, “a superbly accomplished vision.”

Them is the third novel in the Wonderland Quartet. The books that complete this acclaimed series, A Garden of Earthly Delights, Expensive People, and Wonderland, are also available from the Modern Library.

What people are saying

LibraryThing Review

User Review  - JosephKing6602 - LibraryThing

I started reading this book on a couple of prior occasions. Now, I've read it through; and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Oates really creates in-depth characters. The reader begins to really care about what happens. Very good book!

LibraryThing Review

User Review  - EadieB - LibraryThing

I found this book to be very captivating and enjoyed Joyce Carol Oates writing very much. The books describes the turmoil of this time period very vividly and with believable characters. It is not a ...

About the author

One of the most versatile and accomplished writers of our time, Oates has influenced the American literary landscape perhaps even more than we realize. The New York Times Book Review suggests, "With occasional exceptions (Joyce, Flaubert), we finally care most about novelists like Dickens, George Eliot, Balzac, Tolstoy, Hardy, James, Conrad, Lawrence or Faulkner whose work is copious enough to constitute a 'world,' and though no guarantees can be offered, energy like Joyce Carol Oates' may find an eventual reward."
        


From the Hardcover edition.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Them; Volume 3 of Modern Library Paperbacks Series; Book 3 of Modern Library; The Modern Library Classics; Wonderland quartet
• Author: Joyce Carol Oates
• Contributor: Elaine Showalter
• Edition: reprint, revised
• Publisher: Modern Library, 2006
• ISBN: 0345484401, 9780345484406
• Length: 546 pages
• Subjects: Fiction / Literary