Joyce Carol Oates Books In Order

Wonderland Quartet/Garden Of Earthly Delights Books In Publication Order

  1. A Garden of Earthly Delights (1967)
  2. Expensive People (1968)
  3. Them (1969)
  4. Wonderland (1971)

The Gothic Saga Books In Publication Order

  1. Bellefleur (1980)
  2. A Bloodsmoor Romance (1982)
  3. Mysteries of Winterthurn (1984)
  4. My Heart Laid Bare (1998)
  5. The Accursed (2013)

L.A. Noire: The Collected Stories Books In Publication Order

  1. Black DahliaWhite Rose (2011)

Standalone Novels In Publication Order

  1. With Shuddering Fall (1964)
  2. Do With Me What You Will (1973)
  3. The Assassins: A Book of Hours (1975)
  4. Childwold (1976)
  5. Cybele (1978)
  6. Son of the Morning (1978)
  7. Unholy Loves (1979)
  8. Angel of Light (1981)
  9. Luxury of Sin (1984)
  10. Solstice (1985)
  11. Marya: A Life (1986)
  12. Lives of the Twins / Kindred Passions (As: Rosamond Smith) (1987)
  13. You Must Remember This (1987)
  14. American Appetites (1989)
  15. Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart (1990)
  16. Soul/Mate (As: Rosamond Smith) (1990)
  17. Nemesis (As:Rosamond Smith) (1990)
  18. Snake Eyes (As:Rosamond Smith) (1992)
  19. Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang (1993)
  20. What I Lived For (1994)
  21. Zombie (1995)
  22. You Can’t Catch Me (As:Rosamond Smith) (1995)
  23. We Were the Mulvaneys (1996)
  24. Man Crazy (1997)
  25. Double Delight (As:Rosamond Smith) (1997)
  26. Broke Heart Blues (1999)
  27. Starr Bright Will Be With You Soon (As:Rosamond Smith) (1999)
  28. Blonde (2000)
  29. The Barrens (As:Rosamond Smith) (2001)
  30. Middle-Age: A Romance (2001)
  31. I’ll Take You There (2002)
  32. Big Mouth and Ugly Girl (2002)
  33. Freaky Green Eyes (2003)
  34. The Tattooed Girl (2003)
  35. The Falls (2004)
  36. Take Me, Take Me With You (As: Lauren Kelly) (2004)
  37. Sexy (2005)
  38. The Stolen Heart (As: Lauren Kelly) (2005)
  39. Missing Mom / Mother, Missing (2005)
  40. Black Girl/White Girl (2006)
  41. After the Wreck, I Picked Myself Up, Spread My Wings, and Flew Away (2006)
  42. Blood Mask (As: Lauren Kelly) (2006)
  43. The Gravedigger’s Daughter (2007)
  44. Little Bird of Heaven (2007)
  45. My Sister, My Love (2008)
  46. A Fair Maiden (2010)
  47. Mudwoman (2012)
  48. Two or Three Things I Forgot to Tell You (2012)
  49. Daddy Love (2013)
  50. Carthage (2014)
  51. The Sacrifice (2015)
  52. Jack of Spades (2015)
  53. The Man Without a Shadow (2016)
  54. A Book of American Martyrs (2017)
  55. Hazards of Time Travel (2018)
  56. My Life as a Rat (2019)
  57. The Pursuit (2019)
  58. Night Sleep Death The Stars (2020)
  59. Breathe (2021)

Short Stories/Novellas In Publication Order

  1. The Triumph of the Spider Monkey (1976)
  2. I Lock My Door Upon Myself (1990)
  3. The Rise of Life on Earth (1991)
  4. Black Water (1992)
  5. First Love (1996)
  6. Beasts (2001)
  7. Rape (2003)
  8. Spotted Hyenas (2010)
  9. Patricide (2012)
  10. The Rescuer (2012)
  11. Mystery, Inc. (2015)
  12. The Sign of the Beast (2017)

Short Story Collections In Publication Order

  1. By the North Gate (1963)
  2. The Goddess and Other Women (1966)
  3. Upon the Sweeping Flood, and Other Stories (1966)
  4. Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? (1966)
  5. Anonymous Sins and Other Poems (1969)
  6. The Wheel of Love and Other Stories (1970)
  7. Cupid & Psyche (1970)
  8. Angel Fire: Poems (1973)
  9. The Hungry Ghosts (1974)
  10. Love and Its Derangements and Other Poems (1974)
  11. The Fabulous Beasts (1975)
  12. The Seduction and Other Stories (1975)
  13. The Poisoned Kiss and Other Stories from the Portuguese (1975)
  14. Crossing the Border (1976)
  15. Night-Side (1977)
  16. Women Whose Lives Are Food, Men Whose Lives Are Money (1978)
  17. Marriages and Infidelities (1978)
  18. All the Good People I’ve Left Behind (1979)
  19. A Sentimental Education (1980)
  20. Three Plays (1980)
  21. The Perfectionist and Other Plays (1981)
  22. Invisible Woman (1982)
  23. Wild Saturday, and Other Stories (1984)
  24. Last Days (1984)
  25. Raven’s Wing (1986)
  26. The Assignation (1988)
  27. Time Traveler (1989)
  28. Heat and Other Stories (1991)
  29. Oates in Exile (1991)
  30. Twelve Plays (1991)
  31. Where is Here? (1992)
  32. Haunted (1994)
  33. Tenderness (1996)
  34. Demon and Other Tales (1996)
  35. Will You Always Love Me? and Other Stories (1996)
  36. Invisible Writer (1998)
  37. The Collector of Hearts (1998)
  38. New Plays (1998)
  39. Where I’ve Been, and Where I’m Going (1999)
  40. Faithless (2001)
  41. Small Avalanches and Other Stories (2003)
  42. I Am No One You Know (2004)
  43. The Female of the Species (2005)
  44. High Lonesome (2006)
  45. The Museum of Dr. Moses (2007)
  46. Wild Nights!: Stories About the Last Days of Poe, Dickinson, Twain, James, and Hemingway (2008)
  47. Dear Husband (2009)
  48. Give Me Your Heart (2010)
  49. Sourland (2010)
  50. The Corn Maiden and Other Nightmares (2011)
  51. Evil Eye (2013)
  52. High Crime Area (2014)
  53. Lovely, Dark, Deep (2014)
  54. The Doll-Master and Other Tales of Terror (2016)
  55. Beautiful Days (2018)
  56. Night-Gaunts and Other Tales of Suspense (2018)
  57. Dis Mem Ber and Other Stories of Mystery and Suspense (2018)
  58. Cardiff, by the Sea (2020)
  59. The (Other) You: Stories (2021)
  60. American Melancholy: Poems (2021)
  61. Night, Neon (2021)

Standalone Plays In Publication Order

  1. Miracle Play (1974)
  2. I Stand Before You Naked (1991)

Picture Books In Publication Order

  1. Come Meet Muffin! (1998)
  2. Where is Little Reynard? (With: Mark Graham) (2003)
  3. Naughty Chérie! (With: Mark Graham) (2008)
  4. The New Kitten (2019)

Non-Fiction Books In Publication Order

  1. The Edge Of Impossibility (1972)
  2. Hostile Sun (1973)
  3. New Heaven New Earth (1974)
  4. Contraries (1981)
  5. First Person Singular (1984)
  6. The Profane Art (1985)
  7. On Boxing (1987)
  8. Woman Writer (1988)
  9. The Life of the Writer, the Life of the Career (1995)
  10. Muhammad Ali: Ringside (With: Norman Mailer) (1999)
  11. George Bellows (2000)
  12. The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates (2002)
  13. The Faith of a Writer (2003)
  14. Uncensored (2005)
  15. A Widow’s Story (2007)
  16. In Rough Country (2010)
  17. Gerald Slota: Story (2012)
  18. The Lost Landscape (2015)
  19. Soul at the White Heat (2016)

Akashic Drug Chronicles Books In Publication Order

  1. The Cocaine Chronicles (By:Lee Child,Laura Lippman,Ken Bruen,Jervey Tervalon) (2005)
  2. The Mari*juana Chronicles (By:Jonathan Santlofer) (2013)
  3. The Nicotine Chronicles (With: Lee Child,Hannah Tinti,,Cara Black,,,Jonathan Ames) (2020)

Best American Short Stories Books In Publication Order

  1. The Best Short Stories of 1915 (1916)
  2. The Best Short Stories of 1916 (1916)
  3. The Best Short Stories of 1917 (1917)
  4. The Best Short Stories of 1918 (1918)
  5. The Best Short Stories of 1919 (1919)
  6. The Best Short Stories of 1921 (1921)
  7. The Best Short Stories of 1922 (1922)
  8. The Best Short Stories of 1923 (1923)
  9. The Best Short Stories 1924 (1924)
  10. The Best Short Stories of 1925 (1925)
  11. The Best Short Stories 1926 (1926)
  12. The Best Short Stories 1927 (1927)
  13. The Best Short Stories of 1928 (1928)
  14. The Best Short Stories of 1929 (1929)
  15. The Best Short Stories 1930 (1930)
  16. The Best Short Stories 1931 (1931)
  17. The Best Short Stories of 1932 (1932)
  18. The Best Short Stories 1933 (1933)
  19. The Best Short Stories 1934 (1934)
  20. The Best Short Stories 1935 (1935)
  21. The Best Short Stories 1936 (1936)
  22. The Best Short Stories 1937 (1937)
  23. The Best Short Stories of 1938 (1938)
  24. 50 Best American Short Stories, 1915-1939 (1939)
  25. The Best Short Stories 1939 (1939)
  26. The Best Short Stories of 1940 (1940)
  27. The Best Short Stories 1941 (1941)
  28. The Best American Short Stories 1942 (1942)
  29. The Best American Short Stories 1943 (1943)
  30. The Best American Short Stories 1944 (1944)
  31. The Best American Short Stories 1945 (1945)
  32. The Best American Short Stories 1946 (1946)
  33. The Best American Short Stories 1947 (1947)
  34. The Best American Short Stories 1948 (1948)
  35. The Best American Short Stories 1949 (1949)
  36. The Best American Short Stories 1950 (1950)
  37. The Best American Short Stories 1951 (1951)
  38. The Best American Short Stories 1952 (1952)
  39. The Best American Short Stories 1953 (1953)
  40. The Best American Short Stories 1955 (1955)
  41. The Best American Short Stories 1956 (1956)
  42. The Best American Short Stories 1957 (1957)
  43. The Best American Short Stories 1958 (1958)
  44. The Best American Short Stories 1959 (1959)
  45. The Best American Short Stories 1960 (1960)
  46. The Best American Short Stories 1961 (1961)
  47. The Best American Short Stories 1962 (1962)
  48. The Best American Short Stories 1963 (1963)
  49. The Best American Short Stories 1964 (1964)
  50. The Best American Short Stories 1965 (1965)
  51. The Best American Short Stories 1966 (1966)
  52. The Best American Short Stories 1967 (1967)
  53. The Best American Short Stories 1968 (1967)
  54. The Best American Short Stories of 1969 (1969)
  55. The Best American Short Stories 1970 (1970)
  56. The Best American Short Stories 1971 (1971)
  57. The Best American Short Stories 1972 (1972)
  58. The Best American Short Stories 1973 (1973)
  59. The Best American Short Stories 1974 (1974)
  60. The Best of Best American Short Stories 1915-1950 (1975)
  61. The Best American Short Stories 1975 (1975)
  62. The Best American Short Stories 1976 (1976)
  63. The Best American Short Stories 1977 (1977)
  64. The Best American Short Stories 1978 (1978)
  65. The Best American Short Stories 1979 (1979)
  66. The Best American Short Stories 1980 (1980)
  67. The Best American Short Stories 1981 (1981)
  68. The Best American Short Stories 1982 (1982)
  69. The Best American Short Stories 1983 (1983)
  70. The Best American Short Stories 1984 (1984)
  71. The Best American Short Stories 1985 (1985)
  72. The Best American Short Stories 1986 (1986)
  73. The Best American Short Stories 1987 (1987)
  74. The Best American Short Stories 1988 (1988)
  75. The Best American Short Stories 1989 (1989)
  76. The Best American Short Stories of the Eighties (1990)
  77. The Best American Short Stories 1990 (1990)
  78. The Best American Short Stories 1991 (1991)
  79. The Best American Short Stories 1992 (1992)
  80. The Best American Short Stories 1993 (1993)
  81. The Best American Short Stories 1994 (1994)
  82. The Best American Short Stories 1995 (1995)
  83. The Best American Short Stories 1996 (1996)
  84. The Best American Short Stories 1997 (1997)
  85. The Best American Short Stories 1998 (1998)
  86. The Best American Short Stories 1999 (1999)
  87. The Best American Short Stories 2000 (2000)
  88. The Best American Short Stories of the Century (2000)
  89. The Best American Short Stories 2001 (2001)
  90. The Best American Short Stories 2002 (2002)
  91. The Best American Short Stories 2003 (2003)
  92. The Best American Short Stories 2004 (2004)
  93. The Best American Short Stories 2005 (2005)
  94. The Best American Short Stories 2006 (2006)
  95. The Best American Short Stories 2007 (2007)
  96. The Best Short Stories of 1921, and the Yearbook of the American Short Story (2007)
  97. The Best American Short Stories1921 (2007)
  98. The Best American Short Stories 2008 (2008)
  99. The Best American Short Stories 2009 (2009)
  100. The Best American Short Stories 2010 (2010)
  101. The Best American Short Stories 2011 (2011)
  102. The Best American Short Stories 2012 (2012)
  103. The Best American Short Stories 2013 (2013)
  104. The Best American Short Stories 2014 (2014)
  105. The Best American Short Stories 2015 (2015)
  106. 100 Years of The Best American Short Stories (2015)
  107. The Best American Short Stories 2016 (2016)
  108. The Best American Short Stories 2017 (2017)
  109. The Best American Short Stories 2018 (2018)
  110. The Best American Short Stories 2019 (2019)
  111. The Best American Short Stories 2020 (2020)

Bibliomysteries Books In Publication Order

  1. The Book of Virtue (By:Ken Bruen) (2012)
  2. Pronghorns of the Third Reich (By:C.J. Box) (2012)
  3. The Book Thing (By:Laura Lippman) (2012)
  4. The Book Case (By:Nelson DeMille) (2012)
  5. An Acceptable Sacrifice (By:Jeffery Deaver) (2012)
  6. Death Leaves a Bookmark (By:William Link) (2012)
  7. The Final Testament (By:Peter Blauner) (2013)
  8. Rides a Stranger (By:David Bell) (2013)
  9. The Long Sonata of the Dead (By:Andrew Taylor) (2013)
  10. The Book of Ghosts (By:Reed Farrel Coleman) (2013)
  11. The Compendium of Srem (By:F. Paul Wilson) (2014)
  12. What’s in a Name? (By:Thomas H. Cook) (2014)
  13. Remaindered (By:Peter Lovesey) (2014)
  14. The Sequel (By:R.L. Stine) (2014)
  15. The Gospel of Sheba (By:Lyndsay Faye) (2014)
  16. The Nature of My Inheritance (By:Bradford Morrow) (2014)
  17. It’s in the Book (By:Mickey Spillane) (2014)
  18. The Scroll (By:Anne Perry) (2014)
  19. The Book of the Lion (By:Thomas Perry) (2015)
  20. The Little Men (By:Megan Abbott) (2015)
  21. Condor in the Stacks (By:James Grady) (2015)
  22. Mystery, Inc. (2015)
  23. Every Seven Years (By:Denise Mina) (2015)
  24. From the Queen (By:Carolyn Hart) (2015)
  25. The Travelling Companion (By:Ian Rankin) (2016)
  26. Citadel (By:Stephen Hunter) (2016)
  27. Reconciliation Day (By:Christopher Fowler) (2016)
  28. Dead Dames Don’t Sing (By:John Harvey) (2016)
  29. The Haze (By:James W. Hall) (2016)
  30. Hoodoo Harry (By:Joe R. Lansdale) (2017)
  31. The Pretty Little Box (By:Charles Todd) (2018)
  32. Seven Years (By:Peter Robinson) (2018)
  33. The Hemingway Valise (By:Robert Olen Butler) (2018)
  34. The Last Honest Horse Thief (By:Michael Koryta) (2018)
  35. The Caxton Private Lending Library & Book Depository (By:John Connolly) (2018)

Bibliomysteries Books In Chronological Order

  1. The Book of Virtue (By:Ken Bruen) (2012)
  2. The Scroll (By:Anne Perry) (2014)
  3. Pronghorns of the Third Reich (By:C.J. Box) (2012)
  4. An Acceptable Sacrifice (By:Jeffery Deaver) (2012)
  5. Death Leaves a Bookmark (By:William Link) (2012)
  6. Seven Years (By:Peter Robinson) (2018)
  7. The Book Thing (By:Laura Lippman) (2012)
  8. The Book of Ghosts (By:Reed Farrel Coleman) (2013)
  9. The Long Sonata of the Dead (By:Andrew Taylor) (2013)
  10. The Final Testament (By:Peter Blauner) (2013)
  11. Rides a Stranger (By:David Bell) (2013)
  12. What’s in a Name? (By:Thomas H. Cook) (2014)
  13. It’s in the Book (By:Mickey Spillane) (2014)
  14. The Nature of My Inheritance (By:Bradford Morrow) (2014)
  15. Remaindered (By:Peter Lovesey) (2014)
  16. The Compendium of Srem (By:F. Paul Wilson) (2014)
  17. The Gospel of Sheba (By:Lyndsay Faye) (2014)
  18. The Sequel (By:R.L. Stine) (2014)
  19. The Book of the Lion (By:Thomas Perry) (2015)
  20. The Little Men (By:Megan Abbott) (2015)
  21. From the Queen (By:Carolyn Hart) (2015)
  22. Every Seven Years (By:Denise Mina) (2015)
  23. Citadel (By:Stephen Hunter) (2016)
  24. Condor in the Stacks (By:James Grady) (2015)
  25. Mystery, Inc. (2015)
  26. The Travelling Companion (By:Ian Rankin) (2016)
  27. The Haze (By:James W. Hall) (2016)
  28. Dead Dames Don’t Sing (By:John Harvey) (2016)
  29. Reconciliation Day (By:Christopher Fowler) (2016)
  30. Hoodoo Harry (By:Joe R. Lansdale) (2017)
  31. The Pretty Little Box (By:Charles Todd) (2018)
  32. The Caxton Private Lending Library & Book Depository (By:John Connolly) (2018)
  33. The Hemingway Valise (By:Robert Olen Butler) (2018)
  34. The Last Honest Horse Thief (By:Michael Koryta) (2018)
  35. The Book Case (By:Nelson DeMille) (2012)

Dark Corners Books In Publication Order

  1. Hannah-Beast (By:Jennifer McMahon) (2018)
  2. The Sleep Tight Motel (By:Lisa Unger) (2018)
  3. There’s a Giant Trapdoor Spider Under Your Bed (By:Edgar Cantero) (2018)
  4. Miao Dao (2018)
  5. The Tangled Woods (By:Emily Raboteau) (2018)
  6. The Remedy (By:Adam Haslett) (2018)
  7. Oak Avenue (By:Brandi Reeds) (2018)

