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Product Info
Publisher: Vintage
Author: Joyce Carol Oates
ISBN: 9780593469583
Fiction, Short Stories
Zero-Sum
by
Joyce Carol Oates
Zero-Sum by
Joyce Carol Oates
Reviews
"Captivating... Humanity in all its devilishness is on vibrant display in these short and potent flashes of life in bleak corners. Readers will be spellbound."
Publishers Weekly
Summary
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 collection’s 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 Oates’s standing as a literary treasure and an artist of the mysterious interior life.