Zero-Sum Joyce Carol Oates 9780008609801

'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

Joyce Carol Oates is a novelist, critic, playwright, poet and author of short stories and one of America's most highly respected literary figures. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including We Were the Mulvaneys, which was an Oprah Book Club Choice, and Blonde, which was nominated for the National Book Award. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Princeton University and a recipient of the National Book Award and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction.

'Zero-Sum is brilliant - bloodied, breathless, weird' A. K. Blakemore, author of The Manningtree Witches

'A genuine, sharp chronicler of our times, with a remarkable ability to sway from keen modernity to complete Gothic' Gillian Flynn, author of Gone Girl

'A fierce chronicler of survival against the odds' Ali Smith, author of Companion Piece

'Oates's imagination is as unique, dystopian and vivid as Lewis Carroll's' Rose Tremain, author of Lily

'A writer of extraordinary strengths' Guardian

'American's pre-eminent fiction writer' New Yorker

'Electric ... A vein of feminist horror runs through Zero-Sum ... [Zero-Sum's] zero-sum games [advance] to an existential battle between humanity and the destructive forces it has unleashed' The New York Times Book Review

'Oates presses the zero-sum principle to extremes ... Reading these tales is a startling and disturbing adventure. Having finished one variation on the theme, the reader never knows what form the next will take' TLS

'An electric story collection from a lit icon ... Violence simmers and sometimes boils over' Vanity Fair

'Taut, nervy, and often fantastically unsettling' Esquire

'A prolific master of the short form' Kirkus