The Rise of Life on Earth

Selected by The New York Times Book Review as one of the most notable books of 1991, Joyce Carol Oates's The Rise of Life on Earth is a memorable portrait of one of the "insulted and injured" of American society. Set in the underside of working-class Detroit of the '60s and '70s, thisshort, lyric novel sketches Kathleen Hennessy's violent childhood—shattered by a broken home, child-beating, and murder—and follows herinto her early adult years as a hospital health-care worker. Overworked,underpaid, and quietly overzealous, Kathleen falls in love with a youngdoctor, whose exploitation of her sets the course of the remainder ofher life, in which her passivity masks a deep fury and secret resolve totake revenge.