About this item
Highlights
- Celebrated author Joshua Seigl, an idiosyncratic bachelor and confirmed recluse--young but in failing health--reluctantly admits to himself that he must hire a live-in assistant to help him with his increasingly complicated professional and personal affairs.
- Author(s): Joyce Carol Oates
- 336 Pages
- Fiction + Literature Genres, Psychological
Description
About the Book
With her unique, masterful balance of dark suspense and surprising tenderness, Oates probes the tragedy of ethnic hatred and challenges accepted limits of desire.Book Synopsis
Celebrated author Joshua Seigl, an idiosyncratic bachelor and confirmed recluse--young but in failing health--reluctantly admits to himself that he must hire a live-in assistant to help him with his increasingly complicated professional and personal affairs. Then one day at the bookstore he encounters Alma, a young woman covered with bizarre tattoos, who stirs something inside him. Unaware of her torturous past--the abuses she's suffered, the wrongs she's committed, the virulent hatred that seethes within her--Seigl decides that she is the one, and he has no idea that he is bringing an enemy into his home.
With her unique, masterful balance of dark suspense and surprising tenderness, Joyce Carol Oates probes the tragedy of ethnic hatred and challenges the accepted limits of desire.
Review Quotes
"Marvelously controlled satire...wonderfully smart and subtle." -- New York Times Book Review
"Oates takes a tricky look at the nature of hate and its sources....The Tattooed Girl is a complicated, sometimes sweet story rife with misunderstandings and missteps, unintended hurts and deliberate forgiveness. It will leave a mark." -- Entertainment Weekly
"The Tattooed Girl is a technical wonder...beautiful, enigmatic, chilling." -- Miami Herald
"Ms. Oates is an American literary institution. The Tattooed Girl demonstrates her mastery of her darkly disturbing art." -- Richmond Times-Dispatch
"The Tattooed Girl often burns with frenzy, ignited by Oates's deft prose... passages blaze with raw, apocalyptic poetry...Oates's attention to the microscopic surges of the heart truly astonishes." -- Time Out New York
"[A] fine, disturbing novel." -- Nashville Tennessean
"With her usual cadenced grace, Oates tells a mesmerizing, disturbing tale" -- Publishers Weekly (starred review)