Raven's Wing

Raven's Wing is a collection of short fiction 18 works by Joyce Carol Oates published by E. P. Dutton in 1986.

The title story "Raven’s Wing" was included in The Best American Short Stories (1986) "The Seasons" was reprinted in Prize Stories 1985: The O. Henry Awards.

Stories
Those stories first appearing in literary journals are indicated.


 * "Raven’s Wing" (Esquire, August 1984)
 * "The Seasons" (Ploughshares, 1983)
 * "Nairobi" (Paris Review, Spring 1983)
 * "Golden Gloves" (Washington Post Magazine, August 4, 1985)
 * "Harrow Street in Linden" (Massachusetts Review, Winter 1983)
 * "Happy" (Vanity Fair, December 1984)
 * "Ancient Airs, Voices" (Antioch Review, 1986)
 * "Double Solitaire" (Michigan Quarterly Review, 1986)
 * "Manslaughter" (The Malahat Review, June 1984)
 * "Little Wife" (Kenyon Review, Spring 1986)
 * "The Jesuit"
 * "The Mother"
 * "Testimony" (Southern Review, Summer 1986)
 * "Nuclear Holocaust"
 * "Surf City"
 * "Little Blood-Button"
 * "Baby"
 * "April"

Reception
Critic Greg Johnson considers the stories in Raven's Wing—in which Oates returns to settings and themes similar to the fictional "Eden County" she created in her volume By the North Gate (1963)—to exemplify "her most impressive recent work."

Literary critic Jack Matthews in The New York Times praises "the rich inventiveness conveyed in a plain style" in which the characters in the work take precedent over the author. Rejecting "fashionable ironies" Oates presents the tales of the working-class of semi-rural New York state in which "pent-up wrath of those who are inarticulate and self-deluded. And yet, in spite of their human defects, they are created with an urgency that signifies that they matter; and because of this urgency, they matter to the reader as well."