Snow White, Blood Red Anthology Books In Publication Order

  1. Snow White, Blood Red (1993)
  2. Black Thorn, White Rose (1994)
  3. Ruby Slippers, Golden Tears (1995)
  4. Black Swan, White Raven (1997)
  5. Silver Birch, Blood Moon (1999)
  6. Black Heart, Ivory Bones (2000)

World’s Finest Mystery and Crime Stories Books In Publication Order

  1. The World’s Finest Mystery and Crime Stories 1 (2000)
  2. The World’s Finest Mystery and Crime Stories 2 (2000)
  3. The World’s Finest Mystery and Crime Stories 3 (2002)
  4. The World’s Finest Mystery and Crime Stories 4 (2003)
  5. The World’s Finest Mystery and Crime Stories 5 (2004)

Anthologies In Publication Order

  1. Scenes From American Life: Contemporary Short Fiction (1973)
  2. Night Walks (1982)
  3. The Web She Weaves (1983)
  4. Witches’ Brew (1984)
  5. The Dark Descent (1987)
  6. The Year’s Best Fantasy: First Annual Collection (1988)
  7. Demons & Dreams: The Best Fantasy and Horror 1 (1988)
  8. The Oxford Book of American Short Stories (1992)
  9. Deadly Sins (1994)
  10. Bad Behavior (1995)
  11. Telling Stories (1997)
  12. The Best American Mystery Stories 1997 (1997)
  13. The Best of the Best (1998)
  14. Murder for Revenge (1998)
  15. The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror: Eleventh Annual Collection (1998)
  16. The Best American Mystery Stories 1999 (1999)
  17. Master’s Choice: Mystery Stories by Today\’s Top Writers and the Masters Who Inspired Them (2000)
  18. The Best American Mystery Stories of the Century (2000)
  19. The World’s Finest Mystery and Crime Stories 2 (2000)
  20. The Best American Mystery Stories 2001 (2001)
  21. Opening Shots, Vol. II (2001)
  22. The World’s Finest Mystery and Crime Stories 3 (2002)
  23. The Best American Mystery Stories 2003 (2003)
  24. The Future Dictionary of America (2004)
  25. Dangerous Women (2005)
  26. Transgressions (2005)
  27. The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror: Twentieth Annual Collection (2007)
  28. The Best American Mystery Stories 2007 (2007)
  29. Unforgettable Ghost Stories by Women Writers (2008)
  30. The Best American Mystery Stories 2009 (2009)
  31. Hint Fiction (2010)
  32. The Mammoth Book of Angels and Demons (2011)
  33. What You Wish For: A Book for Darfur (2011)
  34. Better Than Fiction: True Travel Tales From Great Fiction Writers (2012)
  35. Boston Noir 2 (2012)
  36. Prison Noir (2014)
  37. Choose Wisely: 35 Women Up To No Good (2015)
  38. The Best American Mystery Stories 2015 (2015)
  39. Unloaded: Crime Writers Writing Without Guns (2016)
  40. In Sunlight or In Shadow: Stories Inspired by the Paintings of Edward Hopper (2016)
  41. The Best American Mystery Stories 2017 (2017)
  42. Alive in Shape and Color (2017)
  43. Cutting Edge: New Stories of Mystery and Crime by Women Writers (2019)
  44. Drawing Lines (2021)
  45. When Things Get Dark (2021)

Wonderland Quartet/Garden Of Earthly Delights Book Covers

The Gothic Saga Book Covers

L.A. Noire: The Collected Stories Book Covers

Standalone Novels Book Covers

Short Stories/Novellas Book Covers

Short Story Collections Book Covers

Standalone Plays Book Covers

Picture Book Covers

Non-Fiction Book Covers

Akashic Drug Chronicles Book Covers

Best American Short Stories Book Covers

Bibliomysteries Book Covers

Bibliomysteries Book Covers

Dark Corners Book Covers

Snow White, Blood Red Anthology Book Covers

World’s Finest Mystery and Crime Stories Book Covers

Anthologies Book Covers

Joyce Carol Oates Books Overview

A Garden of Earthly Delights

Joyce Carol Oates’s Wonderland Quartet comprises four remarkable novels that explore social class in America and the inner lives of young Americans. In A Garden of Earthly Delights, Oates presents one of her most memorable hero*ines, Clara Walpole, the beautiful daughter of Kentucky born migrant farmworkers. Desperate to rise above her haphazard existence of violence and poverty, determined not to repeat her mother s life, Clara struggles for independence by way of her relationships with four very different men: her father, a family man turned itinerant laborer, smoldering with resentment; the mysterious Lowry, who rescues Clara as a teenager and offers her the possibility of love; Revere, a wealthy landowner who provides Clara with stability; and Swan, Clara s son, who bears the psychological and spiritual burden of his mother s ambition.A masterly work from a writer with the uncanny ability to give us a cinemascopic vision of her America National Review, A Garden of Earthly Delights is the opening stanza in what would become one of the most powerful and engrossing story arcs in literature.A Garden of Earthly Delights is the first novel in the Wonderland Quartet. The books that complete this acclaimed series, Expensive People, them, and Wonderland, are also available from the Modern Library.

Expensive People

Joyce Carol Oates’s Wonderland Quartet comprises four remarkable novels that explore social class in America and the inner lives of young Americans. In Expensive People, Oates takes a provocative and suspenseful look at the roiling secrets of America s affluent suburbs. Set in the late 1960s, this first person confession is narrated by Richard Everett, a precocious and obese boy who sees himself as a minor character in the alarming drama unfolding around him. Fascinated by yet alienated from his attractive, self absorbed parents and the privileged world they inhabit, Richard incisively analyzes his own mismanaged childhood, his pretentious private schooling, his successful executive father, and his elusive mother. In an act of defiance and desperation, eleven year old Richard strikes out in a way that presages the violence of ever younger Americans in the turbulent decades to come.A National Book Award finalist, Expensive People is a stunning combination of social satire and gothic horror. You cannot put this novel away after you have opened it, said The Detroit News. This is that kind of book hypnotic, fascinating, and electrifying. Expensive People is the second novel in the Wonderland Quartet. The books that complete this acclaimed series, A Garden of Earthly Delights, them, and Wonderland, are also available from the Modern Library.

Them

Winner of the National Book Award and in print for more than thirty years, them ranks as one of the most masterly portraits of postwar America ever written by a novelist. Including several new pages and text substantially revised and updated by the author, this Modern Library edition is the most current and accurate version available of Oates’ seminal work. A novel about class, race, and the horrific, glassy sparkle of urban life, them chronicles the lives of the Wendalls, a family on the steep edge of poverty in the windy, riotous Detroit slums. Loretta, beautiful and dreamy and full of regret by age sixteen, and her two children, Maureen and Jules, make up Oates’ vision of the American fam ily broken, marginal, and romantically proud. The novel’s title, pointedly uncapitalized, refers to those Americans who inhabit the outskirts of society men and women, mothers and children whose lives many authors in the 1960s had left unexamined. Alfred Kazin called her subject ‘the sheer rich chaos of American life.’ The Nation wrote, ‘When Miss Oates’ potent, life gripping imagination and her skill at narrative are conjoined, as they are preeminently in them, she is a prodigious writer.’ In addition to the text revisions, this new edition contains an Afterword by the author and a new Introduction by Greg Johnson, Oates’ biographer and the author of two monographs on the work of Joyce Carol Oates.

Wonderland

Joyce Carol Oates’s Wonderland Quartet comprises four remarkable novels that explore social class in America and the inner lives of young Americans. Spanning from the Great Depression to the turbulent Vietnam War era, Wonderland is the epic account of Jesse Vogel, a boy who emerged from a family tragedy with his life spared but his world torn apart. Orphaned after watching his father murder his entire family, Jesse embarks on a personal odyssey that takes him from a Dickensian foster home to college and graduate school to the pinnacle of the medical profession. As an adult, Jesse must summon the strength to reach across the generation gap and rescue his endangered teenaged daughter, who has fallen into the drug infused 1960s counterculture. Hailed by Library Journal as the greatest of Oates s novels, Wonderland is the capstone of a magnificent literary excursion that plunges beneath the glossy surface of American life. Wonderland is the final novel in Joyce Carol Oates s Wonderland Quartet. The books that complete this acclaimed series, A Garden of Earthly Delights, Expensive People, and them, are also available from the Modern Library.J

Bellefleur

A wealthy and notorious clan, the Bellefleurs live in a region not unlike the Adirondacks, in an enormous mansion on the shores of mythic Lake Noir. They own vast lands and profitable businesses, they employ their neighbors, and they influence the government. A prolific and eccentric group, they include several millionaires; a mass murderer; a spiritual seeker who climbs into the mountains looking for God; a wealthy noctambulist who dies of a chicken scratch; a baby, Germaine the hero*ine of the novel and her parents, Leah and Gideon. Written with a voluptuousness and immediacy unusual even for Oates, ‘Bellefleur‘ is widely regarded as one of her masterworks.

Mysteries of Winterthurn

The first paperback reprint since 1986 of the author’s favorite among her several acclaimed and controversial Gothic novels.

In Mysteries of Winterthurn, the brilliant young detective hero Xavier Kilgarvan is confronted with three baffling cases ‘The Virgin in the Rose Bower,’ ‘The Devil’s Half Acre,’ and ‘The Blood Stained Gown’ that tax his genius for detection to the utmost, just as his forbidden passion for his cousin Perdita becomes an obsession that shapes his life.

‘Exactly why Mysteries of Winterthurn, or more specifically, the youthful detective hero Xavier Kilgarvan remains so close to my heart is something of a mystery to me. It must be that Xavier, the painstaking, often frustrated, balked, discouraged and depressed amateur detective so misunderstood by his public, is a self portrait of a kind: after Xavier has achieved a modicum of fame, or notoriety, in his ‘hazardous’ profession, he comes to feel that his public image is terribly misleading, since the public can have no awareness of the ‘painstaking labor, the daily and hourly ‘grind,’ of the detective’s work: and is woefully misled as to the glamorous ease with which mysteries are solved’ as novels may appear, at a distance, to be ‘easily’ written if the novelist has a reputation for being prolific.’ Joyce Carol Oates, from the Afterword

My Heart Laid Bare

My Heart Laid Bare is a striking departure for Joyce Carol Oates: a sweeping saga of the fortunes and misfortunes of a family of enterprising confidence artists in 19th century America. Mythic in scope, ballad like in the telling, it is Oates’s most daring work yet a stunning tale of crime and transgression with profound moral consequences. Oates’s picture of America as a land of opportunity to immigrants and settlers takes on a dark tone as we see these veritable shape shifters exploit the unsuspecting rich by appealing to their deepest flaws. Yet recognizing the sins of greed, lust, pride, and small mindedness in others does not prevent the patriarch and his brilliant children from being laid low by the same faults. From the virgin provinces of New York State to the rough and tumble Western frontier, from the backrooms of Washington, D.C., to the Atlantic City of the Gilded Age, from Carnegie Hall to Harlem in the twenties, My Heart Laid Bare transports readers with its mesmerizing narrative voice. ‘Dazzling…
Oates at her most playful and inventive.’ San Francisco Chronicle ‘Provocative…
Oates’s accomplishment here is to construct an original way of looking at American history.’ The New York Times Book Review ‘A triumph…
shows off Oates’s macabre, lushly poetic imagination, almost feverish, yet always in perfect control.’ San Diego Union Tribune ‘Fresh, spirited…
full of zestful criminality.’ Atlanta Journal Constitution

Solstice

Back in print, one of the most engrossing of Joyce Carol Oates’s earlier novels explores a relationship between two women. Originally published in 1985, Solstice is the gripping story of Monica Jensen and Sheila Trask, two young women who are complete opposites yet irresistibly attracted to each other. Blonde, shy, recently divorced Monica is a school teacher; dark, nocturnal, sophisticated Sheila is a painter of stature, driven by the needs of her art. Over the months, their friendship deepens, first to love and then to a near fatal obsession.

Marya: A Life

Successful author and famous intellectual Marya Knauer did not always occupy such a secure and comfortable position in life. Her memories of her childhood in Innisfail, New York are by turns romantic and traumatic. The early violent death of her father and abandonment by her mother have left her with a permanent sense of dislocation and loss. After decades apart, Marya becomes determined to find the mother who gave her away. In searching for her past, Marya changes her present life more than she could ever have imagined. Vividly evoking the natural beauty of rural upstate New York, and the complex emotions of a woman artist, Marya: A Life is one of Joyce Carol Oates’s most deeply personal and fully realized novels.

You Must Remember This

Joyce Carol Oates’s epic novel of an American family in the 1950’s probes the tender division between the permissible and the forbidden, between ordinary life and the secret places of the heart. Set in an industrial, working class town in upstate New York, this book chronicles the frustrating marriage of parents Lyle and Hannah; the idealistic political journey of son Warren, and the passionate, obsessive relationship that develops between 15 year old Enid Maria and her uncle Felix, a professional boxer twice her age. While brilliantly re creating a decade that worshipped conformity, You Must Remember This presents the lives of family members that break every convention in the search for meaning and fulfillment.

American Appetites

Starring: Keith Carradine, Alastair Duncan, Anna Gunn, Dan Lauria, Jean Louisa Kelly, Liza Weil, and Tegan West Adapted for radio by Nick Olcott Full Cast production. The complete play on 1 Cassette 88 Minutes L.A. Theatre Works’ excluse dramatization of Joyce Carol Oates’ best selling novel shows a close knit group of prestigious scholars in the affluent 80’s blown apart by tragedy and scandal. A sophisticated, witty and chilling tale. WORLD PREMIERE! L.A. Theatre Works, founded in 1974, produces the world’s finest audio theatre. Our catalogue features the largest collection of classic and contemporary plays, recorded in state of the art sound quality, starring today’s most popular and acclaimed actors. Your selection is packed in durable vinyl cases with colorful, attractive covers. These handsome editions are perfect for personal collections, schools and libraries. Our catalogue features many award winning plays, musicals, docudramas and novels that let your imagination soar!

Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart

Joyce Carol Oates is in full fire here. The motifs and themes of this rich, intricately textured, realistic novel belong to the American experience of the 1950s and ’60s. But the vision of life that animates them is so clear and unflinching that the past comes to us with the force of revelation. ‘Fiction of extraordinary imaginative power.’ The New York Times Book Review. Nominated for the National Book Award.

Soul/Mate (As: Rosamond Smith)

Rosamond Smith establishes herself as a premier suspense novelist with one of the most engrossing psychothrillers in recent years, a novel that shows at every riveting, unexpected turn, the hand of a master. A chilling tale about a psychopathic serial killer with a lover’s face…
described by Elmore Leonard as ‘a hair raiser.’ Rosamond Smith is a pseudonym for Joyce Carol Oates. HC: NAL.

Snake Eyes (As:Rosamond Smith)

Lovely blonde Gina O’Meara had seemingly the ideal life a devoted husband, two well behaved children, a comfortable home but something draws her to magnetic, evil ex con Lee Roy Sears. PW.

Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang

Five teenage girls from upstate New York in the 1950s form a blood sisterhood to protect one another against the world and its oppressors, until their leader’s disastrous act of revenge puts all their lives in turmoil. Book available.

What I Lived For

A respected author offers a powerful and insightful portrait of an unforgettable and deeply troubled man, exploring the complex dynamics that fuel Corky Corcoran’s driving ambitions.Major Lit Guild Feat Alt. Doubleday.

Zombie

Meet Quentin P.

He is a problem for his professor father and his loving mother, though of course they do not believe the charge sexual molestation of a minor that got him in that bit of trouble.

He is a challenge for his court appointed psychiatrist, who nonetheless is encouraged by the increasingly affirmative quality of his dreams and his openness in discussing them.

He is a thoroughly sweet young man for his wealthy grandmother, who gives him more and more, and can deny him less and less.

He is the most believable and thoroughly terrifying sexual psychopath and killer ever to be brought to life in fiction, as Joyce Carol Oates achieves her boldest and most brilliant triumph yet a dazzling work of art that extends the borders of the novel into the darkest heart of truth.

We Were the Mulvaneys

The Mulvaneys, at first a close and very lucky family, drift apart over the years, until the youngest son, Judd, discovers the secret of their downfall and sets out to help reunite the family./Content /EditorialReview EditorialReview Source Amazon. com Review /Source Content Oprah Book Club Selection, January 2001: A happy family, the Mulvaneys. After decades of marriage, Mom and Dad are still in love and the proud parents of a brood of youngsters that includes a star athlete, a class valedictorian, and a popular cheerleader. Home is an idyllic place called High Point Farm. And the bonds of attachment within this all American clan do seem both deep and unconditional: ‘Mom paused again, drawing in her breath sharply, her eyes suffused with a special lustre, gazing upon her family one by one, with what crazy unbounded love she gazed upon us, and at such a moment my heart would contract as if this woman who was my mother had slipped her fingers inside my rib cage to contain it, as you might hold a wild, thrashing bird to comfort it.’

But as we all know, Eden can’t last forever. And in the hands of Joyce Carol Oates, who’s chronicled just about every variety of familial dysfunction, you know the fall from grace is going to be a doozy. By the time all is said and done, a rape occurs, a daughter is exiled, much alcohol is consumed, and the farm is lost. Even to recount these events in retrospect is a trial for the Mulvaney offspring, one of whom declares: ‘When I say this is a hard reckoning I mean it’s been like squeezing thick drops of blood from my veins.’ In the hands of a lesser writer, this could be the stuff of a bad television movie. But this is Oates’s 26th novel, and by now she knows her material and her craft to perfection. We Were the Mulvaneys is populated with such richly observed and complex characters that we can’t help but care about them, even as we wait for disaster to strike them down. Anita Urquhart

Man Crazy

Fresh from the triumph of We Were the Mulvaneys, Joyce Carol Oates continues her exploration of family love and possibilities of human redemption with this compelling story of how one young woman suffers profoundly in the pursuit of love, but manages to emerge safe and whole. Set in several towns on the Chatauqua River in upstate New York, Man Crazy tells the story of Ingrid Boone, who at age eight is taken into hiding by her beautiful young mother, Chloe. Sought by the men who have taunted Chloe, the authorities, and Ingrid’s loving but volatile father still haunted by memories of Vietnam, Ingrid and her mother fight to survive both together and apart. ‘Man Crazy‘ is the label assigned to teenage Ingrid, whose desperate need to find a substitute for her father’s affection makes her easy prey for the charismatic leader of a violent cult. Eventually, the police surround the cult compound and a tense standoff erupts in bullets and flames. Ingrid escapes to rebuild her life, and Oates’ depiction of this severely damaged young woman’s slow but miraculous process of healing stands as one of the most brilliant portraits she has ever created. Oates’ gift for haunting imagery reaches new heights in this emotionally resonant work. This will be published simultaneously with the Dutton release of a major new novel from Oates, My Heart Laid Bare. We Were the Mulvaneys was a national bestseller.

