My Heart Laid Bare is a striking departure for Joyce Carol Oates: a sweeping saga of the fortunes and misfortunes of a family of enterprising confidence artists in 19th-century America. Mythic in scope, ballad-like in the telling, it is Oates's most daring work yet--a stunning tale of crime and transgression--with profound moral consequences.

Oates's picture of America as a land of opportunity to immigrants and settlers takes on a dark tone as we see these veritable shape-shifters exploit the unsuspecting rich by appealing to their deepest flaws. Yet recognizing the sins of greed, lust, pride, and small-mindedness in others does not prevent the patriarch and his brilliant children from being laid low by the same faults.

From the virgin provinces of New York State to the rough and tumble Western frontier, from the backrooms of Washington, D.C., to the Atlantic City of the Gilded Age, from Carnegie Hall to Harlem in the twenties, My Heart Laid Bare transports readers with its mesmerizing narrative voice.

"Dazzling...Oates at her most playful and inventive." --San Francisco Chronicle

"Provocative...Oates's accomplishment here is to construct an original way of looking at American history." --The New York Times Book Review

"A triumph...shows off Oates's macabre, lushly poetic imagination, almost feverish, yet always in perfect control." --San Diego Union Tribune

"Fresh, spirited...full of zestful criminality." --Atlanta Journal Constitution