Joyce Carol Oates Keynote | The Saratoga Book Festival 2021

For Saratoga Book Festival’s inaugural keynote, bestselling and prize-winning author Joyce Carol Oates speaks with Robert Boyers, Professor of English, editor of Salmagundi Literary Magazine, and director of the New York State Summer Writers Institute. 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.

Published in August 2021, her newest book Breathe is an intimately detailed love story, part horror story rooted in real life. The novel is an exploration of unbridled, feral grief determination and the human desire to be faithful to the beloved, and to survive the trauma of loss.

“Fecund with fear and anguish, and driven by raw, breathless narration, this hallucinatory tale
will not disappoint. Oates is on a roll.”

— Publishers Weekly

Robert Boyers is the author of 11 books, the most recent of which is The Tyranny of Virtue: Identity, The Academy and the Hunt for Political Heresies. The book is a combination of memoir and cultural criticism, which draws upon a lifetime of experience as an editor (Salmagundi Magazine), writing program director (The New York State Summer Writers Institute), college professor and frequent contributor to such national magazines as The Nation, Harpers, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and The New Republic. Boyers’ previous books include a book of short stories, a volume of personal essays on the fate of ideas (including authority, the other, beauty, judgment, and fidelity), and several works on the politics of novels and novelists.

Presented in partnership with the New York Summer Writers Institute