Broke Heart Blues

Brando. Dean. John Reddy Heart is right up there among them at least in the eyes of the residents of Willowsville, New York. The handsome young heart throb begins his bad boy career at sixteen, the night that a man is murdered in his mother’s house. Was John Reddy protecting her from rape or covering up her crime, or is he actually innocent? It may not matter the minute the manhunt starts, the second the sensational trial begins, John Reddy Heart is front page news, celebrated in song, and well on his way to becoming a small town’s obsession. The always inventive Oates has struck upon a truly innovative way to tell this uniquely American story.

Blonde

‘A lush bodied girl in the prime of her physical beauty. In an ivory georgette crepe sundress with a halter top that gathers her breasts up in soft undulating folds of the fabric. She’s standing with bare legs apart on a New York subway grating. Her blond head is thrown rapturously back as an updraft lifts her full, flaring skirt, exposing white cotton panties. White cotton! The ivory crepe sundress is floating and filmy as magic. The dress is magic. Without the dress the girl would be female meat, raw and exposed. ‘ She was an all American girl who became a legend of unparalleled stature. She inspired the adoration of millions, and her life has beguiled generations of fans and fellow artists. The story of Norma Jeane Baker better known by her studio name ‘Marilyn Monroe’ has been dissected for more than three decades, but never has it been captured in a narrative as breathtaking and transforming as Blonde. In her most ambitious work to date, Joyce Carol Oates, one of America’s most distinguished, writers, reimagines the inner, poetic, and spiritual life of Norma Jeane Baker the child, the woman, the fated celebrity and tells the story in Norma Jeane’s own voice: startling, rich, and shattering. This most intimate portrait of Norma Jeane reveals a fragile, idiosyncratically gifted young woman who makes and remakes her identity, ever managing to survive against crushing odds to become the definition of stardom. Bit by bit, she tells her own epic story of how an emblematic American artist perpetually conflicted and intensely driven lost her way. Drawing on biographical and historical sources, Joyce Carol Oates evokes the distinct consciousness of the woman and the unsparing reflection of the myth, writing as she has never written before ecstatic, completely absorbed, inhabited as if by the spirit of her extraordinary subject. Rich with psychological insight and disturbing irony, this mesmerizing narrative illumines Norma Jeane’s lonely childhood, wrenching adolescence, and the creation of ‘Marilyn Monroe.’Distorted and misunderstood, the muted voice of Norma Jeane and the grand legacy of Marilyn Monroe are also a looking glass into the shadow world of Hollywood. While paying tribute to the elusive art of acting and moviemaking, Joyce Carol Oates depicts the chilling panorama of an industry that nourishes and devours the ‘pure products’ of America. Blonde offers astonishing and often disturbing portraits of the powerful men in Norma Jeane’s life: the Ex Athlete, the Playwright, the President, the Dark Prince. With fresh insights into the heart of a celebrity culture hypnotized by its own, myths, Blonde is a sweeping novel about the elusive magic of a woman, the lasting legacy of a star, and the heartbreak behind the creation of the most evocative icon of the twentieth century.

The Barrens (As:Rosamond Smith)

In this gripping psychological thriller, Joyce Carol Oates, New York Times best selling author and one of the most versatile and original voices in contemporary American fiction, delivers a startling, complex tale of a serial killer and the people that his ghastly crimes touch and transform. People like Matt McBride. Matt was barely out of junior high when the mutilated body of the first victim a popular, pretty teenager was uncovered in the desolate New Jersey Pine Barrens. Although he had hardly known the girl, Matt has long felt guilty at not having been able somehow to prevent the atrocity. Now another attractive young woman has disappeared, and Matt knew this victim, too. Just possibly he knew her more intimately than he is prepared to admit. By degrees Matt becomes obsessed with a guilt he can neither comprehend nor assuage. His seemingly happy marriage begins to deteriorate, while his increasingly erratic behavior heightens police suspicions. It also draws official attention away from an artist a man of limited talent but of fierce, demented vision who signs his work Name Unknown. Under the spell of the missing woman, Matt follows a path that leads him out of the maze of tortured memory to a confrontation with not only the baleful Name Unknown but also his own long unacknowledged self. The outcome is shattering. With ‘murder as an art and the serial killer as an artist,’ National Book Award winner Joyce Carol Oates shows ‘how a murderer’s savage creations…
transform a man s life.’ Marilyn Stasio, The New York Times ‘Oates fans may judge The Barrens the best Smith novel yet.’ Boston Herald

Middle-Age: A Romance

A darkly comic novel from the author of Blonde and We Were the Mulvaneys In Salthill on Hudson, a half hour train ride from Manhattan, everyone is rich, beautiful, and though they look much younger middle age. But when Adam Berendt, a charismatic, mysterious sculptor, dies suddenly in a brash act of heroism, shock waves rock the town. But who was Adam Berendt? Was he in fact a hero, or someone more flawed and human? His loss and the rumor that surface of his possible lovers plunge his friends into grief, confusion, and self reflection. The women who loved Adam find themselves engaging in life altering romantic adventures. The men who were Adam’s closest friends become utterly transformed in his absence. Adam’s lawyer, Roger Cavenagh, who has broken the law for Adam’s sake, becomes invlolve with an elusive and perhaps treacherous young woman. Marina Troy exiles herself to fullfill a wish Adam had made for her. Lionel Hoffman sets out, unwisely but with great hope, to recapture his lost youth after a lifetime of soulless financial success, even as his wife, Camille, discovers an unspeckable joy close to home. Augusta Cutler, a hitherto sensuous, unreflective woman defiantly endeavors to solve the mystery of Adam’s origins, even if it means losing her marriage and family. Middle Age: A Romance is an intimately drawn, richly sympathetic, yet unsparingly comic portrait of the affluent class at the dawn of the twenty first century. Incisive, insightful, and never predictable, it’s a uniquely American sage of self determination and identity from one of our finest writers of contemporary fiction.

I’ll Take You There

Joyce Carol Oates is one of the world’s most respected living novelists. ‘I’ll Take You There‘ is an intense, deeply moving story of how a young woman finds her place in the world. ‘In those days in the early 1960s we were not women yet but girls. This was, without irony perceived as our advantage.’ So begins ‘I’ll Take You There‘, an astonishingly intimate and unsparing self portrait of a young woman who comes of age in the most turbulent of American decades. ‘Anellia’ as she sometimes calls herself is a student at Syracuse University, the first time she has lived away from her family. Headstrong, passionate, occasionally obsessive, she is pitiless in exposing herself to her new life as she searches for a place in the world. In her quest for belonging, ‘Anellia’ discovers the risks, and curious rewards, of confronting the world: being taken in, and then cruelly rejected by a ‘sisterhood’ of her fellow students, falling recklessly in love with an older graduate student who happens to be black, making a journey westward when summoned by a figure from her past who she believed to be dead. Through this triptych of events, the atoms of ‘Anellia’s’ life comes together as she begins her journey into adulthood. This spellbinding novel confirms Oates as one of America’s most important writers. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our times. ‘I’ll Take You There‘ is a deeply moving, wry, intense examination of how a girl becomes a young woman.

Big Mouth and Ugly Girl

Matt Donaghy has always been a BIG MOUTHbut it’s never gotten him in trouble until one day when two detectives escort him out of class for questioning. Matt has been accused of threatening to blow up Rocky River High School. Ursula Riggshas always been an UGLY GIRLA loner with fierce, staring eyes, Ursula has no time for petty high school stuff like friends and dating or at least that’s what she tells herself. Ursula is content with minding her own business. And she doesn’t even really know Matt Donaghy. But Ursula is the only person who knows what Matt really said that day…
and she is the only one who can help him. In her first novel for young adults, acclaimed author Joyce Carol Oates has created a provocative and unflinching story of friendship and family, and of loyalty and betrayal.

Freaky Green Eyes

Later, I would think of it as crossing over. From a known territory into an unknown. From a place where people know you to a place where people only think they know you. It began with me a year ago this past July. A few weeks after my fourteenth birthday. When Freaky Green Eyes came into my heart. When her parents separate, Franky Pierson has no trouble deciding whose side she’s on. After all, her mother is the one who chose to leave. And when her mother is suddenly reported missing, Franky believes she’s simply pulled a disappearing act and deserted their family for good. But a part of Franky, a part she calls Freaky Green Eyes, knows that something is wrong. And it’s up to Freaky to open Franky’s eyes to the truth.

The Tattooed Girl

A celebrated but reclusive author, generally regarded as a somewhat idiosyncratic bachelor, young but in failing health, Joshua Seigl reluctantly admits to himself that he can no longer live alone. Although it goes against his instincts to do so, he must hire an assistant to help him with his increasingly complicated professional and personal affairs. Considering at first only male applicants, he is dissatisfied with everyone he meets. Then one day at the bookstore he encounters Alma. A young woman with synthetic looking blond hair and pale, tattooed skin, she stirs something inside Seigl pity? desire? responsibility? Though he’s uncertain why, he decides she is the one she will be his assistant. Unaware of her torturous past the abuses she’s suffered, the wrongs she’s committed, and the hatred that seethes within her he has no idea that he is bringing into his home an enemy: an anti Semite who despises him virulently and unquestioningly. Seigl allows Alma more and more deeply into his life, mindless of the danger she presents. Yet their closeness forces Seigl and Alma to make discoveries that cut to the core of their identities. With her unique, masterful balance of dark suspense and surprising tenderness, Joyce Carol Oates probes the tragedy of ethnic hatred and challenges accepted limits of desire.

The Falls

A stunning, major achievement from Joyce Carol Oates, ‘one of the great artistic forces of our time’ The Nation. A haunting story of the powerful spell Niagara Falls casts upon two generations of a family, leading to tragedy, love, loss, and, ultimately, redemption. A man climbs over the railings and plunges into Niagara Falls. A newlywed, he has left behind his wife, Ariah Erskine, in the honeymoon suite the morning after their wedding. ‘The Widow Bride of The Falls,’ as Ariah comes to be known, begins a relentless, seven day vigil in the mist, waiting for his body to be found. At her side throughout, confirmed bachelor and pillar of the community Dirk Burnaby is unexpectedly transfixed by the strange, otherworldly gaze of this plain, strange woman, falling in love with her though they barely exchange a word. What follows is their passionate love affair, marriage, and children a seemingly perfect existence. But the tragedy by which their life together began shadows them, damaging their idyll with distrust, greed, and even murder. What unfurls is a drama of parents and their children; of secrets and sins; of lawsuits, murder, and, eventually, redemption. As Ariah’s children learn that their past is enmeshed with a hushed up scandal involving radioactive waste, they must confront not only their personal history but America’s murky past: the despoiling of the landscape, and the corruption and greed of the massive industrial expansion of the 1950s and 1960s. Set against the mythic historic backdrop of Niagara Falls, Joyce Carol Oates explores the American family in crisis, but also America itself in the mid twentieth century. As in We Were the Mulvaneys, a ‘darkly engrossing novel’ Washington Post Book World, she examines what happens when the richly interwoven relationships of parents and their children are challenged by circumstances outside the family. The Falls is a love story gone wrong and righted, and it alone places Joyce Carol Oates definitively in the company of the great American novelists.

Take Me, Take Me With You (As: Lauren Kelly)

Lauren Kelly, with amazing power and authority, explores the secret kinship of ‘soul mates,’ in a mysterious and demonic love story. Lara Quade, a disaffected intellectual associated with a prominent Princeton research center, is a young woman whose physical beauty has been scarred in a childhood accident. She is jarred out of the routine of her life by a seemingly chance meeting with a young man named Zedrick Dewe, whom she seems to know somehow as he in turn seems to know her. What is the connection between them? Who has brought them together? And why are they drawn so powerfully to one another? Their encounter leads to a highly charged erotic experience that takes an abrupt turn from tender to violent, predictable to terrifying. And from this initial episode springs a sequence of inexplicable events and revelations so shocking that they lead Lara, long in denial about her life, to uncover the truth about the buried hurt and rage in the tortured past of her family.

Sexy

It was in November, a Thursday after swim practice. The thing with Mr. Tracy, Darren’s English teacher.
The thing was how Darren would think of it, afterward.
The thing that was vague and not named.
The thing that hadn t happened, anyway.

Darren Flynn has the perfect life until that day in November.

After that day, after what happened did it happen?, life is different. Darren is different. Nothing is as it was before. His friends, his family, even the people who are supposed to be in charge are no longer who Darren thought they were. Who can he trust, now?

This compelling, masterfully written novel by acclaimed author Joyce Carol Oates explores one teenager’s search for identity in a complex, deceiving world, and the answers he finds in the most unexpected places.

The Stolen Heart (As: Lauren Kelly)

From Lauren Kelly, ‘a writer of formidable talent’ Scott Turow, comes the page turning story of Merilee Graf, whose past and present mysteries converge in a revelation too painful, and too shocking, for her to accept. Sixteen years ago, a vivacious fifth grade classmate of Merilee Graf was abducted from a park in Mt. Olive, New York. Haunted by the memory of the eleven year old ‘gypsy looking’ girl whose disappearance has never been explained, Merilee returns home to keep a vigil at the bedside of her dying father, a prosperous importer of exotic goods and a former, popular mayor of the upstate New York town on the Chautauqua River. After Mr. Graf’s death, Merilee finds herself an ‘heiress’ in more ways than one as she becomes involved, with both dread and fascination, with two very different men from her Mt. Olive past the elusive older brother of her missing classmate and her own seductive ‘Uncle Jedah,’ executor of her father’s estate. Past and present mysteries converge in a revelation too painful, and too shocking, for Merilee to accept, and in a sudden act of reckless courage she frees herself of the terrifying obsessions of the past.

Missing Mom / Mother, Missing

Nikki Eaton, single, thirty one, sexually liberated, and economically self supporting, has never particularly thought of herself as a daughter. Yet, following the unexpected loss of her mother, she undergoes a remarkable transformation during a tumultuous year that brings stunning horror, sorrow, illumination, wisdom, and even& 8212from an unexpected source& 8212a nurturing love.

Black Girl/White Girl

In 1975 Genna Hewett Meade’s college roommate died a mysterious, violent death partway through their freshman year. Minette Swift had been assertive, fiercely individualistic, and one of the few black girls at their exclusive, ‘enlightened’ college and Genna, daughter of a prominent civil defense lawyer, felt duty bound to protect her at all costs. But fifteen years later, while reconstructing Minette’s tragic death, Genna is forced to painfully confront her own past life and identity…
and her deepest beliefs about social obligation in a morally gray world.

Black Girl / White Girl is a searing double portrait of race and civil rights in post& 150;Vietnam America, captured by one of the most important literary voices of our time.

After the Wreck, I Picked Myself Up, Spread My Wings, and Flew Away

In the raw was how the world felt now. My feelings were raw, my thoughts were raw and hurtful like knife blades…
. In the blue had been my place to hide, now In the raw there was nowhere to hide.

Jenna Abbott separates her life into two categories: before the wreck and after the wreck. Before the wreck, she was leading a normal life with her mom in suburban New York. After the wreck, Jenna is alone, trying desperately to forget what happened that day on the bridge. She’s determined not to let anyone get close to her — she never wants to feel so broken and fragile again.

Then Jenna meets Crow. He is a powerfully seductive enigma, and Jenna is instantly drawn to him. Crow is able to break down the wall that Jenna has built around her emotions, and she surprises herself by telling him things she hasn’t told anyone else. Can Jenna bring herself to face the memories she’s tried so hard to erase?

Blood Mask (As: Lauren Kelly)

Awealthy, charismatic, and controversial ‘benefactress of art,’ Drewe Hildebrand disappears from her estate on the Hudson River, seemingly abducted in the night. Her young niece, Marta, found in a desolate wooded area close by, is too traumatized to describe the abductors. A provocative exhibit of avant garde ‘bio art’ that includes a blood mask of Drewe Hildebrand is disrupted by protestors. In this, her third suspense novel, Lauren Kelly explores the startling world of ‘bio artists’ and their admirers, examining the intermingling of private, inscrutable motives with public masks of dominance and power; the ways in which spiritual yearnings may be transformed into worldly, erotic appetites that consume the innocent.

The Gravedigger’s Daughter

In 1936 the Schwarts, an immigrant family desperate to escape Na*zi Germany, settle in a small town in upstate New York, where the father, a former high school teacher, is demeaned by the only job he can get: gravedigger and cemetery caretaker. After local prejudice and the family’s own emotional frailty result in unspeakable tragedy, The Gravedigger’s Daughter, Rebecca, begins her astonishing pilgrimage into America, an odyssey of erotic risk and imaginative daring, ingenious self invention, and, in the end, a bittersweet but very ‘American’ triumph. ‘You are born here, they will not hurt you’ so the gravedigger has predicted for his daughter, which will turn out to be true.

In The Gravedigger’s Daughter, Oates has created a masterpiece of domestic yet mythic realism, at once emotionally engaging and intellectually provocative: an intimately observed testimony to the resilience of the individual to set beside such predecessors as The Falls, Blonde, and We Were the Mulvaneys.

Little Bird of Heaven

Joyce Carol Oates returns with a dark, romantic, and captivating tale, set in the Great Lakes region of upstate New York the territory of her remarkably successful New York Times bestseller The Gravedigger’s Daughter.

Set in the mythical small city of Sparta, New York, this searing, vividly rendered exploration of the mysterious conjunction of erotic romance and tragic violence in late twentieth century America returns to the emotional and geographical terrain of acclaimed author Joyce Carol Oates’s previous bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys and The Gravedigger’s Daughter.

When a young wife and mother named Zoe Kruller is found brutally murdered, the Sparta police target two primary suspects, her estranged husband, Delray Kruller, and her longtime lover, Eddy Diehl. In turn, the Krullers’ son, Aaron, and Eddy Diehl’s daughter, Krista, become obsessed with each other, each believing the other’s father is guilty.

Told in halves in the very different voices of Krista and Aaron, Little Bird of Heaven is a classic Oates novel in which the lyricism of intense sexual love is intertwined with the anguish of loss, and tenderness is barely distinguishable from cruelty. By the novel’s end, the fated lovers, meeting again as adults, are at last ready to exorcise the ghosts of the past and come to terms with their legacy of guilt, misplaced love, and redemptive yearning.

My Sister, My Love

Herein is the unexpurgated first person narrative of nineteen year old Skyler Rampike, the only surviving child of an ‘infamous’ American family destroyed a decade ago by the murder of Skyler& 146;s six year old ice skating champion sister, Bliss, and the media scrutiny that followed. Part investigation into the unsolved murder, part elegy for the lost Bliss and for his own lost childhood, Skyler& 146;s narrative is an alternately harrowing and corrosively funny expos of upper middle class American pretensions and an unexpectedly subtle and sympathetic exploration of those who dwell in ‘Tabloid Hell.’

