Lovely, Dark Deep by Joyce Carol Oates was shortlisted for The 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Literature; Joyce Carol Oates is one of the two writers who have been nominated for this award four times, the other is Philip Roth – you could check my blog for more reviews https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2026/08/do-you-have-any-suggestions-how-to-make.html

 

Lovely, Dark Deep by Joyce Carol Oates was shortlisted for The 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Literature; Joyce Carol Oates is one of the two writers who have been nominated for this award four times, the other is Philip Roth – you could check my blog for more reviews https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2026/08/do-you-have-any-suggestions-how-to-make.html

 

9 out of 10

 

Joyce Carol Oates https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2026/08/mastiff-by-joyce-carol-oates-is-second.html is one of two writers to be nominated four times for The Pulitzer Prize for Literature, and the collection Lovely, Dark, Deep is one of the four oeuvres, I have been first mesmerized by Black Water, a fabulous novel…

 

Which is based on fact, senator Kennedy has been involved in an accident, in which his lover was killed, a film was made about this, the car was driven into the Black Water, the man may have been drunk, this is how I recall it, but I may be wrong, then he did not do much, if anything to help the victim, more concerned with the fallout

This is where I will just put in a few words about the stories that follow Mastiff and Sex With Camel  https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2026/08/sex-with-camel-by-joyce-carol-oates-is.html the latter is the first in the volume, the third tale is Distance, in which this woman checks into a Las Vegas hotel, and wants to open the windows

 

The bellboy tells her they are sealed, and then she sees that considering the casinos, fortunes lost there, it is reasonable to have rooms at higher floors with sealed windows; she tries to get the phone number of her lover and then we read about her anxieties…I was better impressed by A Book of Martyrs, the next short story

This one centers around abortion, the Family Planning facility and the anti-abortion militants that protest, and abuse the women who come to end their pregnancies, this is such a crucial theme today, given that The Supreme Court (in which I see the majority as pathetic, revolting) has ended what used to a right for decades

 

https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2025/07/the-belles-lettres-papers-by-charles.html I am reading again the marvelous Belles Lettres Papers, and Joyce Carol Oates is praised within it – Stephanos is Dead comes next, and here we have this celebrated man, who dies, and then the narrator attends the wake, only to be reprimanded

the widow is sure that this strange woman had been a lover, but she is wrong…now for the next in line, The Hunter, where the title belongs to the president of this college on the Mississippi river, where they invite a poet, who is also the narrator, and a bizarre encounter starts with the guest trying to see where The Underground Railroad was connected

 

https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2025/08/the-underground-railroad-by-colson.html then, just as she is about to leave, the lover -president asks her is she had not stolen a watch…the last to be ‘reviewed’ here is The Disappearing, where a bicycle is missing and then we enter another outré world, popular reviews are just a couple of lines long, on Goodreads, I should try that