The Frenzy
Stories
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- $199.00
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- $199.00
Descripción editorial
A gripping collection of propulsive, psychologically suspenseful stories by the legendary Joyce Carol Oates “who is surely on any shortlist of America’s greatest living writers” (The New York Times Magazine)
“A genius in the truest sense of the word.”—Rebecca Makkai
“One of the greatest writers among us today.”—Gillian Flynn
“Haunting . . . masterfully orchestrated . . . Oates’s best work is simmering and remorseless.”—Vogue
“Astounding . . . Oates imbues this entire book with psychological suspense and high stakes.”—Harper's Bazaar
“Already one of our most accomplished and, yes, prolific living writers, Oates is on a thrilling winning streak with her third stellar work of literary fiction in two years. Call it the JCOaissance. Or maybe don’t. But definitely pick up this collection.”—Publishers Weekly (Pick of the Week)
A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF THE YEAR: Vogue, Haper’s Bazaar, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, Lit Hub, AARP
Frenzy (noun): a temporary madness; a violent mental or emotional agitation; intense usually wild and often disorderly compulsive or agitated activity
Joyce Carol Oates is a master of the short story and one of the legends of the form. Her collections of short fiction have twice been finalists for the Pulitzer Prize and have won numerous awards, including the O. Henry Award and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Art of the Short Story. In The Frenzy: Stories, Oates plunges us into the lives of her characters at moments of crisis and confusion, when much of what they understand about themselves and those they love comes undone.
A young woman on a supposedly romantic weekend trip to Cape May, New Jersey, turns the tables on her older, married lover. A freak bicycle accident on a bridge haunts one family for decades. A girl jealous of her popular cousin discovers she is the lucky one. A widow waits at her riverside house for her dead husband's return. A young man hiking in the woods comes upon a couple in a heated, possibly violent argument—should he intervene?
Suspenseful and psychologically astute, Oates's short stories enthrall and captivate as they dissect her character's deepest fears—revealing our own in turn. "Literature is a texture of words," says Oates of her short fiction, "evoking life in the most vivid ways—psychologically, physically." These new stories blazingly evoke life at its most vivid and perilous, when fate and free will intersect, and one ominous encounter or bad choice can be the difference between an ordinary day and the point of no return.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This terrific collection from Oates (Fox) includes nine sly and sinister stories of human behavior at its most unsavory. The delightfully subversive title story starts in familiar Oates territory, with a Humbert Humbert–esque middle-aged man driving along the Jersey Shore with a 19-year-old friend of the family, whom he perversely considers his "teenaged mistress," before the plot veers in an unexpected direction. Several entries return to Upstate New York, another familiar realm of Oates's fiction, including the remorseless "The Fear," in which shy, "not so pretty" Janette grows up jealous of her beautiful cousin Juliet and holds on to the feeling as an adult even after Juliet develops cancer. Oates also frequently touches on the fraught state of widowhood, as in the eerie "The Return," where Maude, guilty over losing contact with her widowed friend Audra, pays her a visit. At Audra's house, Maude is greeted by a gun propped casually by the door, and Audra delivers an unhinged monologue about her disturbing reunion that morning with her husband, who "doesn't seem to know, yet," that he is dead. Full of parenthetical asides that call much of what the reader knows into question, the stories range from sharply compressed to vertiginously recursive. Oates has few competitors as a purveyor of deeply disturbing fiction about the porous border between life and death.