A Fair Maiden

Sixteen year old Katya Spivak is out for a walk on the gracious streets of Bayhead Harbor with her two summer babysitting charges when she’s approached by silver haired, elegant Marcus Kidder. At first his interest in her seems harmless, even pleasant; like his name, a sort of gentle joke. His beautiful home, the children s books he s written, his classical music, the marvelous art in his study, his lavish presents to her Mr. Kidder s life couldn t be more different from Katya s drab working class existence back home in South Jersey, or more enticing. But by degrees, almost imperceptibly, something changes, and posing for Mr. Kidder s new painting isn t the lighthearted endeavor it once was. What does he really want from her? And how far will he go to get it? In the tradition of Oates s classic story ‘Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?’ A Fair Maiden is an unsettling, ambiguous tale of desire and control.

Mudwoman

Oates is just a fearless writer with her brave heart and her impossibly lush and dead on imaginative powers. Los Angeles Times An extraordinarily intense, racking, and resonant novel. Booklist starred reviewOne of the most acclaimed writers in the world today, the inimitable Joyce Carol Oates follows up her searing, New York Times bestselling memoir, A Widow’s Story, with an extraordinary new work of fiction. Mudwoman is a riveting psychological thriller, taut with dark suspense, that explores the high price of repression in the life of a respected university president teetering on the precipice of a nervous breakdown. Like Daphne DuMaurier s gothic masterwork, Rebecca, and the classic ghost story, The Turn of the Screw, by Henry James, Oates s Mudwoman is a chilling page turner that hinges on the power of the imagination and the blurry lines between the real and the invented and it stands tall among the author s most powerful and beloved works, including The Falls, The Gravedigger s Daughter, and We Were the Mulvaneys.

I Lock My Door Upon Myself

Written in a painterly style that is utterly compelling, this compact yet powerful novel is perfect for anyone wishing to step into the hypnotic fictional world of Joyce Carol Oates. ‘A poetic ballad of love and death and martyrdom in a turn of the century small town…
.’ The New York Times.

The Rise of Life on Earth

‘Like most important writers Joyce, Proust, Mann she has an absolute identification with her material: the spirit of a society at a crucial point in its history.’ Walter Clemens, NewsweekSelected by The New York Times Book Review as one of the most notable books of 1991, Joyce Carol Oates’s The Rise of Life on Earth is a memorable portrait of one of the ‘insulted and injured’ of American society. Set in the underside of working class Detroit of the ’60s and ’70s, this short, lyric novel sketches Kathleen Hennessy’s violent childhood shattered by a broken home, child beating, and murder and follows her into her early adult years as a hospital health care worker. Overworked, underpaid, and quietly overzealous, Kathleen falls in love with a young doctor, whose exploitation of her sets the course of the remainder of her life, in which her passivity masks a deep fury and secret resolve to take revenge.

Black Water

Based on National Book Award winner Joyce Carol Oates novella about the Chappaquiddick scandal, this tragic and beautiful new opera enthralls as a handsome Senator uses power to enchant, seduce and carelessly destroy. A L.A. Theatre Works full cast performance featuring: David Lee Brewer, Reid Bruton, Stephanie Buckley, Karen Burlingame, Kimberly Graham, Linda Kerns, Erin Langston, Patrick Mason, John Savarese and Rob Shacklett.

Beasts

A young woman tumbles into a nightmare of deadly desire in a superb novella of suspense from National Book Award winner Joyce Carol Oates. Art and arson, the poetry of D. H. Lawrence and pulp po*rnography, hero worship and sexual debaseme*nt, totems and taboos out of narrative elements like these one of the most adroit voices in American fiction devises a startling, suspenseful tale that turns the sunny idyll of New England college campus life into a lurid nightmare. A bright, talented junior at Catamount College in the druggy 1970s, Gillian Brauer strives to realize more than a poet’s craft in her workshop with the charismatic, rebellious professor Andre Harrow. For Gillian has fallen in love with Harrow, with his aesthetic sensibility, with his bohemian cottage on Brierly Lane, with the mystique of his majestic, russet haired wife, Dorcas. A sculptress, Dorcas has outraged the campus and alumnae with the crude, primitive, larger than life sized wooden totems that she has exhibited under the motto We are Beasts and this is our consolation. As if mesmerized, Gillian enters the rarefied world of the Harrows. She surrenders to their cassoulets, Quaaludes, and intimacies. She is special, even though she knows her classmates Marisa and Sybil and the exotic Dominique have preceded her here. She is helpless. And she will learn in full the meaning of that motto.

Rape

Teena Maguire should not have tried to shortcut her way home that Fourth of July. Not after midnight, not through Rocky Point Park. Not the way she was dressed: tank top, denim cut offs, high heeled sandals. Not with her twelve year old daughter, Bethie. Not with packs of local guys running loose on hormones, rage, and alcohol. A victim of gang rape, left for dead in the park boathouse, the once vital and sexy Teena Maguire can now only regret that she has survived. And Bethie can barely remember a childhood uncolored by fear. For they re not even a neighborhood away, the men that she identified for the Niagara Falls Police Department: the wide browed, sandy haired Pick brothers; the sneering Jimmy DeLucca; Fritz Haaber with his moustache and stubbled jaw. They ve killed her grandmother’s longhaired orange cat. At a relentless, compelling pace punctuated by lonely cries in the night and the whisper of terror in the afternoon, National Book Award winner Joyce Carol Oates unfolds the story of Teena and Bethie, their assailants, and their unexpected, silent champion, a man who knows the meaning of justice. And love.

Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?

Joyce Carol Oates’s prize winning story ‘Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been??’ takes up troubling subjects that continue to occupy her in her fiction: the romantic longings and limited options of adolescent women; the tensions between mothers and daughters; the sexual victimization of women; and the American obsession with violence. Inspired by a magazine story about a serial killer, its remarkable portrait of the dreamy teenager Connie has made it a feminist classic. Connie’s life anticipates the emergence of American society from the social innocence of the fifties into the harsher contemporary realities of war, random violence, and crime. The story was the basis for the movie Smooth Talk, which became the subject of much feminist debate. This casebook includes an introduction by the editor, a chronology of Oates’s life, and authoritative text of ‘Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been??’ an essay by Oates on Smooth Talk, the original Life article about the serial killer, ten critical essays including two about the film, and a bibliography. The contributors are Brenda O. Daly, Christina Marsden Gillis, Don Moser, Tom Quirk, B. Ruby Rich, R.J.R. Rockwood, Larry Rubin, Gretchen Schultz, Marie Mitchell Oleson Urbanski, Joyce M. Wegs, and Joan D. Winslow. Elaine Showalter is Avalon Foundation Professor of Humanities at Princeton University. She is the author and editor of many books on women’s writing, including Sister’s Choice: Tradition and Change in American Women’s Writing. A volume in the Women Writers: Texts and Contexts Series.

The Fabulous Beasts

This collection of fifty two poems from the author of Angel Fire and Anonymous Sins explores the annihilation of the time bound ego, a liberating, sometimes terrifying experience for all who live within the ‘fabulous beast’ of history and nature. The poems explore the shifting, elusive point at which the inwardness of individual experience touches upon the larger consciousness of a species or an era, forming a connection with a ‘self’ that goes beyond subjectivity. The poems are grouped into four parts: ‘Broken Connections,’ ‘Forbidden Testimonies,’ ‘The Child Martyr’ and ‘A Posthumous Sketch,’ are prose poems which, though technically different from the others, are concerned with the same theme the relationship between the individual and a larger, all inclusive whole. Neither fatalistic nor rebellious, the poems convey the idea that as long as we live in time we must struggle, and that is this struggle that determines our humanity.

Three Plays

Alfred Kazin has spoken of Joyce Carol Oates’ ‘sweetly brutal sense of what American experience I like,’ and each of these original and disturbing plays explores a facet of that experience. When Ontological Proof of My Existence was presented in New York City, Newsweek critic Jack Kroll spoke of its ‘flaring life’ and its power in reminding us that we are all characters in the melodrama of contemporary crisis.

The Perfectionist and Other Plays

The Best American Essays 1998 features a captivating mix of people and prose, as guest editor Cynthia Ozick shapes a volume around the intricacies of human memory. The reflections and recollections of Saul Bellow, John Updike, Jamaica Kincaid, John McPhee, and Andre Dubus join company with many voices new to the series, as an astonishing variety of writers share their deepest thought on ecstasy and injury, ambition and failure, privacy and notoriety.

The Assignation

A woman’s lover seems not to recognize her on the street. A teenage girl accepts a ride from a stranger in a rust speckled Cadillac. An old man is obsessed by the memory of his innocent childhood intrusion on a half dressed aunt.

In forty four very short, very powerful stories, Joyce Carol Oates fashions brief, intensely compact dramas out of the unwieldy material of human experience. The stories in The Assignation are infused with a ‘radiant intensity,’ wrote James Atlas in the New York Times Book Review, and they convey the depth and scope of a novel in a few charged pages. The Assignation is an electric display of the talents that make Joyce Carol Oates one of our finest short story writers.

Heat and Other Stories

A new collection of twenty five short stories from one of America’s preeminent literary figures once again reveals the darkness, the violence, and the raw emotion lurking below the surfaces of everyday life. PW.

Where is Here?

In dramatic, tightly focused narratives charges with tension, menace, and the shock of the unexpected, Where is Here?? examines a world in which ordinary life is electrified by the potential for sudden change. Domestic violence, fear and abandonment and betrayal, and the obsession with loss shadow the characters that inhabit these startling, intriguing stories. With the precision and intensity that are the hallmarks of her remarkable talent, Joyce Carol Oates explores the unexpected turns of events that leave people vulnerable and struggling to puzzle out the consequences of their abrupt reversals of fortune. As in the title story, in which a married couple find their controlled life irrevocably altered by a stranger’s visit, the fiction in this new collection is punctuated again and again by mysterious, perhaps unanswerable, questions: ‘Out of what does our life arise? Out of what does our consciousness arise? Why are we here? Where is Here??’ Like the questions they pose, these tales at once elusive and direct unfold with the enigmatic twists of riddles and, often, the blunt shock of tragedy. Where is Here?? is the work of a master practitioner of the short story.

Haunted

Revealing another side of the accomplished writer’s unlimited imagination, sixteen tales of the grotesque include ”Accursed Inhabitants of the House of Bly,” a reworking of The Turn of the Screw, and the chilling ”No Trespassing.” NYT.

Tenderness

Now in paperback, the most recent volume of poems by the award winning author. Tenderness, the eighth volume of verse by Joyce Carol Oates, is a generous selection of fifty seven poems, ranging in voice from the lyric to the narrative to the satiric. Most of them have appeared in prominent magazines and literary journals, including The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, and Triquarterly; all feature Oates at the height of her powers.

Will You Always Love Me? and Other Stories

As one woman continues to feel the rage over the murder of her sister two years ago, another becomes her son’s accomplice in a devious plot, in a powerful collection of short stories. NYT.

Invisible Writer

Granted privileged access to Joyce Carol Oates’s letters and journals, as well as extensive interviews with family, friends, colleagues, and Oates herself, biographer Greg Johnson examines the relationship between Oates’s life and work in this fascinating exploration of a complex and gifted artist. Johnson reveals little known facts about Oates’s personal and family history and debunks many of the myths that have arisen about this brilliant, enigmatic woman. Johnson takes readers from Oates’s impoverished childhood in upstate New York and the birth of her autistic sister through Oates’s studies at Syracuse University, where her talent was immediately recognized, to the full breadth of her astonishingly productive career. His astute examination of Oates’s novels, short stories, and plays demonstrates how her art has been informed by her life.

The Collector of Hearts

‘Shimmering…
Oates is a master at this genre.’ Boston GlobeIn these twenty five gothic horror tales from the master of the short story, Joyce Carol Oates explores the waking nightmares of life with eyes wide open, facing what the bravest of us fear the most. From the Kafka esque ‘Scars’ to a balladlike tale of erotic obsession in ‘The Crossing,’ to the mother daughter bond given a fatal twist in ‘Death Mother,’ the stories in The Collector of Hearts illuminate the mysteries of the human experience both intellectual and visceral. It is a stunning and richly diverse anthology of mood and menace haunting, elegiac, and compulsively readable.

New Plays

Oates’s fourth and most accomplished collection includes three full length plays, Bad Girls, Black Water, The Passion of Henry David Thoreau, and eight shorter pieces. Bad Girls is the story of three teenage sisters who ruin the life of the man who comes between them and their single mother; Black Water, a dramatization of Oates’s widely acclaimed novel of that title; and The Passion of Henry David Thoreau, a portrayal of the passionate life and premature death of one of the romantic heroes of American literature. The subjects of the shorter pieces range from a serial murder to a nightmarish visit to an adoption agency.

Where I’ve Been, and Where I’m Going

One of America’s foremost novelists comments on the classics of literature and art and the perennial questions of the human condition in her first essay collection in a decade.

Faithless

In this collection of twenty one unforgettable stories, Joyce Carol Oates explores the mysterious private lives of men and women with vivid, unsparing precision and sympathy. By turns interlocutor and interpreter, magician and realist, she dissects the psyches of ordinary people and their potential for good and evil with chilling understatement and lasting power. In ‘Faithless,’ two adult sisters recall their mother’s disappearance when they were children. In ‘Ugly,’ a bitterly angry young woman defines herself as ugly as a way of making herself invulnerable to hurt and in so doing hurts others. In ‘Lover,’ a beautiful young woman locked into an obsessive love affair seeks her revenge in a bizarre, violent manner. In ‘Gunlove,’ a woman in thrall to a powerful erotic fetishism recounts in brief, deadpan vignettes a history of her relations with firearms. Intense and provocative, Faithless is a startling look into the heart of contemporary America from the modern master of the short story.

Small Avalanches and Other Stories

When The Sky Blue Ball comes soaring over the fence, a high school girl is confronted with the haunting memory of childhood. A jealous teen lets her cousin go off alone with a dangerous Capricorn, aware of the terrifying possibilities. A vulnerable young girl cunningly outwits a menacing stranger and exults in her newfound power, surviving the first of many Small Avalanches. In these twelve riveting tales, master storyteller Joyce Carol Oates visits the dark, enigmatic psyche of the teenage years. Intense and unnerving, uplifting and triumphant, the stories in this collection explore the fateful consequences of the choices we make in our everyday lives.

I Am No One You Know

I Am No One You Know contains nineteen startling stories that bear witness to the remarkably varied lives of Americans of our time. In ‘Fire,’ a troubled young wife discovers a rare, radiant happiness in an adulterous relationship. In ‘Curly Red,’ a girl makes a decision to reveal a family secret, and changes her life irrevocably. In ‘The Girl with the Blackened Eye,’ selected for The Best American Mystery Stories 2001, a girl pushed to an even greater extreme of courage and desperation manages to survive her abduction by a serial killer. And in ‘Three Girls,’ two adventuresome NYU undergraduates seal their secret love by following, and protecting, Marilyn Monroe in disguise at Strand Used Books on a snowy evening in 1956.

These vividly rendered portraits of women, men, and children testify to Oates’s compassion for the mysterious and luminous resources of the human spirit.

The Female of the Species

A young wife is home alone when the phone rings in ‘So Help Me God.’ Is the strange voice flirting with her from the other end of the line her jealous husband laying a trap, or a stranger who knows entirely too much about her? In ‘Madison at Guignol’ an unhappy fashionista discovers a secret door inside her favorite clothing store and insists the staff let her enter. But even her fevered imagination cannot anticipate the horror they have been hiding from her. In these and other gripping and disturbing tales, women are confronted by the evil around them and surprised by the evil they find within themselves.

With wicked insight, Joyce Carol Oates demonstrates why the females of the species be they six year old girls, seemingly devoted wives, or aging mothers are by nature more deadly than the males.

High Lonesome

No other writer can match the impressive oeuvre of Joyce Carol Oates. High Lonesome: New and Selected Stories 1966 2006 gathers short fiction from the acclaimed author’s seminal collections and includes eleven new tales that further demonstrate the breathtaking artistry and striking originality of an incomparable talent who ‘has imbued the American short story with an edgy vitality and raw social surfaces’ Chicago Tribune.

The Museum of Dr. Moses

In ‘The Man Who Fought Roland LaStarza’ a woman’s world is upended when she learns the brutal truth about a family friend s death and what her father is capable of. Meanwhile, a businessman desperate to find his missing two year old grandson in ‘Suicide Watch’ must determine whether the horrifying tale his junky son tells him about the boy s whereabouts is a confession or a sick test. In ‘Valentine, July Heat Wave’ a man prepares a gruesome surprise for the wife determined to leave him. And the children of a BTK style serial killer struggle to decode the patterns behind their father s seemingly random bad acts, as well as their own, in ‘Bad Habits.’In these and other stories, Joyce Carol Oates explores with bloodcurdling insight the ties that bind or worse. The Museum of Dr. Moses is another chilling masterpiece from ‘one of the great artistic forces of our time’ The Nation.

Wild Nights!: Stories About the Last Days of Poe, Dickinson, Twain, James, and Hemingway

Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson, Samuel Clemens ‘Mark Twain’, Henry James, Ernest Hemingway Joyce Carol Oates evokes each of these American literary icons in her newest work of prose fiction, poignantly and audaciously reinventing the climactic events of their lives. In subtly nuanced language suggestive of each of these writers, Oates explores the mysterious regions of the unknowable self that is ‘genius’ for Edgar Allan Poe, a belated encounter with bizarre life forms utterly alien to the poet’s exalted Romantic aesthetics; for Emily Dickinson, resurrected in the twenty first century in a ‘distilled’ state, a belated encounter with blundering humanity and brute passion of a kind excluded from the poet’s verse; for the elderly, renowned Samuel Clemens, a belated encounter with impassioned innocence, in the form of ‘the little girl who loves you’; for Henry James, an aging volunteer in a London hospital during World War I, a belated encounter with the physicality of desire and the raw yearning of love long absent from the master’s fiction; and, for Ernest Hemingway, the most tragic of these figures, a belated encounter with the ‘profound mysteries of the world outside him, and the profound mysteries of the world inside him.’

Wild Nights! is Joyce Carol Oates’s most original and haunting work of the imagination, a writer’s memoirist work in the form of fiction.

Dear Husband

A gripping and moving new collection of stories by Joyce Carol Oates, which reimagines the meaning of family by unexpected, often startling means With the unflinching candor and sym pathy for which Joyce Carol Oates is celebrated, these fourteen stories examine the intimate lives of contemporary American families: the tangled ties between generations, the desperation and the covert, radiant happiness of loving more than one is loved in return. In ‘Cutty Sark’ and ‘Landfill,’ the bond between adolescent son and mother reverberates with the force of an unspoken passion, bringing unexpected consequences for the son. In ‘A Princeton Idyll,’ a woman is forced to realize, decades later, her childhood role in the destruction of a famous, beloved grandfather’s life. In ‘Magda Maria,’ a man tries to break free of the enthralling and dangerous erotic obsession of his life. In the gripping title story, Oates boldly reimagines the true crime story of Andrea Yates, the Texas mother who drowned her children in 2001. Several stories ‘Suicide by Fitness Center,’ ‘The Glazers,’ and ‘Dear Joyce Carol,’ take a less tragic turn, exploring with mordant humor the shadowy interstices between self awareness and delusion. Dramatic, intensely rendered, and always provocative, Dear Husband, provides an unsettling and fascinating look into the mysterious heart of America.

