Back in print in a beautiful new paperback edition, a lost classic from Joyce Carol Oates-a satirical, often surreal, and beautifully plotted nineteenth-century Gothic Romance that brilliantly illuminates contemporary American cultureSet in a nineteenth century similar to our own, A Bloodsmoor Romance follows the beautiful Zinn sisters, five young women who refuse-for the Back in print in a beautiful new paperback edition, a lost classic from Joyce Carol Oates-a satirical, often surreal, and beautifully plotted nineteenth-century Gothic Romance that brilliantly illuminates contemporary American cultureSet in a nineteenth century similar to our own, A Bloodsmoor Romance follows the beautiful Zinn sisters, five young women who refuse-for the most part-"the obligations of Christian marriage."Full of Oatess mordant wit, and breathlessly told in the Victorian style by an unnamed narrator shocked by the Zinn sisters sexuality, impulsivity, and rude rejection of the mores of their time, A Bloodsmoor Romance is a delicious filigree of literary conventions, "a novel of manners" in the tradition of Austen, Dickens, and Alcott which Oates turns on its head.Oatess dark exploration interweaves murder and mayhem, ghosts, and abductions, substance abuse and gender identity, womens suffrage, the American spiritualist movement, and sexual aberration as the Zinn sisters come into contact with some of the nineteenth-centurys greatest characters, from Mark Twain to Oscar Wilde. A biting assessment of the American landscape and a virtuosic transformation of a literary genre, A Bloodsmoor Romance is a compelling, hilarious, and magical anti-romance-Little Women by way of Stephen King. ...more
