Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart (Magill’s Literary Annual 1991-2005)

At a glance:

Joyce Carol Oates takes the title of her twentieth—and perhaps most assured and impressive—novel from Stephen Crane’s poetry sequence, “The Black Riders and Other Lines,” wherein the narrator comes upon a creature in the desert who is consuming his own heart and likes it not because it is “good,” but precisely for its bitterness, and because it is his alone. There are many justifiably embittered hearts among Oates’s characters, and if the morally most aware among them hang on tenaciously to their bitterness, it is not from some senseless clinging to their own misery, but...

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