Joyce Carol Oates

A nameless young student, though gifted with a penetrating intelligence, finds herself driven to obsession when she falls passionately in love with a brilliant yet elusive African-American philosophy student.

"A novel about class, race, and the horrific, glassy sparkle of urban life, them chronicles the lives of the Wendalls, a family on the steep edge of poverty in the windy, riotous Detroit slums. Loretta, beautiful and dreamy and full of regret by age sixteen, and her two children, Maureen and Jules, make up Oates' vision of the American fam-ily--broken, marginal, and romantically proud. The novel's title, pointedly uncapitalized, refers to those Americans...

A collection of twelve short stories for young people including "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been," "Life After High School," and "How I Contemplated the World."