Joyce Carol Oates

This novel provides an examination of contemporary America through the prism of a family tragedy: when a powerful parent dies, each of his adult children reacts in startling and unexpected ways, and his grieving widow in the most surprising way of all. Stark and penetrating, it's an exploration of psychological trauma, class warfare, grief, and eventual healing.

"Joyce Carol Oates is renowned for her rare ability to "illuminate the mind's most disturbing corners" (Seattle Times). That genius is on full display in her new collection of seven feverishly unsettling works, DIS MEM BER and Other Stories of Mystery and Suspense. In the title story, a precocious eleven-year-old named Jill is in thrall to an older male relative, the mysterious, attractive black sheep of the family. Without telling her parents Jill...

In 20th century Princeton, New Jersey, a powerful curse, which besets the wealthiest of families, causes the disappearance of a young bride, and when her brother sets out to find her, he crosses paths with the town's most formidable people, including Grover Cleveland and Upton Sinclair.

"Andrew J. Rush has achieved the kind of critical and commercial success most authors only dream about: he has a top agent and publisher in New York, and his twenty-eight mystery novels have sold millions of copies around the world. He also has a loving wife and three grown children and is a well-known philanthropist in his small New Jersey town. But Rush is hiding a dark secret. Under the pseudonym "Jack of Spades," he pens another string of novels--...

"From one of the most important contemporary American writers, Cardiff, by the Sea is a bold, haunting collection of four previously unpublished novellas. Starting with the title novella-- in which a romantic-minded young art historian is led to (re)discover a terrifying trauma after inheriting property in faraway Cardiff, Maine-- through to "The Surviving Child"-- which finds the young new wife of a famous poet's widow haunted by the dead poet's...

A volume of six stories and novellas by the National Book Award-winning author of We Were the Mulvaneys includes the title story, in which the disappearance of a sweet blonde-haired child is linked to her mother's indiscretions, a too-obvious schoolteacher and an older student with a fascination for a Native American legend.

""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...

Part-time preacher Chester Cash calls himself Daddy Love. He has abducted, tortured, and raped several young boys into being his lover and his 'son'. Kidnapping Robbie from his mother at a mall, he confines the child in a small box and gradually brainwashes him over subsequent years into believing that they are father and son. Dinah, the boy's mother, who was savagely injured during the abduction, clings to hope that her son is alive.

Set in the mythical small city of Sparta, New York, this searing, vividly rendered exploration of the mysterious conjunction of erotic romance and tragic violence in late 20th century America returns to the emotional and geographical terrain of Oates's We Were the Mulvaneys and The Gravedigger's Daughter. When Zoe Kruller, a young wife and mother, is found brutally murdered, the Sparta police target two primary suspects: her estranged husband, Delray...

A new collection of stories by National Book Award winner Joyce Carol Oates. In the suspenseful "Strip Poker," a reckless adolescent girl must find a way of turning the tables on a gathering of increasingly threatening young men. Can she outplay them? In the award-winning "Smother!" a young woman's nightmare memory of childhood brings trouble on her professor-mother. Which of them will win? In "Split/Brain" a woman who has blundered into a lethal...