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Title: Because We Are Poor, Must We Be Vicious?
Review: Joyce Carol Oates is a novelist of the first order. Her novel of postwar Detroit (really of postwar America), Them, is her best. Nothing she has written, before or since (even including her newest, the fictionalized biography of Marilyn Monroe) brings the reader the emotional power, or the superb prose of Oates' immortal classic. Readers who read Them when it was first published years ago deserve to study the new Modern Library edition. Readers unfamiliar with the best of Oates should run, not walk, to their bookstores or their personal computers and order this classic. It is as simple as that. Them is a masterpiece.
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