—New York Observer
“Joyce Carol Oates takes the boldest path to comprehending ‘the riddle, the curse of Monroe’ by proceeding directly and frankly to fiction. Her novel Blonde is fat, messy, and fierce. It’s part Gothic, part kaleidoscopic novel of ideas, part lurid celebrity potboiler, and is seldom less than engrossing.”
—Laura Miller, New York Times
“In Oates’ corpus, Blonde lands near the top. It is an ambitious, complex, and powerful novel.”
—Greensboro News and Record
“If you are prejudiced against biographical fiction . . . or if you simply think that there are too many books about Marilyn Monroe . . . now is the time to lay aside your prejudices—or, rather, to allow them to be swept aside by a torrentially imaginative, compulsively readable tour de force. . . . Blonde brings this near-mythic tale triumphantly and terribly to psychological life.”
—Sunday Telegraph
“Joyce Carol Oates’ precise and inspired writing is close to witchcraft. With mastery, she unravels the story of the mythical blonde, the overly adored and despised Marilyn Monroe. Breathlessly, I followed the intricate and passionate emotions surrounding the sweet and complex Norma Jeane, whose blazing ‘aura’ suffused the whole world and frightened the men who loved her most.”
—Jeanne Moreau
“The novel may be more than 700 pages long, but you’re hard pressed to put it down from the moment you turn to the first page. Oates has forged a book of irresistible and terrible locomotion, and it little matters that we know—oh how sorrowfully we know—how it will end.”
—Commercial Appeal
“Joyce Carol Oates’ scary and rhapsodic novel about the life of Marilyn Monroe is saturated with the mysteries of eye and camera. . . . It’s eccentric, exhausting—and remarkable.”
—Salon.com
“Blonde is at once epic and impressionistic, even lyrical, all snippets that seem intimate, a catalog that accumulates into something public and grand.”
—Brian Bouldrey
“Oates is as diverse as she is driven. She has tackled topics ranging from the aesthetics of boxing to the misadventures of toxic twins. But rarely is she so intriguing as when she strays into a genre best described as ‘faction.’ It’s as unsettling as it is worthwhile to take a fresh look at a much-publicized event or personality through Oates’ eyes.”
—Times (London)
ALSO BY JOYCE CAROL OATES
With Shuddering Fall (1964)
A Garden of Earthly Delights (1967)
Expensive People (1968)
them (1969)
Wonderland (1971)
Do With Me What You Will (1973)
The Assassins (1975)
Childwold (1976)
Son of the Morning (1978)
Unholy Loves (1979)
Bellefleur (1980)
Angel of Light (1981)
A Bloodsmoor Romance (1982)
Mysteries of Winterthurn (1984)
Solstice (1985)
Marya: A Life (1986)
You Must Remember This (1987)
American Appetites (1989)
Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart (1989)
Black Water (1992)
Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang (1993)
What I Lived For (1994)
We Were the Mulvaneys (1996)
Man Crazy (1997)
My Heart Laid Bare (1998)
Broke Heart Blues (1999)
Blonde (2000)
Middle Age: A Romance (2001)
I’ll Take You There (2002)
The Tattooed Girl (2003)
The Falls (2003)
Missing Mom (2005)
Black Girl / White Girl (2006)
The Gravedigger’s Daughter (2007)
My Sister, My Love (2008)
Little Bird of Heaven (2009)
CREDITS
Cover design by Alison Forner
Cover photograph by Philippe Halsman © Halsman Archive
COPYRIGHT
Blonde is a work of fiction. While many of the characters portrayed here have some counterparts in the life and times of Marilyn Monroe, the characterizations and incidents presented are totally the products of the author’s imagination. Accordingly, Blonde should be read solely as a work of fiction, not as a biography of Marilyn Monroe.
BLONDE. Copyright © 2009 by The Ontario Review. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
First Ecco edition published 2001.
This reissue published 2009.
EPub Edition February 2017 ISBN 9780062685865
ISBN: 978-0-06-177435-5 (pbk)
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