“Joyce Carol Oates is a major one-woman industry. Constantly exploring new aspects of American life, Joyce Carol Oates has restlessly evolved as an artist.” — New York Review of Books
“Joyce Carol Oates’ uncompromising prose illuminates the stark landscape of our times” — Chicago Tribune
“The daughter of a Holocaust survivor (the gravedigger of the title) who commits an incredible murder, Oates’s heroine endures enough violence to fill a slasher movie. But she is able to reinvent herself as a peppy salesclerk with a jazz-musician lover and become ‘a living, breathing, complex presence on the page,’ our reviewer, Lee Siegel, wrote. Oates is sometimes compared to Theodore Dreiser, the author of Sister Carrie, Siegel continued, ‘but in the way her novels take off at the moment when her heroines break free, Oates is sometimes more like Carrie herself.’” — New York Times
“The Gravedigger’s Daughter is Joyce Carol Oates at her very best: mesmerizing, intense and unique in her vision and power.” — The New Yorker
“Oates’s characters are vivid and mulit-dimensional, and the book’s surprise ending is moving and hopeful. This is a saga worth savoring.” 4 out of 4 stars — People
“For many novelists, quantity is damaging to quality, but Oates’s power springs directly from her prodigality. Her genius – the only word for the alarming thing that so evidently possesses her – happens to be a giant. And the reader’s intimation that this huge-handed, league-striding, voracious monster is somehow speaking, whispering, howling through her is what gives to her writing the illusion that it’s all real…Oates succeeds here, as she often does, in making such judgements feel simple-minded. What it all seems is true and therefore moving and somewhat terrible, but in an exhilarating way. Every aspect of the ungainly plot feels right, including its ungainliness.” — Washington Post Book World