The Sacrifice

by Joyce Carol Oates

Overview

When a teenage girl is the alleged victim of an act of racial violence, the incident shocks and galvanizes her community, exacerbating the racial tension that has been simmering in this New Jersey town for decades. In this magisterial work of fiction, Joyce Carol Oates explores the uneasy fault lines in a racially troubled society and reveals that there must always be a sacrifice—of innocence, truth, trust, and, ultimately, of lives.

Unfolding in a succession of multiracial voices, in a community transfixed by this alleged crime and the spectacle unfolding around it, this profound novel exposes what—and who—the "sacrifice" actually is, and what consequences these kinds of events hold for us all. The Sacrifice is a chilling exploration of the enduring trauma of the past, modern racial and class tensions, the power of secrets, and the primal decisions we all make to protect those we love.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780594678892
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	10/20/2015
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 1.25(h) x 9.00(d)

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 National Book Award, and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction, and has been several times 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. Her most recent novel is A Book of American Martyrs. 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.

Hometown:

Princeton, New Jersey

Date of Birth:

June 16, 1938

Place of Birth:

Lockport, New York

Education:

B.A., Syracuse University, 1960; M.A., University of Wisconsin, 1961

Editorial Reviews

Joyce Carol Oates […] is simply the most consistently inventive, brilliant, curious and creative writer going, as far as I’m concerned.

Gillian Flynn

Oates fully intends to make readers squirm. But for all its headline brashness, visceral magnification, and societal melodrama, The Sacrifice is laced with striking psychological subtleties, painful ironies, and flashes of tenderness and wit. A sure-fire catalyst for meaningful discussion.

Booklist (starred review)

In this provocative novel, Oates barges her way into territory where not many white writers have dared to tread - and produced a raw and earnest mix of fiery drama and the bone-cold truths of race as we live it today.

NPR / All Things Considered

If you enjoy historical fiction, there’s a wide range of it coming up. In January, the tireless Joyce Carol Oates publishes The Sacrifice, a tense novel based on the notorious Tawana Brawley rape case in 1987.

Tampa Bay Times

Based largely on the infamous Tawana Brawley hoax of the late-1980s, Joyce Carol Oates’ latest novel, The Sacrifice is a savage satire on race relations and the culture of sensationalism...The Sacrifice ranks among Joyce Carol Oates’s best novels.

New York Post

The tireless Joyce Carol Oates publishes The Sacrifice, a tense novel based on the notorious Tawana Brawley rape case in 1987.

Lexington Herald Leader

Without a doubt this book is timely...If there was ever a moment that called for insight into the scourge of racist policing, this is it....Oates has a sophisticated grasp of racial complexities…

Boston Globe

Oates doesn’t lack for ambition. Her narrative builds carefully and patiently, revealing how this kind of morality play can occur. She covers a great deal of sociological ground...issues both inside the black community and between the black and white populations of Pascayne.

Roxane Gay

During her long and distinguished career, Joyce Carol Oates never has shied away from the controversy that can come with using celebrities and tabloid news stories as the inspiration for her fiction… Oates’s latest novel, The Sacrifice, seems likely to stir up another flap.

Washington Post

What is memorable about this book is not its echoes of the Brawley story, but rather what Oates adds, creating new and distinct perspectives… Oates poignantly transports this novel to the present, and we are reminded of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and Tamir Rice.

Philadelphia Inquirer

Oates’ representation of the effects of such a scandal on our modern media-frenzied national imagination is all the more grotesque because it is believable… The Sacrifice brings into disturbing clarity the human frustrations of the post-civil rights movement era...

Bookreporter.com

Oates [poses] difficult questions: If someone has not told the truth about a racist incident, does that mean that there was no racism at all? In bringing up issues of race, if we aren’t squeaky-clean are our claims that much easier to dismiss?

Required Reading March 2015 Essence

[A] provocative new novel...For more than half a century, [Oates] has been going where others fear to tread...The Sacrifice is...so plugged into the national ethos of today that we want to look away in shame.

Buffalo News