"Grimly compelling. . . . a portrait of Hollywood as terrifyingly hallucinatory as Nathaniel West's The Day of the Locust." -- Wall Street Journal

"In Blonde, Oates has found a character and a narrative mode that exploit all her strengths as a writer . . . a narrative intensity often found in her stories but never sustained so successfully in a long novel and an exuberant mastery of language that suggests a writer at the peak of her power." -- Atlanta Journal-Constitution

"A fascinating imagining of the hellish battles that Monroe fought with herself." -- Playboy

"Joyce Carol Oates' scary and rhapsodic novel about the life of Marilyn Monroe is saturated with the mysteries of eye and camera. . . . It's eccentric, exhausting--and remarkable." -- Salon.com

"An overwhelmingly vivid and powerful rendering of a human being who outlived her life." -- The Nation

"Oates may have created the most important novel of her career." -- Newsday

"Ms. Oates has hit another one of her targets. This vengeful history is about the majesty of imagination. Marilyn's self-imaginings were cruelly curtaied. Come now the artist to accord Marilyn her rightful status, as artist. The artist uses flesh and fact, the artist transcends them." -- New York Observer

"Blonde is a true mythic blowout, in which Marilyn is everything and nothing--a Great White Whale of significance, standing not for the blind power of nature but for the blind power of artifice." -- GQ

"Joyce Carol Oates takes the boldest path to comprehending 'the riddle, the curse of Monroe' by proceeding directly and frankly to fiction. Her novel Blonde is fat, messy and fierce. It's part Gothic, part kaleidoscopic novel of ideas, part lurid celebrity potboiler, and is seldom less than engrossing." -- New Y