Joyce Carol Oates

An ingenious, dystopian novel of one young woman’s resistance against the constraints of an oppressive society, from the inventive imagination of Joyce Carol Oates “Time travel” — and its hazards—are made literal in this astonishing new novel in which a recklessly idealistic girl dares to test the perimeters of her tightly controlled (future) world and is punished by being sent back in time to a region of North America — “Wainscotia, Wisconsin”—that existed eighty years before. Cast adrift in time in this idyllic Midwestern town she is set upon a course of “rehabilitation”—but cannot resist falling in love with a fellow exile and questioning the constrains of the Wainscotia world with results that are both devastating and liberating. Arresting and visionary, Hazards of Time Travel is both a novel of harrowing discovery and an exquisitely wrought love story that may be Joyce Carol Oates’s most unexpected novel so far.

A Novel

Hazards of Time Travel

High Fidelity

At first, books had seemed very strange to me.

Objects made of paper and cardboard designed to be read. How wasteful and clumsy it seemed—an object you had to hold in your hand (for reading was dependent upon turning the pages of a book). You could carry only five or six books easily, while on any eBook, you could access thousands of books. But then I realized that if there was a power outage you could continue to “read”—as the book you held in your hand would not vanish but continue to exist. The curiosity of the book was that, as you held it, and “read” it, you felt an intimate connection with it as with a living thing, which you did not feel with an eBook; as soon as you were finished with the eBook, you stored it, or deleted it; you felt no sentiment or particular ownership. You could not see it on a shelf or a table, you could not admire its design. In effect, it had been Deleted.

Hazards of Time Travel quotes

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