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FOX
A Novel
A mesmerizing story of mystery and psychological suspense, FOX follows the shocking disappearance of a beloved, mercurial teacher at an elite boarding school and all the lives he touched.
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.
FOX begins in a small town in southern New Jersey at a pond in a bird sanctuary. People out walking their dogs or enjoying the nature notice something is off -- a dog discovers a strange, tongue-like carcass of what is thought to be a dead animal. A father with his 12-year-old daughter recovers a mutilated doll in the mucky water. Eventually a car is discovered partially submerged in the pond and then pieces of a human, possibly male, corpse. The car is registered to Mr. Fox, a beloved 8th grade teacher at a nearby prep school, who has gone missing; the body parts might be him.
From here, unspools a magnetic, operatic, deeply disturbing tale of sexual abuse, complicity, revenge killing, and so much more. The charismatic Mr. Fox has sexually abused some of his female students in a Humbert Humbert manner of cruel, delusional manipulation. (The novel is in part a commentary on, and response to, LOLITA.)?In intense, often hypnotic detail we meet the community around Mr. Fox and his school -- the students, their parents, the fellow teachers and administrators, a working-class family associated with the town whose own daughter has gone?missing, the detective trying to piece it all together. The novel moves back in time and to the present days and weeks following the discovery of Mr. Fox's car and corpse.
The novel asks multiple narrative questions that keep you turning the page??does the corpse belong to Mr. Fox? Did he commit the crimes we suspect he did? Who killed Mr. Fox???And, most philosophically, does he deserve his fate? Did he have it coming? Written in Joyce Carol Oates classic propulsive, sometimes hallucinatory style, the novel shows remarkable craftsmanship and artistry, as it plays with form and structure, interweaving multiple methods of storytelling and numerous points of view. Joyce Carol Oates is a wildly inventive writer and artist who is constantly testing and pressing the limits of language to create mood, tone, and suspense. You will be kept on edge until the end of FOX.
Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Humanities Medal awarded by President Barack Obama, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Life Achievement Award, the National Book Award in Fiction, the Jerusalem Prize for Lifetime Achievement, the Prix Femina, and the Cino Del Duca World Prize, and is a five-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. 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. "It's hard to think of another writer," says The New York Times, "with as fecund and protean an imagination as [Oates], who is surely on any shortlist of America's greatest living writers."
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.
FOX begins in a small town in southern New Jersey at a pond in a bird sanctuary. People out walking their dogs or enjoying the nature notice something is off -- a dog discovers a strange, tongue-like carcass of what is thought to be a dead animal. A father with his 12-year-old daughter recovers a mutilated doll in the mucky water. Eventually a car is discovered partially submerged in the pond and then pieces of a human, possibly male, corpse. The car is registered to Mr. Fox, a beloved 8th grade teacher at a nearby prep school, who has gone missing; the body parts might be him.
From here, unspools a magnetic, operatic, deeply disturbing tale of sexual abuse, complicity, revenge killing, and so much more. The charismatic Mr. Fox has sexually abused some of his female students in a Humbert Humbert manner of cruel, delusional manipulation. (The novel is in part a commentary on, and response to, LOLITA.)?In intense, often hypnotic detail we meet the community around Mr. Fox and his school -- the students, their parents, the fellow teachers and administrators, a working-class family associated with the town whose own daughter has gone?missing, the detective trying to piece it all together. The novel moves back in time and to the present days and weeks following the discovery of Mr. Fox's car and corpse.
The novel asks multiple narrative questions that keep you turning the page??does the corpse belong to Mr. Fox? Did he commit the crimes we suspect he did? Who killed Mr. Fox???And, most philosophically, does he deserve his fate? Did he have it coming? Written in Joyce Carol Oates classic propulsive, sometimes hallucinatory style, the novel shows remarkable craftsmanship and artistry, as it plays with form and structure, interweaving multiple methods of storytelling and numerous points of view. Joyce Carol Oates is a wildly inventive writer and artist who is constantly testing and pressing the limits of language to create mood, tone, and suspense. You will be kept on edge until the end of FOX.
Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Humanities Medal awarded by President Barack Obama, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Life Achievement Award, the National Book Award in Fiction, the Jerusalem Prize for Lifetime Achievement, the Prix Femina, and the Cino Del Duca World Prize, and is a five-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. 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. "It's hard to think of another writer," says The New York Times, "with as fecund and protean an imagination as [Oates], who is surely on any shortlist of America's greatest living writers."
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Book Published 2025-06-17 by Hogarth |