About the Book
When a teenage girl is the alleged victim of an act of racial violence, the incident shocks and galvanizes her community, exacerbating the racial tension that has been simmering in this New Jersey town for decades. In this magisterial work of fiction, Joyce Carol Oates explores the uneasy fault lines in a racially troubled society and reveals that there must always be a sacrifice--of innocence, truth, trust, and, ultimately, of lives.
Unfolding in a succession of multiracial voices, in a community transfixed by this alleged crime and the spectacle unfolding around it, this profound novel exposes what--and who--the "sacrifice" actually is, and what consequences these kinds of events hold for us all. The Sacrifice is a chilling exploration of the enduring trauma of the past, modern racial and class tensions, the power of secrets, and the primal decisions we all make to protect those we love.
About the Author :
Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Medal of Humanities, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Book Award, and the 2019 Jerusalem Prize, and has been several times nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the national bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys; Blonde, which was nominated for the National Book Award; and the New York Times bestseller The Falls, which won the 2005 Prix Femina. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978.
Review :
In her latest novel, The Sacrifice, Joyce Carol Oates explores in fiction what most of us only experienced through headlines some 25 years ago. Striving to inhabit the "procession of voices" on every side of an explosive racial crime, or hoax, perhaps, she reminds us of what is too easily lost in our world of instant and quickly forgotten news-that there is a story behind, and in between, every word of a press release, that pauses in a court transcript are novels waiting to be written, and that pain, fear and ambition bind us together in common humanity even as they pull us apart. Most of all, reading The Sacrifice evoked for me what the great W.E.B. Du Bois wrote of the color line over a century ago: "herein lies the tragedy of the age ... that men know so little of men." The same might be said of 15 year-old girls trapped in our nation's inner cities. Joyce Carol Oates, with characteristic brilliance, has masterfully drawn Sybilla Frye so that we may, in turn, draw closer to those who remain nameless and voiceless, beyond the next news cycle of racial hatred and discord. - HENRY LOUIS GATES, JR. The Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of The Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. HENRY LOUIS GATES, JR. The Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of The Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of The Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of The Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University.
Joyce Carol Oates [...] is simply the most consistently inventive, brilliant, curious and creative writer going, as far as I'm concerned. - Gillian Flynn, author of Gone Girl
"Oates fully intends to make readers squirm. But for all its headline brashness, visceral magnification, and societal melodrama, The Sacrifice is laced with striking psychological subtleties, painful ironies, and flashes of tenderness and wit. A sure-fire catalyst for meaningful discussion. - Booklist (starred review)
"A fictional account of the infamous Tawana Brawley case... [Oates] uses fiction as an opportunity to interrogate the circumstances that made Brawley's story a sensation and gave it meaning." - Kirkus Reviews
"Oates [poses] difficult questions: If someone has not told the truth about a racist incident, does that mean that there was no racism at all? In bringing up issues of race, if we aren't squeaky-clean are our claims that much easier to dismiss?" - Essence, Required Reading March 2015
"[A] provocative new novel...For more than half a century, [Oates] has been going where others fear to tread...The Sacrifice is...so plugged into the national ethos of today that we want to look away in shame." - Buffalo News
"Without a doubt this book is timely...If there was ever a moment that called for insight into the scourge of racist policing, this is it....Oates has a sophisticated grasp of racial complexities..." - Boston Globe
"What is memorable about this book is not its echoes of the Brawley story, but rather what Oates adds, creating new and distinct perspectives... Oates poignantly transports this novel to the present, and we are reminded of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and Tamir Rice." - Philadelphia Inquirer
