Joyce Carol Oates

Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart is a 1990 novel by American novelist Joyce Carol Oates. The title is taken from "In the Desert," a poem by Stephen Crane. Oates's novel was nominated for best work of fiction in the 1990 National Book Awards.

Bellefleur is a magic realist novel by Joyce Carol Oates about the generations of an upstate New York family. It is the first book in Oates' "Gothic Saga" and at the time of publication represented a major departure from the modern-day themes about which Oates had written up to that point.