"Whimsy” is not a word often associated with Joyce Carol Oates, the five-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, social media provocateur, and notoriously prolific chronicler of America’s cracked, calamitous heart. So the vision that greets visitors at the entrance to her light-filled home near Princeton University, where she’s taught for more than four decades—a burbling frog pond, metallic lawn ornaments molded jauntily into oversize roses and a lone, red-combed rooster—conjures a momentary sense of disorientation. Could this dappled suburban idyll possibly contain the formidable figure renowned for more than half a century as our Dark Lady of Letters?
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