Give Me Your Heart

An Otto Penzler Book The need for love obsessive, self destructive, unpredictable takes us to forbidden places, as in the chilling world of Give Me Your Heart, a new collection of stories by the inimitable Joyce Carol Oates. In the suspenseful Strip Poker, a reckless adolescent girl must find a way of turning the tables on a gathering of increasingly threatening young men Can she outplay them? In the award winning Smother! a young woman’s nightmare memory of childhood brings trouble on her professor mother Which of them will win ? In Split/Brain a woman who has blundered into a lethal situation confronts the possibility of saving herself Will she take it? In The First Husband, a jealous man discovers that his wife seems to have lied about her first marriage, and exacts a cruel revenge, years after the fact. In these and other powerful tales, children veer beyond their parents control, wives and husbands wake up to find that they hardly know each other, haunted pasts intrude upon uncertain futures, and those who bring us the most harm may be the nearest at hand. In ten razor sharp stories, National Book Award winner Joyce Carol Oates shows that the most deadly mysteries often begin at home.

Sourland

In addition to her novels and literary criticism, Joyce Carol Oates is also a master of the short story. In these 16 stories, all previously published in publications as diverse as ‘The New Yorker’, the ‘Guardian’ UK and ‘Ellery Queen’ magazine, Oates explores the power of violence, loss, and grief to shape not only the psyche but the soul. The sixteen stories of Sourland beautifully resonate with the author’s trademark fascination for the unpredictable in the midst of the ‘ordinary’ the commingling of sexual love and violence, the tumult of family life, a predilection for dark humour, and a gift for voice. The inhabitants of Sourland are as varied as a desperate man who dons a jack o lantern head as a prelude to a most curious sort of courtship, a story of a stabbing many times recounted in the life of a lonely young girl, a beguiling young woman librarian whose amputee state attracts a married man and father, a girl hopelessly in love with her renegade, incarcerated cousin, and a professor’s wife who finds herself tragically isolated at the party she is hosting for her beloved husband’s colleagues.

Come Meet Muffin!

When the Smith family rescues Muffin on the side of a country road, he appears to be a typical lost kitten in search of a home. But little Lily Smith soon discovers that this watermelon loving, peanut butter eating new friend is no ordinary kitty!Muffin sits at the dinner table, enjoys lettuce and rye crackers, and keeps a protective eye on the other cats in the family. One chilly winter morning, Muffin notices two lost fawns outside Lily’s bedroom window. Determined to be helpful to others, Muffin heads out into the forest to deliver the fawns back to their mother. Hooting owls, grumpy squirrels, and chirping chickadees are encountered along the way, until Muffin realizes he has roamed very far into unfamiliar surroundings. The resourceful cat learns that he must rely on his own ingenuity to get himself out of trouble and back into the warmth of his cozy home. In her first children’s book, Joyce Carol Oates pairs playful prose with the exquisite naturalistic oil paintings of Mark Graham. Engaging and atmospheric, this charming tale is one that children will want to hear again and again.

Where is Little Reynard? (With: Mark Graham)

Mama cat has seven kittens. Little Reynard is the smallest, and his brothers and sisters tease him about his size and his orange color. Because he is so small and timid, the little girl, Lily, takes special care of Little Reynard. She gives him his own bowl and even lets him sleep on her pillow, yet sometimes he still feels he doesn t really belong. Then one cold winter day Little Reynard peers out of an open window and sees two young foxes that look very much like him, and when the foxes invite him to join them, Little Reynard says yes!In their second picture book collaboration, following come meet muffin!, acclaimed author Joyce Carol Oates and artist Mark Graham introduce an irresistible feline character who will make himself at home in your heart.

Naughty Chérie! (With: Mark Graham)

Naughty Ch rie is the cutest kitten in the litter, but she certainly isn’t the best behaved one! She tries, but she can’t seem to stay out of trouble. Sitting alone in the corner as punishment, she finds a small crack in the wall that leads to a place called Little Friends Kindercare. But after seeing the naughty behavior of the other baby animals in the kindercare, Little Ch rie returns home a changed kitten. This lovable tale from Joyce Carol Oates and Mark Graham includes a valuable message that makes for a purrrfect bedtime story.

On Boxing

‘No other subject is, for the writer, so intensely personal as boxing. To write about boxing is to write about oneself however elliptically, and unintentionally. And to write about boxing is to be forced to contemplate not only boxing, but the perimeters of civilization what it is, or should be, to be ‘human’…
The sport seems in crisis, its best practitioners no less than its most dubious contaminate by association with fixed fights, manipulated judges, questionable referees. Demands for its abolition are made, indignation is aroused, well argued editorials are printed, deals continue to be made, boxers continue to be , managed.’ occasionally there is a boxing match that, in its demonstration of skill, courage, intelligence, hope, seems to redeem the sport or almost. Perhaps boxing has always been in crisis a sport of crisis. Without doubt, it is our most dramatically ‘masculine’ sport, and our most dramatically ‘self destructive’ sport. In this, for some for us, its abiding interest lies.’ Joyce Carol Oates,from the Foreword

Muhammad Ali: Ringside (With: Norman Mailer)

Perhaps no other figure in recent history has had the wide reaching impact of the man many know simply as The Greatest. For four decades Muhammad Ali has been a symbol of honesty and strength in sports, politics, religion, and civil rights. Throughout his remarkable career, Ali was one who truly had to be seen to be believed. But while Ali’s achievements have frequently been chronicled in prose, never before has his extraordinary career been documented in images. Muhammad Ali: Ringside is dedicated to one of the most popular athlete entertainers of all time. Included are vintage posters and programs, fight tickets, handwritten letters, classic photographs, speeches, scorecards, contracts, and rare autographs, all from Ali’s personal memorabilia. Divided chronologically into four sections, one for each decade from the 1960s to the 1990s, the book includes written narrative recountings of Ali’s accomplishments by noted writers and entertaining quotes from Ali’s contemporaries.

George Bellows

Though he was the most famous & most highly regarded American artist of the early 20th century, the intense, prolific painter George Bellows has remained as much of an enigma to his successors as to his contemporaries. Best known for his gritty, impressionistic depictions of underground boxing & the lower east side of New York, Bellows was also influenced by cultural movements & theories of art as diverse as transcendentalism & surrealism. This book explores his life & work from the perspective of a writer & admirer. Examining Bellows’ art within his historical & cultural contexts, Oates sheds new light on his technical versatility & voracious imagination. Illus.

The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates

On New Years Day, 1973, Joyce Carol Oates began keeping a journal that she maintains to this present day. When the journals began, 34-year-old Oates was already a recipient of the National Book Award 1969, with many O. Henry awards, and others, under her literary belt. For all her warm critical reception, however, the author had been and would remain fairly reticent about the personal details of her life and background. Housed in her archive at Syracuse University, the journals run to more than 5,000 single-spaced typewritten pages. This volume focuses on excerpts from that first decade, 1973-1983, one of the most productive of Oates’ long career. Far more than a daily account of her writing life, the journals offer a candid discussion of Oates’ many friendships with other well-known writers – Philip Roth, Anne Sexton, John Updike, and many others; she describes her teaching, her relationship to the natural world, her family, her vast reading, her critics, her travels, and other topics central to her life during this time. What emerges is a fascinating portrait of the artist as a young woman, fully engaged with her world and her culture, a writer who paradoxically fancied herself ‘invisible’ but who was quickly becoming one of the most respected, discussed, and controversial figures in American letters.

The Faith of a Writer

A tribute to the brilliant craftsmanship of one of our most distinguished writers, providing valuable insight into her inspiration and her method Joyce Carol Oates is widely regarded as one of America’s greatest contemporary literary figures. Having written in a number of genres prose, poetry, personal and critical essays, as well as plays she is an artist ideally suited to answer essential questions about what makes a story striking, a novel come alive, a writer an artist as well as a craftsman. In The Faith of a Writer, Oates discusses the subjects most important to the narrative craft, touching on topics such as inspiration, memory, self criticism, and ‘the unique power of the unconscious.’ On a more personal note, she speaks of childhood inspirations, offers advice to young writers, and discusses the wildly varying states of mind of a writer at work. Oates also pays homage to those she calls her ‘significant predecessors’ and discusses the importance of reading in the life of a writer. Oates claims, ‘Inspiration and energy and even genius are rarely enough to make ‘art’: for prose fiction is also a craft, and craft must be learned, whether by accident or design.’ In fourteen succinct chapters, The Faith of a Writer provides valuable lessons on how language, ideas, and experience are assembled to create art.

Uncensored

Uncensored: Views & Reviews is Joyce Carol Oates’s most candid gathering of prose pieces since Woman Writer: Occasions & Opportunities. Her ninth book of nonfiction, it brings together thirty eight diverse and provocative pieces from the New York Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, and the New York Times Book Review. Oates states in her preface, ‘In the essay or review, the dynamic of storytelling is hidden but not absent,’ and indeed, the voice of these ‘conversations’ echoes the voice of her fiction in its dramatic directness, ethical perspective, and willingness to engage the reader in making critical judgments. Under the heading ‘Not a Nice Person,’ such controversial figures as Sylvia Plath, Patricia Highsmith, and Muriel Spark are considered without sentimentality or hyperbole; under ‘Our Contemporaries, Ourselves,’ such diversely talented figures as William Trevor, E. L. Doctorow, Kazuo Ishiguro, Michael Connelly, Alice Sebold, Mary Karr, Anne Tyler, and Ann Patchett are examined. In sections of ‘homages’ and ‘revisits,’ Oates writes with enthusiasm and clarity of such cultural icons as Emily Bront , Ernest Hemingway, Carson McCullers, Robert Lowell, Balthus, and Muhammad Ali ‘The Greatest’; after a lapse of decades, she reconsiders the first film version of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and Americana, Don DeLillo’s first novel, as well as the morality of selling private letters and the nostalgic significance of making a pilgrimage to Henry David Thoreau’s Walden Pond. Through these balanced and illuminating essays we see Oates at the top of her form, engaged with forebears and contemporaries, providing clues to her own creative process: ‘For prose is a kind of music: music creates ‘mood.’ What is argued on the surface may be but ripples rising from a deeper, subtextual urgency.’

A Widow’s Story

In a work unlike anything she’s written before, National Book Award winner Joyce Carol Oates unveils a poignant, intimate memoir about the unexpected death of her husband of forty six years and its wrenching, surprising aftermath. ‘My husband died, my life collapsed.’ On a February morning in 2008, Joyce Carol Oates drove her ailing husband, Raymond Smith, to the emergency room of the Princeton Medical Center where he was diagnosed with pneumonia. Both Joyce and Ray expected him to be released in a day or two. But in less than a week, even as Joyce was preparing for his discharge, Ray died from a virulent hospital acquired infection, and Joyce was suddenly faced totally unprepared with the stunning reality of widowhood. A Widow’s Story illuminates one woman’s struggle to comprehend a life without the partnership that had sustained and defined her for nearly half a century. As never before, Joyce Carol Oates shares the derangement of denial, the anguish of loss, the disorientation of the survivor amid a nightmare of ‘death duties,’ and the solace of friendship. She writes unflinchingly of the experience of grief the almost unbearable suspense of the hospital vigil, the treacherous ‘pools’ of memory that surround us, the vocabulary of illness, the absurdities of commercialized forms of mourning. Here is a frank acknowledgment of the widow’s desperation only gradually yielding to the recognition that ‘this is my life now.’ Enlivened by the piercing vision, acute perception, and mordant humor that are the hallmarks of the work of Joyce Carol Oates, this moving tale of life and death, love and grief, offers a candid, never before glimpsed view of the acclaimed author and fiercely private woman.

In Rough Country

In twenty nine provocative essays, Joyce Carol Oates maps the ‘rough country’ that is both the treacherous geographical and psychological terrain of the writers she so cogently analyzes Flannery O’Connor, Cormac McCarthy, Philip Roth, E. L. Doctorow, and Margaret Atwood, among others and the emotional terrain of Oates’s own life following the unexpected death of her husband, Raymond Smith, after forty eight years of marriage. ‘As literature is a traditional solace to the bereft, so writing about literature can be a solace, as it was to me when the effort of writing fiction seemed beyond me, as if belonging to another lifetime,’ Oates writes. ‘Reading and taking notes, especially late at night when I can’t sleep, has been the solace, for me, that saying the Rosary or reading The Book of Common Prayer might be for another.’ The results of those meditations are the essays of In Rough Country balanced and illuminating investigations that demonstrate an artist working at the top of her form.

The Cocaine Chronicles (By:Lee Child,Laura Lippman,Ken Bruen,Jervey Tervalon)

‘The best stories in The Cocaine Chronicles…
are equal to the best fiction being written today.’ New York Journal of Books’The perfect stocking stuffer for your uncle in AA.’ New York Observer’The Cocaine Chronicles is a pure, jangled hit of urban, gritty, and raw noir. Caution: these stories are addicting.’ Harlan Coben, award winning author of Just One Look’Every story is A . All contributors are top notch…
. Should be required reading for writers who want to master the craft of the short story.’ Cherry BleedsOriginal stories by Susan Straight, Lee Child, Laura Lippman, Ken Bruen, Jerry Stahl, Nina Revoyr, Bill Moody, Donnell Alexander, Deborah Vankin, Robert Ward, Manuel Ramos, and others. Gary Phillips writes for several mediums from novels to screenplays to comic books, and lives in Los Angeles, California. Jervey Tervalon is the author of All the Trouble You Need, Understand This, and the Los Angeles Times bestseller Dead Above Ground. He lives in Altadena, California.

The Best American Short Stories 1981

Short Stories by Ann Beattie, John Updike, Cynthia Ozick, Louis D. Rubin, Mavis Gallant, Alice Munro, Elizabeth Tallent, Hortense Calisher, Joyce Carol Oates, Elizabeth Hardwick, and many others.

The Best American Short Stories 1983

Short Stories by Ann Tyler, Bill Barich, John Updike, Carolyn Chute, Ursula K. Le Guin, Raymond Carver, and many others.

The Best American Short Stories 1986

Short Stories by Ann Beattie, Ethan Canin, Joy Williams, Richard Ford, Tobias Wolff, Alice Munro, Thomas McGuane, Lord Tweedsmuir, Donald Barthelme, Raymond Carver, and many others.

The Best American Short Stories of the Eighties

The 1980s were one of the most fertile and controversial times for the Amer ican short story. Rich in craft and variety, this collection includes such c lassic and beloved stories as Peter Taylor’s ‘The Old Forest,’ Raymond Carve r’s ‘Cathedral,’ and other works by Joyce Carol Oates, Russell Banks, and a host of exciting, newer talents. Hardcover edition also available. Houghton Mifflin

The Best American Short Stories 1993

The preeminent annual collection of short fiction features the writing of John Updike, Alice Munro, Wendell Berry, Diane Johnson, Lorrie Moore, Stephen Dixon, and Mary Gaitskill.

The Best American Short Stories 1994

These twenty short stories boldly and insightfully explore the extremes of human emotions. In her story ‘Night Talkers,’ Edwidge Danticat reunites a young man and the elderly aunt who raised him in Haiti. Anthony Doerr brings readers a naturalist who discovers the surprising healing powers of a deadly cone snail. Louise Erdrich writes of an Ojibwa fiddler whose music brings him deep and mysterious joy. Here are diverse and intriguing characters a kidnapper, an immigrant nanny, an amputee blues musician who are as surprised as the reader is at what brings them happiness. In his introduction, Walter Mosley explores the definition of a good short story, and writes, ‘The writers represented in this collection have told stories that suggest much larger ideas. I found myself presented with the challenge of simple human love contrasted against structures as large as religion and death. The desire to be loved or to be seen, represented on a canvas so broad that it would take years to explain all the roots that bring us to the resolution.’ Each of these stories bravely evokes worlds brim*ming with desire and loss, humanity and possibility. Since its inception in 1915, the Best American series has become the premier annual showcase for the country’s finest short fiction and nonfiction. For each volume, a series editor reads pieces from hundreds of periodicals, then selects between fifty and a hundred outstanding works. That selection is pared down to twenty or so very best pieces by a guest editor who is widely recognized as a leading writer in his or her field. This unique system has helped make the Best American series the most respected and most popular of its kind. Lending a fresh perspective to a perennial favorite, Walter Mosley has chosen unforgettable short stories by both renowned writers and exciting newcomers. The Best American Short Stories 2003 features poignant tales that explore the nuances of family life and love, birth and death. Here are stories that will, as Mosley writes in his introduction, ‘live with the reader long after the words have been translated into ideas and dreams. That’s because a good short story crosses the borders of our nations and our prejudices and our beliefs.’Dorothy AllisonEdwidge DanticatE. L. DoctorowLouise ErdrichAdam HaslettZZ PackerMona SimpsonMary Yukari Waters

The Best American Short Stories 1995

These twenty short stories boldly and insightfully explore the extremes of human emotions. In her story ‘Night Talkers,’ Edwidge Danticat reunites a young man and the elderly aunt who raised him in Haiti. Anthony Doerr brings readers a naturalist who discovers the surprising healing powers of a deadly cone snail. Louise Erdrich writes of an Ojibwa fiddler whose music brings him deep and mysterious joy. Here are diverse and intriguing characters a kidnapper, an immigrant nanny, an amputee blues musician who are as surprised as the reader is at what brings them happiness. In his introduction, Walter Mosley explores the definition of a good short story, and writes, ‘The writers represented in this collection have told stories that suggest much larger ideas. I found myself presented with the challenge of simple human love contrasted against structures as large as religion and death. The desire to be loved or to be seen, represented on a canvas so broad that it would take years to explain all the roots that bring us to the resolution.’ Each of these stories bravely evokes worlds brim*ming with desire and loss, humanity and possibility. Since its inception in 1915, the Best American series has become the premier annual showcase for the country’s finest short fiction and nonfiction. For each volume, a series editor reads pieces from hundreds of periodicals, then selects between fifty and a hundred outstanding works. That selection is pared down to twenty or so very best pieces by a guest editor who is widely recognized as a leading writer in his or her field. This unique system has helped make the Best American series the most respected and most popular of its kind. Lending a fresh perspective to a perennial favorite, Walter Mosley has chosen unforgettable short stories by both renowned writers and exciting newcomers. The Best American Short Stories 2003 features poignant tales that explore the nuances of family life and love, birth and death. Here are stories that will, as Mosley writes in his introduction, ‘live with the reader long after the words have been translated into ideas and dreams. That’s because a good short story crosses the borders of our nations and our prejudices and our beliefs.’Dorothy AllisonEdwidge DanticatE. L. DoctorowLouise ErdrichAdam HaslettZZ PackerMona SimpsonMary Yukari Waters

The Best American Short Stories 1996

Each fall, The Best American Short Stories provides a fresh showcase for this rich and unpredictable genre. Selected from an unusually wide variety of publications, the choices for 1996 place stories from esteemed national magazines alongside those from some of the smallest and most innovative literary journals. Contributors include Joyce Carol Oates, Mary Gordon, Robert Olen Butler, Alice Adams, Lynn Sharon Schwartz, and an array of stunning new talent.

