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Wonderland Quartet

This series delves into the depths of American society, exploring the intricate relationships and aspirations of young individuals. Follow the lives of ambitious characters striving to transcend their social class and find their identity amidst turbulent times. Each installment offers a compelling look at the personal struggles, loves, and disappointments that shape the destinies of individuals and their families. It is an engrossing literary journey capturing the essence of the search for a better life.

A Garden of Earthly Delights
Expensive People
Them
Wonderland

Recommended Reading Order

  1. 1

    A masterly work from a writer with “the uncanny ability to give us a cinemascopic vision of her America” ( National Review ),  A Garden of Earthly Delights  is the opening stanza in what would become one of the most powerful and engrossing story arcs in literature.Joyce Carol Oates’s Wonderland Quartet comprises four remarkable novels that explore social class in America and the inner lives of young Americans. In A Garden of Earthly Delights , Oates presents one of her most memorable heroines, Clara Walpole, the beautiful daughter of Kentucky-born migrant farmworkers. Desperate to rise above her haphazard existence of violence and poverty, determined not to repeat her mother’s life, Clara struggles for independence by way of her relationships with four very different men: her father, a family man turned itinerant laborer, smoldering with resentment; the mysterious Lowry, who rescues Clara as a teenager and offers her the possibility of love; Revere, a wealthy landowner who provides Clara with stability; and Swan, Clara’s son, who bears the psychological and spiritual burden of his mother’s ambition.A Garden of Earthly Delights is the first novel in the Wonderland Quartet. The books that complete this acclaimed series, Expensive People , them, and Wonderland , are also available from the Modern Library.

    A Garden of Earthly Delights
  2. 2

    Expensive People

    • 308 pages
    • 11 hours of reading
    3.7(1702)Add rating

    Expensive, affluent, yes - but morally bankrupt - this is the suburbanite society from which Joyce Carol Oates carves out an electrifying novel of Gothic suspense. EXPENSIVE PEOPLE is the journal of Richard Elwood, an eighteen-year-old looking back with disaffection at his childhood in a succession of wealthy suburbs. He buys a rifle by mail-order ('German Sniper Rifle used by Mad Fanatic SS Men - Limited Number!') and roams the neighbourhood at night with it...The suspense is electrifying, the writing lethal. The first sentence is guaranteed to rivet your eyes to the page: 'I was a child murderer,' begins Richard. Now read on.

    Expensive People
  3. 3

    Chronicles the lives of the Wendalls, a family on the steep edge of poverty in the windy, riotous Detroit slums

    Them