‘Oates’s imagination is as unique, dystopian and vivid as Lewis Carroll’s’ Rose TremainZero-sum games are played for lethal stakes in these arresting stories by one of America’s 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 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.
'A master storyteller' The Times
‘Feminist horror runs through Joyce Carol Oates’s latest collection … Electric’ New York Times
‘Alluringly dark and spiky’ New Statesman
‘Zero-Sum is brilliant – bloodied, breathless, weird’ A. K. Blakemore, author of The Manningtree Witches
‘Dark, unsettling stories … There’s a disquieting violence simmering … a shrill alarm of disquiet’ Daily Mail
‘Oates is an inspired writer, and a formidable psychologist’ Independent
- ISBN13 9780008609795
- Publish Date 18 July 2023
- Publish Status Active
- Publish Country GB
- Publisher HarperCollins Publishers
- Imprint Fourth Estate Ltd
- Format Audiobook (WAV)
- Duration 9 hours and 45 minutes
- Language English
- URL http://harpercollins.co.uk