Zero-Sum
Stories
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
Zero-sum games are played for lethal stakes in these arresting stories by one of America’s most acclaimed writers, the award-winning, best-selling author of Blonde
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Oates (Blonde) exploits the relentless and unforgiving natures of her characters in this captivating collection. The "sulky-shy" philosophy student at the center of the title story obsesses over her married professor, whose unexpected betrayal drives the plot into bonkers territory. In the brilliant and harrowing "Mr. Stickum," a gang of high school girls lures a series of would-be child abusers via anonymous ads, then capture and torture them. In "Take Me, I Am Free," the briefest but no less haunting entry, a first-time mother rejects her role by continually placing her four-year-old daughter outside with the garbage for curb pickup, even when it's raining. The longest story, "The Suicide," enumerates a writer's various plans for his death, each laid out with meticulous details. Oates closes out with a series of apocalyptic and speculative works, most notably "Marthe: A Referendum," about the last surviving member of an artificially produced primate species who's kept in an induced coma in 2169, waiting on the outcome of a vote on whether to keep her alive. Humanity in all its devilishness is on vibrant display in these short and potent flashes of life in bleak corners. Readers will be spellbound.