The Best American Short Stories 1997

The preeminent short fiction series since 1915, The Best American Short Stories is the only annual that offers the finest works chosen by a distinguished best selling guest editor. This year, E. Annie Proulx’s selection includes dazzling stories by Tobias Wolff, Donald Hall, Cynthia Ozick, Robert Stone, Junot D’az, and T. C. Boyle as well as an array of stunning new talent. In her introduction, Proulx writes that beyond their strength and vigor, these stories achieve ‘a certain intangible feel for the depth of human experience, not uncommonly expressed through a kind of dry humor.’ As ever, this year’s volume surprises and rewards.

The Best American Short Stories 1998

Edited by beloved storyteller Garrison Keillor, this year’s volume promises to be full of humor, surprises, and, as always, accomplished writing by new and familiar voices. The preeminent short fiction series since 1915, The Best American Short Stories is the only volume that annually offers the finest works chosen by a distinguished best selling author.

The Best American Short Stories 1999

‘What I look for most in a story,’ writes Amy Tan in her introduction to this year’s volume of The Best American Short Stories, ‘what I crave, what I found in these twenty one, is a distinctive voice that tells a story only that voice can tell.’ Tan found herself drawn to wonderfully original stories that satisfied her appetite for the magic and mystery she loved as a child, when she was addicted to fairy tales. In this vibrant collection, fantasy and truth coexist brilliantly in new works by writers such as Annie Proulx, Lorrie Moore, Nathan Englander, and Pam Houston. ‘The Sun, the Moon, the Stars,’ by Junot Diaz, features a young man trying to stave off heartbreak in a sacred cave in Santo Domingo. In ‘Mrs. Dutta Writes a Letter,’ by Chitra Divakaruni, a mother moves from India to California to be closer to her son, only to sacrifice something crucial along the way. In Melissa Hardy’s haunting story ‘The Uncharted Heart,’ a geologist unearths a shocking secret in the wilds of northern Ontario. ‘Maybe I’m still that kid who wants to see things I’ve never seen before,’ writes Tan. ‘I like being startled by images I never could have conjured up myself.’ With twenty one tales, each a fabulously rich journey into a different world, The Best American Short Stories 1999 is sure to surprise and delight.

The Best American Short Stories 2000

Still the only anthology shaped each year by a different guest editor always a preeminent master of the form THE BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES is the essential yearbook of the American literary scene. Here are the most talked about short stories of the year alongside undiscovered gems. In his introduction, guest editor E. L. Doctorow writes, ‘Here is the felt life conferred by the gifted storyteller…
who always raises two voices into the lonely universe, the character’s and the writer’s own.’ Doctorow has chosen a compelling variety of voices to usher in the new millennium, attesting to the astonishing range of human experience our best writers evoke. /Content /EditorialReview EditorialReview Source Amazon. com Review /Source Content When a great annual collection comes out, it’s hard to know the reason why. Was there a bumper crop of high quality stories, or was this year’s guest editor especially gifted at winnowing out the good ones? Either way, the 2000 edition of The Best American Short Stories is a standout in a series that can be uneven. Its editor, E.L. Doctorow, seems to have a fondness for the ‘what if?’ story, the kind of tale that posits an imagination prodding question and then attempts to answer it. Nathan Englander’s ‘The Gilgul of Park Avenue’ asks: What if a WASPy financial analyst, riding in a cab one day, discovers to his surprise that he is irrevocably Jewish? In ‘The Ordinary Son,’ Ron Carlson asks: What if you are the only average person in a family of certifiable geniuses? And Allan Gurganus’s ‘He’s at the Office’ asks: What if the quintessential postwar American working man were forced to retire? This last story is narrated by the man’s grown son, who at the story’s opening takes his dad for a walk. Though it’s the present day, the father is still dressed in his full 1950s businessman regalia, including camel hair overcoat and felt hat. The two walk by a teenager. ‘The boy smiled. ‘Way bad look on you, guy.”

My father, seeking interpretation, stared at me. I simply shook my head no. I could not explain Dad to himself in terms of tidal fashion trends. All I said was ‘I think he likes you.’

The exchange typifies the writing showcased in this anthology: in these stories, again and again, we find a breakdown of human communication that is sprightly, humorous, and devastatingly complete. A few more of the terrific stories featured herein: Amy Bloom’s ‘The Story,’ a goofy metafiction about a villainous divorcee; Geoffrey Becker’s ‘Black Elvis,’ which tells of, well, a black Elvis; and Jhumpa Lahiri’s ‘The Third and Final Continent,’ a story of an Indian man who moves to Cambridge, Massachusetts. Like the collection itself, Lahiri’s story amas*ses a lovely, funny mood as it goes along. Claire Dederer

The Best American Short Stories of the Century

Since the series’ inception in 1915, the annual volumes of The Best American Short Stories have launched literary careers, showcased the most compelling stories of each year, and confirmed for all time the significance of the short story in our national literature. Now The Best American Short Stories of the Century brings together the best of the best fifty five extraordinary stories that represent a century’s worth of unsurpassed accomplishments in this quintessentially American literary genre. Here are the stories that have endured the test of time: masterworks by such writers as Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Willa Cather, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Saroyan, Flannery O’Connor, John Cheever, Eudora Welty, Philip Roth, Joyce Carol Oates, Raymond Carver, Cynthia Ozick, and scores of others. These are the writers who have shaped and defined the landscape of the American short story, who have unflinchingly explored all aspects of the human condition, and whose works will continue to speak to us as we enter the next century. Their artistry is represented splendidly in these pages. THE BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES series has also always been known for making literary discoveries, and discovery proved to be an essential part of selecting the stories for this volume too. Collections from years past yielded a rich harvest of surprises, stories that may have been forgotten but still retain their relevance and luster. The result is a volume that not only gathers some of the most significant stories of our century between two covers but resurrects a handful of lost literary gems as well. Of all the great writers whose work has appeared in the series, only John Updike’s contributions have spanned five consecutive decades, from his first appearance, in 1959, to his most recent, in 1998. Updike worked with coeditor Katrina Kenison to choose stories from each decade that meet his own high standards of literary quality.

The Best American Short Stories 2001

Since its inception in 1915, the Best American series has become the premier annual showcase for the country’s finest short fiction and nonfiction. For each volume, a series editor reads pieces from hundreds of periodicals, then selects between fifty and a hundred and twenty outstanding works. That selection is pared down to the twenty or so very best pieces by a guest editor who is widely recognized as a leading writer in his or her field. This unique system has helped make the Best American series the most respected and most popular of its kind.A wonderfully diverse collection, this year’s BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES from Hollywood to Hong Kong, from the Jersey shore to Wales, considering the biggest issues: love, war, health, success. Edited by the critically acclaimed, best selling author Barbara Kingsolver, The Best American Short Stories 2001 includes selections by Rick Bass, Ha Jin, Alice Munro, John Updike, and others. Highlighting exciting new voices as well as established masters of the form, this year’s collection is a testament to the good health of contemporary short fiction in this country.

The Best American Short Stories 2002

Since its inception in 1915, the Best American series has become the premier annual showcase for the country’s finest short fiction and nonfiction. For each volume, a series editor reads pieces from hundreds of periodicals, then selects between fifty and a hundred outstanding works. That selection is pared down to the twenty or so very best pieces by a guest editor who is widely recognized as a leading writer in his or her field. This unique system has helped make the Best American series the most respected and most popular of its kind.

This year’s Best American Short Stories features a rich mix of voices, from both intriguing new writers and established masters of the form like Michael Chabon, Edwidge Danticat, Richard Ford, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Arthur Miller. The 2002 collection includes stories about everything from illicit love affairs to family, the immigrant experience and badly behaved children stories varied in subject but unified in their power and humanity. In the words of this year’s guest editor, the best selling author Sue Miller, ‘The American short story today is healthy and strong…
These stories arrived in the nick of time…
to teach me once more what we read fiction for.’

The Best American Short Stories 2003

Since its inception in 1915, the Best American series has become the premier annual showcase for the country’s finest short fiction and nonfiction. For each volume, a series editor reads pieces from hundreds of periodicals, then selects between fifty and a hundred outstanding works. That selection is pared down to twenty or so very best pieces by a guest editor who is widely recognized as a leading writer in his or her field. This unique system has helped make the Best American series the most respected and most popular of its kind. Lending a fresh perspective to a perennial favorite, Walter Mosley has chosen unforgettable short stories by both renowned writers and exciting newcomers. The Best American Short Stories 2003 features poignant tales that explore the nuances of family life and love, birth and death. Here are stories that will, as Mosley writes in his introduction, ‘live with the reader long after the words have been translated into ideas and dreams. That’s because a good short story crosses the borders of our nations and our prejudices and our beliefs.’Dorothy Allison Edwidge Danticat E. L. Doctorow Louise Erdrich Adam Haslett ZZ Packer Mona Simpson Mary Yukari Waters

The Best American Short Stories 2004

Story for story, readers can’t beat The Best American Short Stories series…
Each year it offers the opportunity to dive into the current trends and fresh voices that define the modern American short story’ Chicago Tribune. This year’s most beloved short fiction anthology is edited by the best selling novelist Sue Miller, author of While I Was Gone, and, most recently, The World Below. The volume includes stories by Edwidge Danticat, Jill McCorkle, E. L. Doctorow, Arthur Miller, and Akhil Sharma, among others. /Content /EditorialReview EditorialReview Source Amazon. com Review /Source Content In her opening remarks to The Best American Short Stories 2002, guest editor Sue Miller notes the difficulty of reading fiction produced during 2001, the year of the September 11 terrorist attacks. She also remarks that by the time she had finalized her 20 selections, this act of reading had restored her faith both in fiction’s significance and its ability to tap into timeless themes. The 2002 anthology includes stories best described as realist fiction or traditional fiction, many set in contemporary times. The tales range from E.L. Doctorow’s ‘A House on the Plains,’ a murder set at the turn of the century, to pieces with more recent settings, like ‘Puppy’ by Richard Ford, which shows how a New Orleans couple deals or doesn’t deal with the appearance of a stray dog. Both Jhumpa Lahiri’s ‘Nobody’s Business’ and Edwidge Danticat’s ‘Seven’ deftly portray the disconnection a semi assimilated Indian American and Haitian American couple experience both as partners and as U.S. citizens. Leonard Michael’s ‘Nachman from Los Angeles,’ in contrast, adds some levity to the mix. Miller adds in her preface that maybe next year the tales will depart further from tradition, but judging from this volume no departure is necessary: the selections take the reader on a delightful journey through some of America’s best contemporary writers. Jane Hodges

The Best American Short Stories 2005

The Best American Series First, Best, and Best Selling

The Best American series has been the premier annual showcase for the country’s finest short fiction and nonfiction since 1915. Each volume’s series editor selects notable works from hundreds of periodicals. A special guest editor, a leading writer in the field, then chooses the very best twenty or so pieces to publish. This unique system has made the Best American series the most respected and most popular of its kind.

The Best American Short Stories 2005 includes

Dennis Lehane Tom Perrotta Alice Munro Edward P. Jones Joy Williams Joyce Carol Oates Thomas McGuane Kelly Link Charles D’Ambrosio Cory Doctorow George Saunders and others

Michael Chabon, guest editor, is the best selling author of The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Wonder Boys, A Model World, and, most recently, The Final Solution. His novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay won the Pulitzer Prize in 2000.

The Best American Short Stories 2006

While a single short story may have a difficult time raising enough noise on its own to be heard over the din of civilization, short stories in bulk can have the effect of swarming bees, blocking out sound and sun and becoming the only thing you can think about, writes Ann Patchett in her introduction to The Best American Short Stories 2006.

This vibrant, varied sampler of the American literary scene revels in life’s little absurdities, captures timely personal and cultural challenges, and ultimately shares subtle insight and compassion. In The View from Castle Rock, the short story master Alice Munro imagines a fictional account of her Scottish ancestors emigration to Canada in 1818. Nathan Englander s cast of young characters in How We Avenged the Blums confronts a bully dubbed The Anti Semite to both comic and tragic ends. In Refresh, Refresh, Benjamin Percy gives a forceful, heart wrenching look at a young man s choices when his father along with most of the men in his small town is deployed to Iraq. Yiyun Li s After a Life reveals secrets, hidden shame, and cultural change in modern China. And in Tatooizm, Kevin Moffett weaves a story full of humor and humanity about a young couple s relationship that has run its course.

Ann Patchett brought unprecedented enthusiasm and judiciousness to The Best American Short Stories 2006 , writes Katrina Kenison in her foreword, and she is, surely, every story writer s ideal reader, eager to love, slow to fault, exquisitely attentive to the text and all that lies beneath it.

The Best American Short Stories 2007

In his introduction to this volume, Stephen King writes, Talent does more than come out; it bursts out, again and again, doing exuberant cartwheels while the band plays ‘Stars and Stripes Forever’…
Talent can t help itself; it roars along in fair weather or foul, not sparing the fireworks. It gets emotional. It struts its stuff. In fact, that’s its job. Wonderfully eclectic, The Best American Short Stories 2007 collects stories by writers of undeniable talent, both newcomers and favorites. These stories examine the turning points in life when we, as children or parents, lovers or friends or colleagues, must break certain rules in order to remain true to ourselves. In T. C. Boyle s heartbreaking Balto, a thirteen year old girl provides devastating courtroom testimony in her father s trial. Aryn Kyle s charming story Allegiance shows a young girl caught between her despairing British mother and motherly American father. In The Bris, Eileen Pollack brilliantly writes of a son struggling to fulfill his filial obligations, even when they require a breach of morality and religion. Kate Walbert s stunning Do Something portrays one mother s impassioned and revolutionary refusal to accept her son s death. And in Richard Russo s graceful Horseman, an English professor comes to understand that plagiarism reveals more about a student than original work can. New series editor Heidi Pitlor writes, Stephen King s dedication, unflagging hard work, and enthusiasm for excellent writing shone through on nearly a daily basis this past year…
We agreed, disagreed, and in the end very much concurred on the merit of the twenty stories chosen. The result is a vibrant assortment of stories and voices brim*ming with attitude, deep wisdom, and rare compassion.

The Best Short Stories of 1921, and the Yearbook of the American Short Story

Edward Joseph Harrington O’Brien 1890 1941 was an American author, poet, editor and anthologist. He was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and attended Boston College and Harvard University. He was noted for compiling and editing an annual collection of The Best Short Stories by American authors at the beginning of the twentieth century, and also a series of The Best Short Stories by British authors. They proved to be highly influential and popular. He was also a noted author, his works including White Fountains 1917 and The Forgotten Threshold 1918.

The Best American Short Stories 2008

This brilliant collection, edited by the award winning and perennially provocative Salman Rushdie, boasts a magnificent array Library Journal of voices both new and recognized. With Rushdie at the helm, the 2008 edition reflects the variety of substance and style and the consistent quality that readers have come to expect Publishers Weekly. We all live in and with and by stories, every day, whoever and wherever we are. The freedom to tell each other the stories of ourselves, to retell the stories of our culture and beliefs, is profoundly connected to the larger subject of freedom itself. Salman Rushdie, editorThe Best American Short Stories 2008 includes KEVIN BROCKMEIER ALLEGRA GOODMAN A. M. HOMES NICOLE KRAUSS JONATHAN LETHEM STEVEN MILLHAUSER DANIYAL MUEENUDDIN ALICE MUNRO GEORGE SAUNDERS TOBIAS WOLFF and others

The Best American Short Stories 2009

Edited by critically acclaimed, best selling author Alice Sebold, the stories in this year’s collection serve as a provacative literary ‘antenna for what is going on in the world’ Chicago Tribune. The collection boasts great variety from ‘famous to first timers, sifted from major magazines and little reviews, grand and little worlds’ St. Louis Post Dispatch, ensuring yet another rewarding, eduring edition of the oldest and best selling Best American.

The Best American Short Stories 2010

Edited by the award winning, best selling author Richard Russo, this year’s collection boasts a satisfying chorus of twenty stories that are by turns playful, ironic, somber, and meditative Wall Street Journal. With the masterful Russo picking the best of the best, America s oldest and best selling story anthology is sure to be of enduring quality Chicago Tribune this year.

The Best American Short Stories 2011

With a New AfterwordAs a prizewinning foreign correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Geraldine Brooks spent six years covering the Middle East through wars, insurrections, and the volcanic upheaval of resurgent fundamentalism. Yet for her, headline events were only the backdrop to a less obvious but more enduring drama: the daily life of Muslim women. Nine Parts of Desire is the story of Brooks’ intrepid journey toward an understanding of the women behind the veils, and of the often contradictory political, religious, and cultural forces that shape their lives. Defying our stereotypes about the Muslim world, Brooks’ acute analysis of the world’s fastest growing religion deftly illustrates how Islam’s holiest texts have been misused to justify repression of women, and how male pride and power have warped the original message of a once liberating faith.

Snow White, Blood Red

Once upon a time, fairy tales were for children…
But no longer. You hold in your hands a volume of wonders magical tales of trolls and ogres, of bewitched princesses and kingdoms accursed, penned by some of the most acclaimed fantasists of our day. But these are not bedtime stories designed to usher an innocent child gently into a realm of dreams. These are stories that bite lush and erotic, often dark and disturbing mystical journeys through a phantasmagoric landscape of distinctly adult sensibilities…
where there is no such thing as ‘happily ever after.’

Black Thorn, White Rose

Once Upon A Time…
A seduced prince willingly fell prey to a sensuous usurper’s erotic treacheries…
a flesh eating ogre gamboled in the footlights…
a gingerbread man fled in terror from the baking pan to the fire…
The award winning editors of Snow White, Blood Red return us to distinctly adult realms of myth and the fantastic with eighteen wondorous works that cloak the magical fictions we heard at Grandma’s knee in mantles of darkness and dread. From Roger Zelansky’s delightful tale of Death’s disobedient godson to Peter Straub’s blood chilling examination of a gargantuan Cinderella and her terrible twisted ‘art,’ here are stories strange and miraculous remarkable modern storytelling that remold our most cherished childhood fables into things sexier, more sinister…
and more appealing to grown up tastes and sensiblilities.

Ruby Slippers, Golden Tears

‘Once upon a time…
‘ So begin the classic fairy tales that enthralled and terrified us as children. Now, in their third critically acclaimed collection of original fairy tales for adults, World Fantasy Award winning editors Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling bring us twenty one new stories by some of the top names in literature today. Joyce Carol Oates, Gahan Wilson, Gene Wolfe, Tanith Lee, Neil Gaiman these are but a few of the accomplished literary sorcerers who have gathered here to remold our timeless myths into more sensuous and disturbing forms. Like the fabled ruby slippers, there is powerful magic here. Rich witches in trendy resorts cast evil spells…
beautiful princesses age and wither in sleeping worlds…
terrible beasts reside beneath flawless skin. Dark, disturbing, delightful, each story was written expressly for this superb collection of distinctly grown up fantasy a brilliant companion volume to Datlow and Windling’s acclaimed anthologies, Snow White, Blood Red and Black Thorn, White Rose.

