Fox

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A spellbinding novel of literary and psychological suspenseabout the dark secrets that surface after the shocking disappearance of a charismatic, mercurial teacher at an elite boarding schoolby the legendary author 'who is surely on any shortlist of Americas greatest living writers' (New York Times Magazine)

'Eerie, shocking, provoking, and beautifully written, Fox is yet further proof Oates is one of the greatest writers among us today' Gillian Flynn

Who is Francis Fox A charming English teacher new to the idyllic Langhorne Academy, Fox beguiles many of his students, their parents, and his colleagues at the elite boarding school, while leaving others wondering where he came from and why his biography is so enigmatic. When two brothers discover Foxs car half-submerged in a pond in a local nature preserve and parts of an unidentified body strewn about the nearby woods, the entire community, including Detective Horace Zwender and his deputy, begins to ask disturbing questions about Francis Fox and who he might really be.

A hypnotic, galloping tale of crime and complicity, revenge and restitution, victim vs. predator, Joyce Carol Oatess Fox illuminates the darkest corners of the human psyche while asking profound moral questions about justice and the response evil demands. A character as magnetically diabolical as Patricia Highsmiths Tom Ripley and Vladimir Nabokovs Humbert Humbert, Francis Fox enchants and manipulates nearly everyone around him, until at last he meets someone he cant outfox. Written in Oatess trademark intimate, sweeping style, and interweaving multiple points of view, Fox is a triumph of craftsmanship and artistry, a novel as profound as it is propulsive, as moving as it is full of mystery.

Reviews

'Reading Fox is like being spellbound by a hypnotist who may not wish you well, who leads you, with a deceptively gentle hand, toward that dark forest you fear. Joyce Carol Oates has created a sinister fable all the more chilling for persuading its readers to collude in the unthinkable. Eerie, shocking, provoking, and beautifully written, Fox is yet further proof that Oates is one of the greatest writers among us today' Gillian Flynn

'I cant remember the last time I read something so (darkly, disconcertingly) addictive that yet bears so much realism and nuance and depth. Oates is a genius in the truest sense of the wordfearing nothing, including radical reinventionand Fox is, to my mind, her most compelling book in her remarkable career' Rebecca Makkai

Author Bio

Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of a National Humanities Medal awarded by President Barack Obama, the National Book Critics Circles 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 Award, a lifetime achievement honor given to a master of the thriller and noir literary genre.