“It’s hard to think of another writer with as fecund and protean an imagination as the eighty-five-year-old Joyce Carol Oates, who is surely on any short list of America’s greatest living writers.”
—New York Times Magazine

“Joyce Carol Oates’s stunning novel about one town’s ramped passion for a boy accused of murder, Broke Heart Blues, feels more resonant than ever in this reissue with a thoughtful afterword.”
—Shelf Awareness

“Densely layered, meticulously imagined . . . [a] shared coming-of-age tale fraught with the absurd comedy and uproarious sadness of adolescent obsession . . . among the most entertaining of Oates’s novels.”
—Miami Herald

“With Broke Heart Blues, Oates does for high school reunions what Huckleberry Finn did for the Mississippi . . . Great authors have a way of rendering common things extraordinary . . . This dry satire of America’s thirst for scandal is perfectly calibrated.”
—Christian Science Monitor

“Oates uses her astonishingly plentiful imagination to paint the portrait of . . . virtually an entire generation of a town . . . Rife with life.”
—Washington Post Book World

“Funny and playful . . . displays great inventiveness and a justified belief in its relevance to our emotional lives.”
—New York Times Book Review

“A sparkling comic hit.”
—Boston Sunday Herald

“A sharp, funny look at how memories can warp reality . . . heart-wrenching and beautifully written.”
—Wall Street Journal

“Huge, humorous, manic, and multilayered, Oates’s twenty-ninth novel will rank high among the best work she has produced in her prolific career.”
—Publishers Weekly, starred review