Joyce Carol Oates

"Presents a collection of stories that explores the musings of a writer, a prisoner, a student, and others who consider how their lives might have unfolded differently had they made different choices."--Publisher description.

"Joyce Carol Oates is renowned for her rare ability to "illuminate the mind's most disturbing corners" (Seattle Times). That genius is on full display in her new collection of seven feverishly unsettling works, DIS MEM BER and Other Stories of Mystery and Suspense. In the title story, a precocious eleven-year-old named Jill is in thrall to an older male relative, the mysterious, attractive black sheep of the family. Without telling her parents Jill...

"Time travel" -- and its hazards -- are made literal in this astonishing new novel in which a recklessly idealistic girl dares to test the perimeters of her tightly controlled (future) world and is punished by being sent back in time to a region of North America -- "Wainscotia, Wisconsin" -- that existed eighty years before. Cast adrift in time in this idyllic Midwestern town she is set upon a course of "rehabilitation" -- but cannot resist falling...

Part-time preacher Chester Cash calls himself Daddy Love. He has abducted, tortured, and raped several young boys into being his lover and his 'son'. Kidnapping Robbie from his mother at a mall, he confines the child in a small box and gradually brainwashes him over subsequent years into believing that they are father and son. Dinah, the boy's mother, who was savagely injured during the abduction, clings to hope that her son is alive.

"As a child, Abby had the same recurring nightmare night after night, in which she wandered through a field ridden with human skulls and bones. Now an adult, Abby thinks she's outgrown her demons until, the evening before her wedding, the terrible dream returns, forcing her to confront the dark secrets from her past that she has kept from her new husband, Willem. The following day-less than 24 hours after exchanging vows-Abby steps out into traffic....

"Amid a starkly beautiful but uncanny landscape in New Mexico, a married couple from Cambridge, MA takes residency at a distinguished academic institute. When the husband is stricken with a mysterious illness, misdiagnosed at first, their lives are uprooted and husband and wife each embarks upon a nightmare journey. At thirty-seven, Michaela faces the terrifying prospect of widowhood - and the loss of Gerard, whose identity has greatly shaped her...

Enjoying his successful career and devoted family, a best-selling writer secretly authors a masochist-themed series that threatens his respectable community standing and becomes subject to a plagiarism lawsuit.

From one of our most important contemporary writers, The Doll-Master and Other Tales of Terror is a bold, haunting collection of six stories.--In the title story, a young boy becomes obsessed with his cousin's doll after she tragically passes away from leukemia. As he grows older, he begins to collect ٢found dolls٣ from the surrounding neighborhoods and stores his treasures in the abandoned carriage house on his family's estate. But just what kind...

"In the waning days of the 1970s, the lives of several residents of Detroit and its affluent white suburbs are drawn together following the disappearance of yet another child. Hannah, a wife and mother, begins an affair with a darkly charismatic stranger; Mikey, a young street hustler, finds himself on an unexpected mission to rectify injustice; and then there's the child serial killer known as Babysitter, an enigmatic and elusive figure at the periphery...

Which should prevail: loyalty to family or loyalty to the truth? Is telling the truth ever a mistake and is lying for one's family ever justified? Can one do the right thing, but bitterly regret it? My Life as a Rat follows Violet Rue Kerrigan, a young woman who looks back upon her life in exile from her family following her testimony, at age twelve, concerning what she knew to be the racist murder of an African-American boy by her older brothers....