A Fair Maiden, Joyce Carol Oates
A Fair Maiden, Joyce Carol Oates
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A Fair Maiden

Author: Joyce Carol Oates

Narrator: Angela Goethals

Unabridged: 5 hr 36 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 01/01/2010

Synopsis

Sixteen-year-old Katya Spivak is out for a walk on the gracious streets of Bayhead Harbor with her two summer babysitting charges when she's approached by silver-haired, elegant Marcus Kidder. At first, his interest in her seems harmless, even pleasant; like his name, a sort of gentle joke. His beautiful home, the children's books that he's written, his classical music, the marvelous art in his study, his lavish presents to her: Mr. Kidder's life couldn't be more different from Katya's drab working-class existence back home in South Jersey, or more enticing. But by degrees, almost imperceptibly, something changes, and posing for Mr. Kidder's new painting isn't the light-hearted endeavor it once was. What does he really want from her? And how far will he go to get it?

About Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of a National Humanities Medal awarded by President Barack Obama, the National Book Critics Circle’s Ivan Sandrof Life Achievement Award, the National Book Award in Fiction, the Jerusalem Prize, the Prix Femina, the Cino Del Duca World Prize, and is a five-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the bestsellers Blonde and We Were the Mulvaneys. She is the Roger S. Berlind ’52 Distinguished Professor of the Humanities Emerita at Princeton University and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2024 she won the Raymond Chandler Lifetime Achievement Award given to “a master of the thriller and noir literary genre.”

About Angela Goethals

Angela Goethals is a native New Yorker who has appeared on and off Broadway in Picnic, Four Baboons Adoring the Sun, and The Good Times Are Killing Me, for which she won an Obie Award and a Drama Desk nomination. Since moving to Los Angeles with her husband, she has appeared on Grey’s Anatomy, Without a Trace, and Boston Public, with a recurring role on 24.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Come on May 13, 2020

"Un inizio innocente. Quando Katya Spivak aveva sedici anni e Marcus Kidder sessantotto." Poche parole danno avvio al romanzo e già da subito si coglie che quell'inizio e questa storia sarà tutto fuorché innocente. Siamo nel New Jersey, è estate, e Katya si guadagna da vivere facendo la babysitter. S......more

Goodreads review by Lisa on November 13, 2014

I'm pretty sure that whatever JCO wanted to say with this novel was not what I heard. If it was, that's even worse. Elaborating on this would be disclosing too much... Both Katya and Marcus Kidder were pretty unsympathetic characters in my opinion. Their relationship was disturbing, based soley on m......more

Goodreads review by Salma on January 30, 2011

At the risk of sounding presumptuous, I think Joyce Carol Oates had Little Red Riding Hood in mind when she wrote this. Fairy tale references are scattered throughout the book like breadcrumbs. We meet sixteen-year-old blond, tan-legged Katya (aka Cinderella or Snow White), who is working as a nanny......more

Quotes

“What keeps us coming back to Oates Country is…her uncanny gift of making the page a window, with something on the other side that we’d swear was life itself.” New York Times

“For forty years, Joyce Carol Oates has maintained a creative dialogue with the roiling cauldron of contemporary American culture, writing unflinchingly about the oddities that bubble up into the headlines.” Washington Post

“Fans of Oates’ gothic stylings will not be disappointed…the prose [has] plenty of punch.” Booklist

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