Zero-Sum by Oates, Joyce Carol

Description

Author: Oates, Joyce Carol

Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945)

Published on 18 July 2024 by HarperCollins Publishers (Fourth Estate Ltd) in the United Kingdom.

Paperback | 272 pages
128 x 198 x 19 | 190g

Oatess imagination is as unique, dystopian and vivid as Lewis Carrolls ROSE TREMAIN

‘A master storyteller’

THE TIMES

‘Electric’

NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

Zero-sum games are played for lethal stakes in these arresting stories by one of Americas most acclaimed writers.

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 woman stalked by a would-be killer may be confiding in the wrong former lover; a young woman is morbidly obsessed by her unfamiliar new role as mother. In the collections longest story, a much-praised cutting-edge writer cruelly experiments with drafts of his own suicide.

In these powerfully wrought stories that hold a mirror up to our time, Joyce Carol Oates has created a world of erotic obsession, thwarted idealism, and ever-shifting identities. Provocative and stunning, Zero-Sum reinforces Oatess standing as a literary treasure and an artist of the mysterious interior life.

Alluringly dark and spiky

NEW STATESMAN

Zero-Sum is brilliant bloodied, breathless, weird A. K. BLAKEMORE

Dark, unsettling stories Theres a disquieting violence simmering a shrill alarm of disquiet

DAILY MAIL

Oates is an inspired writer, and a formidable psychologist

INDEPENDENT