Joyce Carol Oates'slatest novel is a big, breathless, complex, and sometimes painfully intense tale relating one man's every thought and move during the 1992 Memorial Day weekend and his downward spiral to moral ruin.Jerome "Corky" Corcorn. A money-juggling wheeler-dealer, rising politico, popular man's man, and successful womanizer. It is a Memorial Day weekend, and we are about to live with him, breathe with him, and sweat with him in a nonstop marathon of mounting desperation as he tries to keep his financial empire from unravelling, his love life from shredding, and his rebellious daughter from destroying both herself and him. Seldom in fiction has a man been brought so vividly to life in all his strength and weakness, hunger and ambition, carnality and corruption. Rarely has the complex web of American society been revealed so rivetingly. And never has one of today's supreme writers, Joyce Carol Oates, written a bolder and better novel than this mesmerizing masterpiece."A pulsating portrait of the American fin-de-siecle, as immediate and unsettling as your morning newspaper, but more compulsively readable. Oates's darkly comic work — set against a background of industrial decline, urban decay, racial strife, and political corruption — is permeated by death, from its opening page...brilliant both stylistically and in its depiction of a man running desperately for his life."-Kirkus ReviewsJoyce Carol Oatesis a recipient of the National Book Award, the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction and the 2005 Prix Femina for The Falls. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University, and she has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978. Pseudonyms:  Rosamond Smith and Lauren Kelly.