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Them

Joyce Carol Oates

A novel about class, race, and the horrific, glassy sparkle of urban life, them chronicles the lives of the Wendalls, a family on the steep edge of poverty in the windy, riotous Detroit slums. Loretta, beautiful and dreamy and full of regret by age sixteen, and her two children, Maureen and Jules, make up Oates' vision of the American fam-ily--broken, marginal, and romantically proud. The novel's title, pointedly uncapitalized, refers to those Americans who inhabit the outskirts of society--men and women, mothers and children--whose lives many authors in the 1960s had left unexamined.

GenresPoor womenFictionWorking class familiesYoung womenDetroit (Mich.)Coming-of-age fiction

478 pages

English edition · First published 1993 by Fawcett crest · ISBN 9780449206928

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