Broke Heart Blues

A Novel

De: Joyce Carol Oates

Narrado por: Finlay Stevenson, Cassandra Campbell, Fred Berman, Brittany Pressley, Linda Jones, Vas Eli, Barton Caplan, Chris Andrew Ciulla, Joyce Carol Oates

The much-anticipated reissue of a novel that is one of Joyce Carol Oates’s personal favorites among her oeuvre; featuring a new afterword by Oates

IN THE HEART OF A LANGUID JULY, ELEVEN-YEAR-OLD JOHN REDDY HEART drives a traffic-stopping, salmon-colored Cadillac into the quiet upstate town of Willowsville, New York. His mother, Dahlia Heart, a blackjack dealer, has brought her family east from Las Vegas to claim the rambling mansion left to her by a wealthy suitor.

But it is John Reddy—already growing into a heartbreaking hybrid of James Dean, Marlon Brando, and Elvis Presley—who will claim the town itself. It is John Reddy who will arouse the desire of Willowsville’s teenage girls and the worship of its boys, the fear and envy of its men, and the yearning of its women. And it is John Reddy who will capture the town’s soul forever on the night a prominent citizen is shot dead in Dahlia Heart’s bedroom—and a statewide manhunt sweeps Willowsville’s rebel outlaw into the realm of living myth.

Over the course of thirty years, Broke Heart Blues charts the rise and fall—and the ultimate call to reckoning—of John Reddy Heart, through the myriad voices of those who find him their whipping boy, savior, dream lover, and confessor. At once a scathing indictment of the cultlike nature of fame and celebrity in America and a deeply moving mediation on human need and longing, the novel explores loneliness, and the profound price we pay for our desires and dreams.

©2024 Joyce Carol Oates (P)2024 Random House Audio

Reseñas de la Crítica

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

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