Joyce Carol Oates

The National Book Award winning author of Blonde demonstrates her mastery of contemporary gothic horror in these 10 chilling short stories.

The need for love—obsessive, self-destructive, unpredictable—can take us to forbidden places, as Joyce Carol Oates demonstrates with fearsome clarity in this short story collection. In "Strip Poker," a reckless adolescent girl must find a way of turning the tables on a gathering

...

""The Woman in the Window"...opens with a woman, naked except for her high-heeled shoes, seated in front of the window in an apartment she cannot, on her own, afford. In this exquisitely tense narrative reimagining of Edward Hopper's Eleven A.M., 1926, the reader enters the minds of both the woman and her married lover, each consumed by alternating thoughts of disgust and arousal, as he rushes, amorously, murderously, to her door. In "The Long-Legged...

Presents a collection of stories that explores the musings of a writer, a prisoner, a student, and others who consider how their lives might have unfolded differently had they made different choices.

Written when Joyce Carol Oates was in her early twenties, and first published in 1964, With Shuddering Fall is her debut novel. It tells the story story of two lovers who discover themselves mortal enemies and explores the struggle for dominance in erotic relationships, as well as the perils of patriarchal inheritance and the ripple-effects of emotional loss in adolescence.

A brilliant young philosophy student bent on seducing her famous philosopher-mentor finds herself outmaneuvered; diabolically clever high school girls wreak a particularly apt sort of vengeance on sexual predators in their community; a man returns from the dead to haunt his grieving wife; a young mother finds herself captivated by her own motherhood. In the collection's longest story, a much-praised writer cruelly experiments with "drafts" of his...

Middle Age portrays a uniquely contemporary phenomenon: the propensity of the affluent middle-aged in America to reinvent themselves romantically when the energies of youth have faded or they have become disillusioned. The setting is Salthill-on-Hudson, NY, a wealthy community where "everyone is middle-aged"--but looks much younger. In this intensely social environment, Adam Berendt, a charismatic and mysterious sculptor, dies unexpectedly, plunging...

Bobbie Gotteson is found in a foot-locker in the Canal Street bus terminal and, turning early to acts of manic desperation, grows into a life of vengeful, fantasy-imbued murders.

After Zoe Kruller is murdered, the Sparta, New York, police target her estranged husband Delray Kruller and her lover Eddy Diehl, leading the Krullers' son Aaron and Eddy Diehl's daughter Krista to become obsessed with one another, each believing the other's father is guilty.