Fox - Paperback

by Joyce Carol Oates (Author)

NATIONAL BESTSELLER - An "enthralling" (Los Angeles Times) and "remarkably engrossing" (The New York Times Book Review, Editors' Choice) novel of literary and psychological suspense about the dark secrets that surface after the shocking disappearance of a charismatic, mercurial teacher at an elite boarding school--by legendary author Joyce Carol Oates

"Eerie, shocking, provoking, and beautifully written."--Gillian Flynn
"I found it mesmerizing front to back."--Michael Connelly
"I can't remember the last time I read something so (darkly, disconcertingly) addictive."--Rebecca Makkai
"An extraordinary novel . . . unlike any other mystery I've read."--Joseph Finder
"Tom Ripley, eat your heart out."--NPR
"A classic psychological suspense."--People
"A dark, daring plunge into literary suspense . . . Oates dissects the predator-prey dynamic with merciless precision."--The Seattle Times

A HARPER'S BAZAAR AND PUBLISHERS WEEKLY BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR

Who is Francis Fox? A charming English teacher new to the idyllic Langhorne Academy, Fox beguiles many of his students, their parents, and his colleagues at the elite boarding school, while leaving others wondering where he came from and why his biography is so enigmatic. When two brothers discover Fox's car half-submerged in a pond in a local nature preserve and parts of an unidentified body strewn about the nearby woods, the entire community, including Detective Horace Zwender and his deputy, begins to ask disturbing questions about Francis Fox and who he might really be.

A hypnotic, galloping tale of crime and complicity, revenge and restitution, victim vs. predator, Joyce Carol Oates's Fox illuminates the darkest corners of the human psyche while asking profound moral questions about justice and the response evil demands. A character as magnetically diabolical as Patricia Highsmith's Tom Ripley and Vladimir Nabokov's Humbert Humbert, Francis Fox enchants and manipulates nearly everyone around him, until at last he meets someone he can't outfox. Written in Oates's trademark intimate, sweeping style, and interweaving multiple points of view, Fox is a triumph of craftsmanship and artistry, a novel as profound as it is propulsive, as moving as it is full of mystery.

Author Biography

Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of a National Humanities Medal awarded by President Barack Obama, the National Book Critics Circle's Ivan Sandrof Life Achievement Award, the National Book Award in Fiction, the Jerusalem Prize, the Prix Femina, the Cino Del Duca World Prize, and is a five-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the bestsellers Blonde and We Were the Mulvaneys. She is the Roger S. Berlind '52 Distinguished Professor of the Humanities Emerita at Princeton University and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2024 she won the Raymond Chandler Lifetime Achievement Award given to "a master of the thriller and noir literary genre."