The Lost Landscape

(Paperback)

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A momentous memoir of childhood and adolescence from one of our finest and most beloved writers, as weve never seen her before.
In The Lost Landscape, Joyce Carol Oates vividly recreates the early years of her life in western New York state, powerfully evoking the romance of childhood and the way it colors everything that comes after. From early memories of her relatives to remembrances of a particularly poignant friendship with a red hen, from her first friendships to her first experiences with death, The Lost Landscape is an arresting account of the ways in which Oatess life (and her life as a writer) was shaped by early childhood and how her later work was influenced by a hard-scrabble rural upbringing.

In this exceptionally candid, moving, and richly reflective recounting of her early years, Oates explores the world through the eyes of her younger self and reveals her nascent experiences of wanting to tell stories about the world and the people she meets. If Alice in Wonderland was the book that changed a young Joyce forever and inspired her to look at life as offering endless adventures, she describes just as unforgettably the harsh lessons of growing up on a farm. With searing detail and an acutely perceptive eye, Oates renders her memories and emotions with exquisite precision to truly transport the reader to a bygone place and time, the lost landscape of the writers past but also to the lost landscapes of our own earliest, and most essential, lives.

Reviews

A compelling and at times mysterious testimony to a life of letters like no other I know Richard Ford

Every piece merits re-issue works effectively as a continuous memoir here and there we glimpse the gothic seam Oates has since mined in her fiction Suzi Feay, Financial Times

The spareness of the prose belies a hinterland of suffering . . Steely, lean and bleakly allusive, The Lost Landscape gives an unsettling insight into the ways in which Oatess writing career has emerged Times Literary Supplement

A tender-hearted excavation of [Oates] hardscrabble early life O, The Oprah Magazine

Oates perfectly captures the unique confusion of childhood Elle (US)

An exquisitely rendered glimpse of [Oates] childhood in rural upstate New York Bookpage

[an] intriguing new memoir . . . Oates mines literary gold San Francisco Chronicle

The Lost Landscapeoffers a window into a highly original mind. While it is never a given that a writers personal story can illuminate her work, in Oates case, it very much does Minneapolis Star Tribune

Praise for Joyce Carol Oates:

[Joyce Carol Oates] is simply the most consistently inventive, brilliant, curious and creative writer going, as far as Im concerned Gillian Flynn, author of Gone Girl

Joyce Carol Oates is a writer who always takes your breath away Mail on Sunday

Oates is a writer of extraordinary strengths. Her great subject, naturally, is love Guardian

'Oates is an inspired writer, and a formidable psychologist. She has a thrilling way of grasping an emotion, wasting no time and launching herself straight at the aching heart of the matter' Independent

'Oates's prose contains a deep felt rawness which hovers between hope, despair and love' Guardian

Author Bio

Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Book Award and the PEN / Malamud Award, and has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Her books include We Were the Mulvaneys, Blonde, Carthage, A Book of American Martyrs and Hazards of Time Travel. She is Professor of Humanities at Princeton University.