Raven's Wing


Raven's Wing is a collection of 18 short stories by Joyce Carol Oates, published by E. P. Dutton in 1986.
The title story "Raven's Wing" was included in The Best American Short Stories 1985.
"The Seasons" was reprinted in Prize Stories 1985: The O. Henry Awards.

Stories

Those stories first appearing in literary journals are indicated.
  • "Raven's Wing"
  • "The Seasons"
  • "Nairobi"
  • "Golden Gloves"
  • "Harrow Street in Linden"
  • "Happy"
  • "Ancient Airs, Voices"
  • "Double Solitaire"
  • "Manslaughter"
  • "Little Wife"
  • "The Jesuit"
  • "The Mother"
  • "Testimony"
  • "Nuclear Holocaust"
  • "Surf City"
  • "Little Blood-Button"
  • "Baby"
  • "April"

    Reception

Critic Greg Johnson considers the stories in Raven's Wing—in which Oates returns to settings and themes similar to the fictional "Eden County" she created in her volume By the North Gate —to exemplify "her most impressive recent work."
Literary critic Jack Matthews in The New York Times praises "the rich inventiveness conveyed in a plain style" in which the characters in the work take precedent over the author. Rejecting "fashionable ironies" Oates presents the tales of the working-class of semi-rural New York state in which "pent-up wrath of those who are inarticulate and self-deluded. And yet, in spite of their human defects, they are created with an urgency that signifies that they matter; and because of this urgency, they matter to the reader as well."