Black Swan, White Raven

A stellar assymbly of many of today’s most creative and accomplished storytellers has gathered around the tribal fire to embroider well worn yarns with new golden thread. Black Swan, White Raven revisits the tales that charmed, enthralled, and terrified us in our early youth carrying us aloft into the healthy, beating heart of cherished myth to tell once again the stories of Rumpelstiltskins and sleeping beauties, only this time from an edgy, provocative and distinctly adult perspective. The themes and archetypes of our beloved childhood fiction are reexamined in a darker light by 21 superb teller of tales who deftly uncover the ironic, the outrageous, the enigmatic and the erotic at the core of the world’s best known fables, while revealing the sobering truths and lies behind ‘happily ever after.’

Silver Birch, Blood Moon

The four previous volumes in Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling’s anthology series of fairly tales retold with a distinctively modern edge have been hailded by reviewers as ‘brilliant,’ ‘provocative,’ and ‘disturbing.’ In this triumphant new collection of original fiction, twenty one of today’s leading writers spin the cherished fables of childhood into glittering gold offering magical tales for adults, as seductive as they are sophisticated.A jealous prince plots the destruction of his hated brother’s wedding by inventing a ‘magic’ suit of clothing visible only to the pure at heart…
A young girl’s strange fairy tale obsession results in a brutal murder…
An embittered mother cares for her dying son who is trapped in a thicket that guards a sleeping beauty…
In a bleak and desolate industrial wasteland, a group of violent outcasts lays the tattered myths of one Millenium to rest, and gives terrifying birth to those of the next. Erotic, compelling, witty, and altogether extraordinary, these stories lay bare our innermost demons and desires imaginatively transforming our youthful fantasies into things darker, slyer, and more delightfully subversive.

Black Heart, Ivory Bones

Hair bright as gold…
Lips red as blood…
Heart black as sin…
Truth sharp as bone…
As in their previous critically acclaimed volumes of reconsidered fairy tales, award winning editors Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling have gathered together remarkable stories that illuminate the more sinister, sensual, and sophisticated aspects of the tales we cherished in childhood; the fables of witches and princes and lost children that we once imagined we knew.’ Black Heart, Ivory Bones‘ showcases twenty beguiling tales for the child that was and the adult that is, penned by twenty of the most creative artists in contemporary American literature. Here dissected are the darker anatomies of the timeless, seemingly simple stories we have long loved. Here wonder and truth have serious bite.’ A lovelorn prince seeking his father’s blessing concocts a fantastic tale of a witch, a tower, and lustrous long hair…
A pair of accursed red boots punishes a beautiful dancer for her pride…
A troll killing, princess rescuing warrior is compelled to consider events from his adversaries’ point of view…
In a blistering tell all memoir, Goldilocks reveals the sordid truth about her brutal foster parent, Papa Bear…
‘Rich, surprising, funny, erotic, and unsettling, these twenty new yarns and poems offer exceptional anew treasures as they brilliantly reveal lusts and jealousies, foibles, hatreds and dangerous obsessions, the things that slyly lurk in the midnight interior of oft told tales. As in their previous critically acclaimed volumes of reconsidered fairy tales, award winning editors Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling have gathered together remarkable stories that illuminate the more sinister, sensual,and sophisticated aspects of the tales we cherished in childhood; the fables of witches and princes and lost children that we once imagined we knew. Black Heart, Ivory Bones showcases twenty beguiling tales for the child that was and the adult that is, penned by twenty of the most creative artists in contemporary American literature. Here dissected are the darker anatomies of the timeless, seemingly simple stories we have long loved. Here wonder and truth have serious bite.’A lovelorn prince seeking his father’s blessing concocts a fantastic tale of a witch, a tower, and lustrous long hair…
A pair of accursed red boots punishes a beautiful dancer for her pride…
A troll killing, princess rescuing warrior is compelled to consider events from his adversaries’ point of view…
In a blistering tell all memoir, Goldilocks reveals the sordid truth about her brutal foster parent, Papa Bear…
Rich, surprising, funny, erotic, and unsettling, these twenty new yarns and poems offer exceptional new treasures as they brilliantly reveal lusts and jealousies, foibles, hatreds, and dangerous obsessions, the things that slyly lurk in the midnight interior of oft told tales. As in their previous critically acclaimed volumes of reconsidered fairy tales, award winning editors Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling have gathered together remarkable stories that illuminate the more sinister, sensual, and sophisticated aspects of the tales we cherished in childhood; the fables of witches and princes and lost children that we once imagined we knew. Black Heart, Ivory Bones showcases twenty beguiling tales for the child that was and the adult that is, penned by twenty of the most creative artists incontemporary American literature. Here dissected are the darker anatomies of the timeless, seemingly simple stories we have long loved. Here wonder and truth have serious bite.’A lovelorn prince seeking his father’s blessing concocts a fantastic tale of a witch, a tower, and lustrous long hair…
A pair of accursed red boots punishes a beautiful dancer for her pride…
A troll killing, princess rescuing warrior is compelled to consider events from his adversaries’ point of view…
In a blistering tell all memoir, Goldilocks reveals the sordid truth about her brutal foster parent, Papa Bear…
Rich, surprising, funny, erotic, and unsettling, these twenty new yarns and poems offer exceptional new treasures as they brilliantly reveal lusts and jealousies, foibles, hatreds, and dangerous obsessions, the things that slyly lurk in the midnight interior of oft told tales.

The World’s Finest Mystery and Crime Stories 1

More than 200,000 words of great crime and suspense fictionEach year, Ed Gorman and Martin H. Greenberg, editors of The World’s Finest Mystery and Crime Stories, have reached farther past the boundaries of the United States to find the very best suspense from the world over. In this third volume of their series they have included stories from Germany, Belgium, and the United Kingdom as well as, of course, a number of fine stories from the U.S.A. Among these tales are winners of the Edgar Award, the Silver Dagger Award of the British Crime Writers, and other major awards in the field. In addition, here are reports on the field of mystery and crime writing from correspondents in the U.S. Jon L. Breen, England Maxim Jakubowski, Canada Edo Van Belkom, Australia David Honeybone, and Germany Thomas Woertche. Altogether, with nearly 250,000 words of the best short suspense published in 2001, this bounteous volume is, as the Wall Street Journal said of the previous year s compilation, the best value for money of any such anthology. The A to Z of the authors should excite the interest of any mystery reader:Robert Barnard Lawrence Block Jon L. Breen Wolfgang Burger Lillian Stewart Carl Margaret Coel Max Allan Collins Bill Crider Jeffery Deaver Brendan DuBois Susanna Gregory Joseph Hansen Carolyn G. Hart Lauren Henderson Edward D. Hoch Clark Howard Tatjana Kruse Paul Lascaux Dick Lochte Peter Lovesey Mary Jane Maffini Ed McBain Val McDermid Marcia Muller Joyce Carol Oates Anne Perry Nancy Pickard Bill Pronzini Ruth Rendell S. J. Rozan Billie Rubin Kristine Kathryn Rusch Stephan Rykena David B. Silva Nancy Springer Jac. Toes John Vermeulen Donald E. Westlake Carolyn Wheat.

The World’s Finest Mystery and Crime Stories 2

More than 200,000 words of great crime and suspense fictionEach year, Ed Gorman and Martin H. Greenberg, editors of The World’s Finest Mystery and Crime Stories, have reached farther past the boundaries of the United States to find the very best suspense from the world over. In this third volume of their series they have included stories from Germany, Belgium, and the United Kingdom as well as, of course, a number of fine stories from the U.S.A. Among these tales are winners of the Edgar Award, the Silver Dagger Award of the British Crime Writers, and other major awards in the field. In addition, here are reports on the field of mystery and crime writing from correspondents in the U.S. Jon L. Breen, England Maxim Jakubowski, Canada Edo Van Belkom, Australia David Honeybone, and Germany Thomas Woertche. Altogether, with nearly 250,000 words of the best short suspense published in 2001, this bounteous volume is, as the Wall Street Journal said of the previous year s compilation, the best value for money of any such anthology. The A to Z of the authors should excite the interest of any mystery reader:Robert Barnard Lawrence Block Jon L. Breen Wolfgang Burger Lillian Stewart Carl Margaret Coel Max Allan Collins Bill Crider Jeffery Deaver Brendan DuBois Susanna Gregory Joseph Hansen Carolyn G. Hart Lauren Henderson Edward D. Hoch Clark Howard Tatjana Kruse Paul Lascaux Dick Lochte Peter Lovesey Mary Jane Maffini Ed McBain Val McDermid Marcia Muller Joyce Carol Oates Anne Perry Nancy Pickard Bill Pronzini Ruth Rendell S. J. Rozan Billie Rubin Kristine Kathryn Rusch Stephan Rykena David B. Silva Nancy Springer Jac. Toes John Vermeulen Donald E. Westlake Carolyn Wheat.

The World’s Finest Mystery and Crime Stories 3

More than 200,000 words of great crime and suspense fictionEach year, Ed Gorman and Martin H. Greenberg, editors of The World’s Finest Mystery and Crime Stories, have reached farther past the boundaries of the United States to find the very best suspense from the world over. In this third volume of their series they have included stories from Germany, Belgium, and the United Kingdom as well as, of course, a number of fine stories from the U.S.A. Among these tales are winners of the Edgar Award, the Silver Dagger Award of the British Crime Writers, and other major awards in the field. In addition, here are reports on the field of mystery and crime writing from correspondents in the U.S. Jon L. Breen, England Maxim Jakubowski, Canada Edo Van Belkom, Australia David Honeybone, and Germany Thomas Woertche. Altogether, with nearly 250,000 words of the best short suspense published in 2001, this bounteous volume is, as the Wall Street Journal said of the previous year s compilation, the best value for money of any such anthology. The A to Z of the authors should excite the interest of any mystery reader:Robert Barnard Lawrence Block Jon L. Breen Wolfgang Burger Lillian Stewart Carl Margaret Coel Max Allan Collins Bill Crider Jeffery Deaver Brendan DuBois Susanna Gregory Joseph Hansen Carolyn G. Hart Lauren Henderson Edward D. Hoch Clark Howard Tatjana Kruse Paul Lascaux Dick Lochte Peter Lovesey Mary Jane Maffini Ed McBain Val McDermid Marcia Muller Joyce Carol Oates Anne Perry Nancy Pickard Bill Pronzini Ruth Rendell S. J. Rozan Billie Rubin Kristine Kathryn Rusch Stephan Rykena David B. Silva Nancy Springer Jac. Toes John Vermeulen Donald E. Westlake Carolyn Wheat.

The World’s Finest Mystery and Crime Stories 4

More than 200,000 words of great crime and suspense fictionEach year, Ed Gorman and Martin H. Greenberg, editors of The World’s Finest Mystery and Crime Stories, have reached farther past the boundaries of the United States to find the very best suspense from the world over. In this third volume of their series they have included stories from Germany, Belgium, and the United Kingdom as well as, of course, a number of fine stories from the U.S.A. Among these tales are winners of the Edgar Award, the Silver Dagger Award of the British Crime Writers, and other major awards in the field. In addition, here are reports on the field of mystery and crime writing from correspondents in the U.S. Jon L. Breen, England Maxim Jakubowski, Canada Edo Van Belkom, Australia David Honeybone, and Germany Thomas Woertche. Altogether, with nearly 250,000 words of the best short suspense published in 2001, this bounteous volume is, as the Wall Street Journal said of the previous year s compilation, the best value for money of any such anthology. The A to Z of the authors should excite the interest of any mystery reader:Robert Barnard Lawrence Block Jon L. Breen Wolfgang Burger Lillian Stewart Carl Margaret Coel Max Allan Collins Bill Crider Jeffery Deaver Brendan DuBois Susanna Gregory Joseph Hansen Carolyn G. Hart Lauren Henderson Edward D. Hoch Clark Howard Tatjana Kruse Paul Lascaux Dick Lochte Peter Lovesey Mary Jane Maffini Ed McBain Val McDermid Marcia Muller Joyce Carol Oates Anne Perry Nancy Pickard Bill Pronzini Ruth Rendell S. J. Rozan Billie Rubin Kristine Kathryn Rusch Stephan Rykena David B. Silva Nancy Springer Jac. Toes John Vermeulen Donald E. Westlake Carolyn Wheat.

The World’s Finest Mystery and Crime Stories 5

More than 200,000 words of great crime and suspense fictionEach year, Ed Gorman and Martin H. Greenberg, editors of The World’s Finest Mystery and Crime Stories, have reached farther past the boundaries of the United States to find the very best suspense from the world over. In this third volume of their series they have included stories from Germany, Belgium, and the United Kingdom as well as, of course, a number of fine stories from the U.S.A. Among these tales are winners of the Edgar Award, the Silver Dagger Award of the British Crime Writers, and other major awards in the field. In addition, here are reports on the field of mystery and crime writing from correspondents in the U.S. Jon L. Breen, England Maxim Jakubowski, Canada Edo Van Belkom, Australia David Honeybone, and Germany Thomas Woertche. Altogether, with nearly 250,000 words of the best short suspense published in 2001, this bounteous volume is, as the Wall Street Journal said of the previous year s compilation, the best value for money of any such anthology. The A to Z of the authors should excite the interest of any mystery reader:Robert Barnard Lawrence Block Jon L. Breen Wolfgang Burger Lillian Stewart Carl Margaret Coel Max Allan Collins Bill Crider Jeffery Deaver Brendan DuBois Susanna Gregory Joseph Hansen Carolyn G. Hart Lauren Henderson Edward D. Hoch Clark Howard Tatjana Kruse Paul Lascaux Dick Lochte Peter Lovesey Mary Jane Maffini Ed McBain Val McDermid Marcia Muller Joyce Carol Oates Anne Perry Nancy Pickard Bill Pronzini Ruth Rendell S. J. Rozan Billie Rubin Kristine Kathryn Rusch Stephan Rykena David B. Silva Nancy Springer Jac. Toes John Vermeulen Donald E. Westlake Carolyn Wheat.

The Dark Descent

In The Dark Descent, hailed as one of the most important anthologies ever to examine horror fiction, editor David G. Hartwell traces the complex history of horror in literature back to the earliest short stories. The Dark Descent, which won the World Fantasy Award for Best Anthology, showcases the finest of these ever written from the time honored classics of Edgar Allan Poe, D.H. Lawrence, and Edith Wharton to the contemporary writing of Stephen King, Clive Barker, and Ray Bradbury.

The Oxford Book of American Short Stories

‘How ironic,’ Joyce Carol Oates writes in her introduction to this marvelous collection, ‘that in our age of rapid mass-production and the easy proliferation of consumer products, the richness and diversity of the American literary imagination should be so misrepresented in most anthologies.’ Why, she asks, when writers such as Samuel Clemens, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor, Saul Bellow, and John Updike have among them written hundreds of short stories, do anthologists settle on the same two or three titles by each author again and again? ‘Isn’t the implicit promise of an anthology that it will, or aspires to, present something different, unexpected?’

In The Oxford Book of American Short Stories, Joyce Carol Oates offers a sweeping survey of American short fiction, in a collection of fifty-six tales that combines classic works with many ‘different, unexpected’ gems, and that invites readers to explore a wealth of important pieces by women and minority writers. Some selections simply can’t be improved on, Oates admits, and she happily includes such time-honored works as Irving’s ‘Rip Van Winkle,’ Poe’s ‘The Tell-Tale Heart,’ and Hemingway’s ‘A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.’ But alongside these classics, Oates introduces such little-known stories as Mark Twain’s ‘Cannibalism in the Cars,’ a story that reveals a darker side to his humor ‘That morning we had Morgan of Alabama for breakfast. He was one of the finest men I ever sat down to…
a perfect gentleman, and singularly juicy’. From Melville come the juxtaposed tales ‘The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids,’ of which Oates says, ‘Only Melville could have fashioned out of ‘real’ events…
such harrowing and dreamlike allegorical fiction.’ From Flannery O’Connor we find ‘A Late Encounter With the Enemy,’ and from John Cheever, ‘The Death of Justina,’ one of Cheever’s own favorites, though rarely anthologized. The reader will also delight in the range of authors found here, from Charles W. Chesnutt, Jean Toomer, and Sarah Orne Jewett, to William Carlos Williams, Kate Chopin, and Zora Neale Hurston. Contemporary artists abound, including Bharati Mukherjee and Amy Tan, Alice Adams and David Leavitt, Bobbie Ann Mason and Tim O’Brien, Louise Erdrich and John Edgar Wideman. Oates provides fascinating introductions to each writer, blending biographical information with her own trenchant observations about their work, plus a long introductory essay, in which she offers the fruit of years of reflection on a genre in which she herself is a master.

This then is a book of surprises, a fascinating portrait of American short fiction, as filtered through the sensibility of a major modern writer.

Telling Stories

Drawing on syllabi for Joyce Carol Oates’s own writing seminar at Princeton University, Telling Stories gathers over one hundred works of narrative art ‘miniature’ narratives, dramatic monologues, early stories by well known writers, prose pieces inspired by myth, legend, and folktale, poems that tell stories, memoir and diary excerpts, two examples of genre fiction, and a generous sampling of classic and contemporary short stories selected to stimulate and inspire beginning writers as they practice and perfect their craft. Oates s chapter introductions and afterword on the writing workshop offer students encouragement, advice, and exercises for honing their skills. As a teacher, Oates emphasizes the importance of reading widely with enthusiasm, pleasure, and purpose. Telling Stories reflects this emphasis, introducing students to a variety of models for their own writing and encouraging them to concentrate on details, revise often, make material their own, experiment with genre, and ultimately find their own voice. Edited by a contemporary master of the storyteller s art ‘who defines herself primarily as a friend of the text and a friend of the writer,’ Telling Stories is the perfect anthology for creative writing workshops and fiction clas*ses and a wellspring of inspiration for any beginning writer. ‘The love of storytelling to hear stories, and to tell them is universal in our species. Those with an apparent talent for writing…
are not of a special breed but simply mirror the common human desire. If you have a natural talent for writing, and a love of the imagination, you risk a lifelong deprivation if you fail to cultivate it as vigorously as you can. Write your own great American novel…
you re talented, you re intelligent, you have the driving passion, and you know as much as anyone about American life. Your story belongs uniquely to you.’ Joyce Carol Oates, from the Introduction

The Best of the Best

Stephen King Joyce Carol Oates Nancy Taylor Rosenberg Sharyn McCrumb Joy Fielding Lisa Alther Erica Jong Lawrence Block Ed McBain Eileen Goudge Tabitha King Larry Collins Stephen Frey Joan Hess Wendy Hornsby Jeffery Deaver Linda Lay Shuler E.L Doctorow. To commemorate its 50th anniversary, Signet is proud to present The Best of the Best a one of a kind collection of all original stories by some of the biggest names in publishing! From gripping tales of suspense to powerful stories of human triumph, this special hardcover focuses on the broad range of genres and authors that continues to define the Signet name!

