Very exciting news!

Randy Souther, who maintains Celestrial Timepiece, the fantastic online resource devoted to Joyce Carol Oates' work, has started a new scholarly journal that focuses on "the writing of Joyce Carol Oates and related subjects, with the goal of advancing knowledge of and deepening the conversation about Oates's massive literary project."

I've written extensively about Oates' work before and my admiration of her creative genius so it's a great privilege to be a contributing editor on this new journal and write reviews for all of Oates' new work that is published in the future. It's especially exciting to be working alongside such distinguished academics and fans of Oates' writing.

To start with, I've written a review of Oates' novel "Marya: A Life" which was first published in 1986 and has recently been reissued by HarperCollins. This is a book which Oates described as "the most 'personal' of my novels" and whose protagonist somewhat represents a quintessential character in her writing. It's a lively, episodic, coming-of-age novel that I whole-heartedly recommend.

Read my review in Volume 1 here: http://repository.usfca.edu/jcostudies/vol1/iss1/