Zero-sum

£9.99

‘Oates’s imagination is as unique, dystopian and vivid as Lewis Carroll’s’ ROSE TREMAIN

‘A master storyteller’ THE TIMES

‘Electric’ NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

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‘Oates’s imagination is as unique, dystopian and vivid as Lewis Carroll’s’ 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 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.

‘Alluringly dark and spiky’ NEW STATESMAN

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

‘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

Additional information

Weight 180 g
Dimensions 198 × 129 × 20 mm
Author

Publisher

Imprint

Cover

Paperback

Pages

251

Language

English

Edition

|Short stories

Dewey

813.54 (edition:23)

Readership

General – Trade / Code: K