The Gravedigger's Daughter

Oates, Joyce Carol

ISBN 10: 0061236829 / ISBN 13: 9780061236822

Published by Ecco Press; HarperCollins, New York, 2007

About this Item

582 pages; 24 cm. SIGNED by the author on the limitation page (specially bound signed first edition). A near-fine copy of the first printing, age toning. Fine DJ. *** "In 1936 the Schwarts, an immigrant family desperate to escape Nazi Germany, settle in a small town in upstate New York, where the father, a former high school teacher, is demeaned by the only job he can get: gravedigger and cemetery caretaker. After local prejudice and the family's own emotional frailty result in unspeakable tragedy, the gravedigger's daughter, Rebecca, begins her astonishing pilgrimage into America, an odyssey of erotic risk and imaginative daring, ingenious self-invention, and, in the end, a bittersweet--but very 'American'--triumph. 'You are born here, they will not hurt you'--so the gravedigger has predicted for his daughter, which will turn out to be true. In The Gravedigger's Daughter, Oates has created a masterpiece of domestic yet mythic realism, at once emotionally engaging and intellectually provocative: an intimately observed testimony to the resilience of the individual to set beside such predecessors as The Falls, Blonde, and We Were the Mulvaneys. / Joyce Carol Oates has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the national bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys and Blonde (a finalist for the National Book Award), and the New York Times bestsellers The Falls (winner of the 2005 Prix Femina) and The Gravedigger's Daughter." - Publisher. Size: 8vo.

Seller Inventory # 210905

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Gravedigger's Daughter
• Publisher: Ecco Press; HarperCollins, New York
• Publication Date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0061236829
• ISBN 13: 9780061236822
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st.
• Condition: Near Fine
• Dust Jacket Condition: Fine
• Signed: SIGNED
• Book Type: Collectible
• Seller catalogs:
  • A BARGAIN BASEMENT
  • XL: Extra Large

About this title

Synopsis

In 1936 the Schwarts, an immigrant family desperate to escape Nazi Germany, settle in a small town in upstate New York, where the father, a former high school teacher, is demeaned by the only job he can get: gravedigger and cemetery caretaker. After local prejudice and the family's own emotional frailty result in unspeakable tragedy, the gravedigger's daughter, Rebecca, begins her astonishing pilgrimage into America, an odyssey of erotic risk and imaginative daring, ingenious self-invention, and, in the end, a bittersweet—but very "American"—triumph. "You are born here, they will not hurt you"—so the gravedigger has predicted for his daughter, which will turn out to be true.

In The Gravedigger's Daughter, Oates has created a masterpiece of domestic yet mythic realism, at once emotionally engaging and intellectually provocative: an intimately observed testimony to the resilience of the individual to set beside such predecessors as The Falls, Blonde, and We Were the Mulvaneys.

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 2019 Jerusalem Prize, 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. 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.