Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart - Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates adds to her extraordinary body of work with this stunning National Book Award Finalist filled with violence, love, racism, and a shared secret in mid-century New York.

In the early 1950s in an industrial town, racial boundaries may keep people apart - or bring them together explosively. Iris Courtney, who is white, is the only witness when handsome Jinx Fairchild, a black basketball player, kills a white man in order to protect her.

The secret link between Iris and Jinx is not only their attraction to each other, but a bond of passion and guilt that has formed between them. This one irrevocable, tragic act shapes their lives and alters their destinies in Joyce Carol Oates's finest, emotion-packed novel, a work critics call a masterpiece, the best work of America's best writer of contemporary realism.

ISBN: 9780452265813

Pages: 405

Trade paperback

Plume, 1991

Good condition; Small tears at the base of spine; Pages tanned

B80