National Book Award Winner Coming To Doylestown

DOYLESTOWN, PA — National Book Award winner Joyce Carol Oates is coming to Doylestown in June to discuss her gripping new novel, “Fox.”

Presented by the Doylestown Bookshop, the event takes place on Wednesday, June 25 at 7 p.m. in the Life Sciences Auditorium at Delaware Valley University. Tickets include a copy of “Fox” and may be purchased here.

Oates is a recipient of a National Humanities Medal awarded by President Barack Obama, the National Book Critics Circle’s Ivan Sandrof Life Achievement Award, the National Book Award in Fiction, the Jerusalem Prize, the Prix Femina, the Cino Del Duca World Prize, and is a five-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

Oates has written some of the most enduring fiction of the time, including the bestsellers “Blonde” and “We Were the Mulvaneys.” 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. In 2024, she won the Raymond Chandler Lifetime Achievement Award given to “a master of the thriller and noir literary genre.”

About the Book

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.

The cover of “Fox,” by Joyce Carol Oates.

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, “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.