"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the most important contemporary American writers, Cardiff, by the Sea is a bold, haunting collection of four previously unpublished novellas.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...

Unafraid to venture into no-man's land both real and surreal, Oates takes readers deep into dangerous territory, from a maximum-security prison - vivdly delineating the heartbreaking and unexpected atmosphere of such an institution - to the inner landscapes of two beautiful and mysteriously doomed young women in 1940s Los Angeles: Elizabeth Short, otherwise known as the Black Dahlia, victim of a long-unsloved and particularly brutal murder, and her...

Six terrifying tales to chill the blood from the unique imagination of Joyce Carol Oates. A young boy plays with dolls instead of action figures. But as he grows older, his passion takes on a darker edge ... A white man shoots dead a black boy creating a media frenzy. But could it be that it was self-defense as he claims? A nervous woman tries to escape her husband. He says he loves her, but she's convinced he wants to kill her ... These quietly lethal...

Explores the high price of success in the life of one woman--the first female president of an Ivy League university--and her hold upon her self-identity in the face of darkly shrouded secrets from her past.

"In this stirring, reflective collection of short stories, Joyce Carol Oates ponders alternate destinies: the other lives we might have led if we'd made different choices. An accomplished writer returns to her childhood home of Yewville, but the homecoming stirs troubled thoughts about the person she might have been if she'd never left. A man in prison contemplates the gravity of his irreversible act. A student's affair with a professor results in...

Blaming herself for the car accident on the Tappan Zee Bridge that killed her mother, fifteen-year-old Jenna undergoes a difficult physical and emotional recovery.

A Philistine discovers a social conscience. He is Jerome Corcoran, a real estate millionaire and city councilman who lives for money, food and sex. On his way to work he comes across a suicide, a black woman who was a critic of city hall. Corcoran smells foul play and for once decides to do something about it. By the author of Foxfire.

A collection of thirteen spellbinding stories that maps the eerie darkness within us all.

Written with the raw honesty and poignant insight that were the hallmarks of her acclaimed bestseller A Widows Story, an affecting and observant memoir of growing up from one of our finest and most beloved literary masters.The Lost Landscape is Joyce Carol Oates vivid chronicle of her hardscrabble childhood in rural western New York State. From memories of her relatives, to those of a charming bond with a special red hen on her family farm; from her...

"In those days in the early Sixties we were not women yet but girls.This was, without irony, perceived as our advantage." So begins I'll Take You There, an astonishingly intimate and unsparing self-portrait of a nameless young student who, though, gifted with a penetrating intelligence, is drastically inclined to obsession. Funny, mordant, and compulsive, "Anellia" (as she sometimes calls herself) falls passionately in love with a brilliant yet elusive...