Murder for Revenge

A high school wallflower cooks up justice la carte at her 20th reunion…
A submissive wife sails her domineering husband straight to hell…
A man disposes of his enemy in a murder only a writer could commit. This irresistible collection of original stories was born of a deliciously wicked idea: ask twelve of America’s best writers to explore a single subject people willing, often gleefully so, to kill for revenge. The result is a star studded gathering of fiction’s finest, and an infinitely satisfying banquet of…
Murder for Revenge. In Lawrence Block’s chilling contribution, a serial killer transforms one victim’s brother into his greatest defender to his eternal regret! Revenge more immediate sizzles in Mary Higgins Clark’s ‘Power Play,’ as a dashing ex president and his congresswoman wife outwit terrorists hunting bigger game. Phillip Margolin’s career criminal has an alibi to die for which becomes a nail in the coffin of self defense. Joyce Carol Oates administers revenge most satisfying in ‘Murder Two’ as a brilliant lawyer defends her first criminal client her worst enemy’s son. And in Peter Straub’s ‘Mr. Clubb and Mr. Cuff,’ a betrayed husband discovers that if you have to ask the price of revenge, you can’t afford to pay for it. Here is delicious retribution in these and seven more superb, all new stories by Thomas H. Cook, Vicki Hendricks, Joan Hess, Judith Kelman, Eric Lustbader, David Morrell, and Shel Silverstein: America’s favorite writers gathered together in one unforgettable volume a wickedly entertaining exploration of sweet, cold blooded revenge. Otto Penzler is the owner of The Mysterious Bookshops in New York City, Los Angeles, and London. The founder of The Mysterious Press and Otto Penzler Books, he is also the editor of the acclaimed collection Murder for Love. He received an Edgar Award for the Encyclopedia of Mystery and Detection, and was honored by the Mystery Writers of America in 1994 with the Ellery Queen Award for his contributions in the publishing field. He lives in New York City.

The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror: Eleventh Annual Collection

Culled from the best of a wide variety of sources, this eleventh annual collection of fantasy fiction features contributions by Kim Newman, Joyce Carol Oates, Ellen Kushner, Jack Womack, Karen Joy Fowler, and others.

The Best American Mystery Stories 1999

In its brief existence, THE BEST AMERICAN MYSTERY STORIES has established itself as a peerless suspense anthology. Compiled by the best selling mystery novelist Ed McBain, this year’s edition boasts nineteen outstanding tales by such masters as John Updike, Lawrence Block, Jeffery Deaver, and Joyce Carol Oates as well as stories by rising stars such as Edgar Award winners Tom Franklin and Thomas H. Cook. The 1999 volume is a spectacular showcase for the high quality and broad diversity of the year’s finest suspense, crime, and mystery writing. ‘Keller’s Last Refuge’ by Lawrence Block, ‘Safe’ by Gary A. Braunbeck, ‘Fatherhood’ by Thomas H. Cook, ‘Wrong Time, Wrong Place’ by Jeffery Deaver, ‘Netmail’ by Brendan DuBois, ‘Redneck’ by Loren D. Estleman, ‘And Maybe the Horse Will Learn to Sing’ by Gregory Fallis, ‘Poachers’ by Tom Franklin, ‘Hitting Rufus’ by Victor Gischler, ‘Out There in the Darkness’ by Ed Gorman, ‘Survival’ by Joseph Hansen, ‘A Death on the Ho Chi Minh Trail’ by David K. Harford, ‘An Innocent Bystander’ by Gary Krist, ‘The Jailhouse Lawyer’ by Phillip M. Margolin, ‘Secret, Silent’ by Joyce Carol Oates, ‘In Flanders Fields’ by Peter Robinson, ‘Dry Whiskey’ by David B. Silva, ‘Sacrifice’ by L. L. Thrasher, ‘Bech Noir’ by John Updike

The Best American Mystery Stories of the Century

In The Best American Mystery Stories of the Century, best selling author Tony Hillerman and mystery expert Otto Penzler present an unparalleled treasury of American suspense fiction that every fan will cherish. Offering the finest examples from all reaches of the genre, this collection charts the mystery’s eminent history from the turn of the century puzzles of Futrelle, to the seminal pulp fiction of Hammett and Chandler, to the mystery story’s rise to legitimacy in the popular mind, a trend that has benefited masterly writers like Westlake, Hunter, and Grafton. Nowhere else can readers find a more thorough, more engaging, more essential distillation of American crime fiction. Penzler, BEST AMERICAN MYSTERY STORIES series editor, and Hillerman, whose Leaphorn/Chee novels have won him multiple Edgar Awards and millions of devotees, winnowed this select group out of a thousand stories, drawing on sources as diverse as ELLERY QUEEN’S MYSTERY MAGAZINE and ESQUIRE, COLLIER’S and THE NEW YORKER. Giants of the genre abound Raymond Chandler, Stephen King, Dashiell Hammett, Lawrence Block, Ellery Queen, Sara Paretsky, and others but the editors also unearthed gems by luminaries rarely found in suspense anthologies: William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, Damon Runyon, Harlan Ellison, James Thurber, and Joyce Carol Oates. Mystery buffs and newcomers alike will delight in the thrilling stories and top notch writing of a hundred years’ worth of the finest suspense, crime, and mystery writing.

The Best American Mystery Stories 2001

Since its inception in 1915, the Best American series has become the premier annual showcase for the country’s finest short fiction and nonfiction. For each volume, a series editor reads hundreds of pieces from dozens of periodicals, then selects between fifty and a hundred outstanding works. That selection is pared down to the twenty or so very best pieces by a guest editor who is widely recognized as a leading writer in his or her field. This unique system has helped make the Best American series the most respected and most popular of its kind. The Best American Mystery Stories 2001 will thrill fans of all reaches of the genre. The legendary mystery writer Lawrence Block offers chilling tales from best selling writers as well as talented up and comers. Ranging from traditional detective cases to psychological studies to atmospheric scene setters, these stories illustrate the variety and broad range of styles, plots, and characters Block admires in the genre. With Block as guest editor and a stellar roster of suspense veterans and rising stars, the 2001 edition will delight mystery afcionados and all lovers of great fiction.

Opening Shots, Vol. II

This second volume of Opening Shots is a collection of twenty three first stories published by prominent mystery and crime writers. Some of these offerings are remarkably mature, professional work. Others are more obviously early works, before the writers’ skills reached full maturity. But every one of them is a pleasure to read, and in each can be seen the seed of the writer’s craft. ‘Each writer has included an introduction worth the price of admission all by themselves,’ observes Block. ‘Writers, it seems to me, are never more eloquent or more interesting that when they reminisce about their early days, and recalling one’s first success seems a spur of anecdotage for most of us.’ Following on the heels of the successful first volume of this series, the stories in this stellar field include: ‘Final Rites’ by Doug Allyn ‘Don’t Kill a Karate Fighter’ by William Chambers ‘Entrapped’ by Harlan Coben ‘Yellow Gal’ by Michael Collins ‘Together’ by Jeffrey Deaver ‘The Rough Boys’ by Harlan Ellison ‘Tole My Cap’n’ by Joe Gores ‘Layover’ by Ed Gorman ‘A Bunch of Mumbo Jumbo’ by Jan Grape ‘The Cure’ by David Handler ‘Till Tuesday’ by Jeremiah Healy ‘Village of the Dead’ by Edward D. Hoch ‘Chalk’ by Evan Hunter ‘It’s a Wise Child Who Knows’ by Stuart Kaminsky ‘Who Killed Co*ck Robin?’ by H. R. F. Keating ‘Medford & Son’ by Dick Lochte ‘Thieves’ Honor’ by John Lutz ‘Not All Brides Are Beautiful’ by Sharyn McCrumb ‘Manslaughter’ by Joyce Carol Oates ‘You Don’t Know What It’s Like’ by Bill Pronzini ‘The Disappearance of Penny’ by Robert J. Randisi ‘A Victim Must Be Found’ by Henry Slesar ‘Blue Rose’ by Peter Straub ‘A Bad Night For Burglars’ by Lawrence Block

The Best American Mystery Stories 2003

This seventh installment of the premier mystery anthology boasts pulse quickening stories from all reaches of the genre, selected by the world renowned mystery writer Michael Connelly. His choices include a Prohibition era tale of a scorned lover’s revenge, a Sherlock Holmes inspired mystery solved by an actor playing the famous detective onstage, stories of a woman’s near fatal search for self discovery, a bar owner’s gutsy attempt to outwit the mob, and a showdown between double crossing detectives, and a tale of murder by psychology. This year’s edition features mystery favorites Elmore Leonard, Walter Mosley, James Crumley, Joyce Carol Oates, and Brendan DuBois as well as talented up and comers, for a diverse collection sure to thrill all readers. Since its inception in 1915, the Best American series has become the premier annual showcase for the country’s finest short fiction and nonfiction. For each volume, a series editor reads pieces from hundreds of periodicals, then selects between fifty and a hundred outstanding works. That selection is pared down to twenty or so very best pieces by a guest editor who is widely recognized as a leading writer in his or her field. This unique system has helped make the Best American series the most respected and most popular of its kind. Edgar Award winner Michael Connelly has chosen a collection of stellar stories by the genre’s luminaries and by the most promising newer talents in the field. As usual, this year’s Best American Mystery Stories will delight readers with dramatic variety and unsurpassed quality. James CrumleyPete DexterBrendan DuBoisElmore LeonardWalter MosleyJoyce Carol Oates

The Future Dictionary of America

This book was conceived by Safran Foer Foer, Nicole Krauss, and Dave Eggers as a way to bring over a hundred authors together to promote progressive causes in the November 2004 election. The book is an imagining of what a dictionary might look like about thirty years hence, when all of the world’s problems are solved and our current president is a distant memory. The book is by turns funny, outraged, utopian, and dyspeptic. Over 150 writers contributed to the book, including: Stephen King, Robert Olen Butler, Glen David Gold, Richard Powers, Susan Straight, Sarah Vowell, Billy Collins, C.K. Williams, Colson Whitehead, Donald Antrim, Jonathan Franzen, Edwidge Danticat, Edward Hirsch, Joyce Carol Oates, Katha Pollitt, Padgett Powell, Paul Auster, Anthony Swofford, Julia Alvarez, Susan Choi, Jim Shepard, Aimee Bender, and Art Spiegelman. Hardcover editions of the book will also include a CD compilation, with all new songs by the best musicians working. Among them: David Byrne, R.E.M., Death Cab for Cutie, Moby, Sleater Kinney, Flaming Lips, Tom Waits, Yo La Tengo, Bright Eyes, They Might Be Giants, Elliott Smith, and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.

Dangerous Women

Prepare to meet the most seductively female and the most shockingly fatal of femmes fatales, brought to you by seventeen of today’s finest authors of mystery and suspense fiction. Award winning editor Otto Penzler presents a collection of short and sizzling masterpieces of kisses and kiss offs, gams and gats, published for the first time anywhere. In ‘Third Party,’ Jay McInerney takes you on a wild ride through the Paris night with a party girl built for speed and sin ‘Rendezvous,’ Nelson DeMille’s first short story in twenty five years, plunges you into a Vietnam jungle where the bloodiest scourge of this man’s army is no man at all back in the U.S.A. of ‘Louly and Pretty Boy,’ Elmore Leonard introduces a Depression era teenage gun moll who loves Pretty Boy Floyd more than she likes knocking off filling stations and Michael Connelly’s colorful and ironic ‘Cielo Azul’ shows how a nameless woman left dead on a Los Angeles hillside can be the most lethal prey of all. These and a bevy of other very bad girls cast their criminal spells through the powerful voices of Lorenzo Carcaterra, Joyce Carol Oates, John Connolly, Thomas H. Cook, Jeffery Deaver, J. A. Jance, Andrew Klavan, Laura Lippman, Ed McBain, Walter Mosley, Anne Perry, Ian Rankin, and S. J. Rozan in stories as irresistible as the antihero*ines that blaze through their pages.’I’m not usually given to superlatives, but Dangerous Women may be the best, most varied, and colorful mystery anthology of all time.’ Janet Evanovich’Otto Penzler knows more about crime fiction than most people know about anything, and proves it once more in this brilliant anthology.’ Robert B. Parker’Wow, what memorable dames! What terrific short stories! Dangerous Women is a winning collection.’ Susan Isaacs

Transgressions

Forge Books is proud to present an amazing collection of novellas, compiled by New York Times bestselling author Ed McBain. Transgressions is a quintessential classic of never before published tales from today’s very best novelists. Faeturing: ‘Walking Around Money’ by Donald E. Westlake: The master of the comic mystery is back with an all new novella featuring hapless crook John Dortmunder, who gets involved in a crime that supposedly no one will ever know happened. Naturally, when something it too good to be true, it usually is, and Dortmunder is going to get to the bottom of this caper before he’s left holding the bag.’Hostages’ by Anne Perry: The bestselling historical mystery author has written a tale of beautiful yet still savage Ireland today. In their eternal struggle for freedom, there is about to be a changing of the guard in the Irish Republican Army. Yet for some, old habits and honor still die hard, even at gunpoint.’The Corn Maiden’ by Joyce Carol Oates: When a fourteen year old girl is abducted in a small New York town, the crime starts a spiral of destruction and despair as only this master of psychological suspense could write it.’Archibald Lawless, Anarchist at Large: Walking the Line’ by Walter Mosley: Felix Orlean is a New York City journalism student who needs a job to cover his rent. An ad in the paper leads him to Archibald Lawless, and a descent into a shadow world where no one and nothing is as it first seems.’The Resurrection Man’ by Sharyn McCrumb’: During America’s first century, doctors used any means necessary to advance their craft including dissecting corpses. Sharyn McCrumb brings the South of the 1850s to life in this story of a man who is assigned to dig up bodies to help those that are still alive.’Merely Hate’ by Ed McBain: When a string of Muslim cabdrivers are killed, and the evidence points to another ethnic group, the detectives of the 87th Precinct must hunt down a killer before the city explodes in violence.’The Things They Left Behind’ by Stephen King: In the wake of the worst disaster on American soil, one man is coming to terms with the aftermath of the Twin Towers when he begins finding the things they left behind.’The Ransome Women’ by John Farris: A young and beautiful starving artist is looking to catch a break when her idol, the reclusive portraitist John Ransome offers her a lucrative year long modeling contract. But how long will her excitement last when she discovers the fate shared by all Ransome’s past subjects? ‘Forever’ by Jeffery Deaver: Talbot Simms is an unusual cop he’s a statistician with the Westbrook County Sheriff Department. When two wealthy couples in the county commit suicide one right after the other, he thinks that it isn’t suicide it’s murder, and he’s going to find how who was behind it, and how the did it.’Keller’s Adjustment’ by Lawrence Block: Everyone’s favorite hit man is back in MWA Grand Master Lawrence Block’s novella, where the philosophical Keller deals out philosophy and murder on a meandering road trip from one end of the America to the other.

The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror: Twentieth Annual Collection

For twenty years this award winning compilation has been the nonpareil benchmark against which all other annual fantasy and horror collections are judged. Directed first by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling and for the past four years by Datlow and Kelly Link & Gavin J. Grant, it consistently presents the strangest, the funniest, the darkest, the sharpest, the most original in short, the best fantasy and horror. The current collection, marking a score of years, offers more than forty stories and poems from almost as many sources. Summations of the field by the editors are complemented by articles by Edward Bryant, Charles de Lint and Jeff VanderMeer highlighting the best of the fantastic in, respectively, media, music and comics as well as honorable mentions notable works that didn t quite make the cut but are nonetheless worthy of attention. The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror: 20th Annual Collection is a cornucopia of fantastic delights, an unparalleled resource and indispensable reference that captures the unique excitement and beauty of the fantastic in all its gloriously diverse forms, from the lightest fantasy to the darkest horror.

The Best American Mystery Stories 2007

The best selling author Carl Hiaasen takes the reins for the eleventh edition of this series, featuring twenty of the past year’s most distinguished tales of mystery, crime, and suspense. Laura Lippman introduces us to a suburban soccer mom who moonlights as a call girl and who has a fateful encounter with a former client at her son s soccer game. Ridley Pearson traces a famous author of horror tales who becomes trapped in a real one after his wife vanishes while jogging. Joyce Carol Oates travels to a New Jersey racetrack where the animals that break down are of the two legged type. Lawrence Block tells the story of Keller, a hitman for hire who happens to live in Greenwich Village, loves spicy food, and collects stamps as a hobby. And Scott Wolven plunges us into the world of an ex con who takes a job at a private and very illegal Nevada racetrack where each day millions are won and lost. Mostly lost. As Carl Hiaasen notes in his introduction, The stories in this collection would do honor to any anthology of short literature. More than transcending the genre of crime, they blow away its nebulous boundaries. The Best American Mystery Stories 2007 is a powerful collection certain to delight mystery aficionados and all lovers of great fiction.

Unforgettable Ghost Stories by Women Writers

Assembled by a noted anthologist, this unique collection presents 18 supernatural fables by female masters of the genre. Haunting tales include ‘The Lost Ghost,’ by Mary Wilkins Freeman, ‘Kerfol’ by Edith Wharton, Mary Molesworth’s ‘The Shadow in the Moonlight,’ and ‘From the Dead’ by E. Nesbit. Each story features a brief author biography.

The Best American Mystery Stories 2009

Best selling novelist Jeffrey Deaver edits this latest collection of the genre’s finest from the past year. Featuring ‘gritty tales told with panache,’ this is a ‘must read for anybody who cares about crime stories’ Booklist.

Hint Fiction

A story collection that proves less is more. The stories in this collection run the gamut from playful to tragic, conservative to experimental, but they all have one thing in common: they are no more than 25 words long. Robert Swartwood was inspired by Ernest Hemingway’s possibly apocryphal six word story ‘For Sale: baby shoes, never worn’ to foster the writing of these incredibly short short stories. He termed them ‘Hint Fiction‘ because the few chosen words suggest a larger, more complex chain of events. Spare and evocative, these stories prove that a brilliantly honed narrative can be as startling and powerful as a story of traditional length. The 125 gemlike stories in this collection come from such best selling and award winning authors as Joyce Carol Oates, Ha Jin, Peter Straub, and James Frey, as well as emerging writers.

What You Wish For: A Book for Darfur

A stellar collection from Newbery medalists and bestselling authors written to benefit Darfuri refugeesWith contributions from some of the best talent writing for children today, What You Wish For is a compelling collection of affecting, inspiring, creepy, and oft times funny short stories and poems all linked by the universal power of a wish the abstract things we all wish for home, family, safety and love. From the exchange of letters between two girls who have never met but are both struggling with the unexpected curves of life, to the stunning sacrifice one dying girl makes for another, to the mermaid who trades her tail for legs, to the boy who unwittingly steals an imp’s house, and to the chilling retelling of Cinderella, What You Wish For brings together a potent international roster of authors of note to remember and celebrate the Darfuri refugees and their incredible story of survival and hope.

Cutting Edge: New Stories of Mystery and Crime by Women Writers

Audio CD, Highbridge Audio and Blackstone Publishing

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