LLL: The Babysitter: a Novel

Labyrinth Live at the Library Presents Joyce Carol Oates in conversation with Professor Maria DiBattista. We are always thrilled to celebrate a new novel by Joyce Carol Oates. Join us at the Library or check back here soon for the link to register for the livestream.

From one of America’s most renowned storytellers—the best-selling author of Blonde—comes a novel about love and deceit, and lust and redemption, against a backdrop of shocking murders in the affluent suburbs of Detroit. Margaret Atwood describes this book as “unsettling, mysterious, deft, sinister, eerily plausible.”

In the waning days of the turbulent 1970s, in the wake of unsolved child-killings that have shocked Detroit, the lives of several residents are drawn together with tragic consequences. Babysitter is a starkly narrated exploration of the riskiness of pursuing alternate lives, calling into question how far we are willing to go to protect those whom we cherish most. In its scathing indictment of corrupt politics, unexamined racism, and the enabling of sexual predation in America, the book is an important work of contemporary fiction.

Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Humanities Medal, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, and the National Book Award, among many honors. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the national best sellers We Were the Mulvaneys; Blonde; and The Falls. She is Professor of the Humanities emerita at Princeton University and teaches at NYU. Maria DiBattista specializes in twentieth century literature and film, the European novel and narrative theory. Her books include Virginia Woolf: The Fables of Anon; First Love: The Affections of Modern Fiction; and Fast Talking Dames.

This event is part of Labyrinth’s and the Princeton Public Library’s joint programming and is cosponsored by Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts and Humanities Council.