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Ecco
384 pages
Product Description
<p> </p><blockquote> A gripping and moving new collection of stories that reimagines the meaning of loss—through often unexpected and violent means. <p></p> </blockquote> <p> Joyce Carol Oates is not only one of our most important novelists and literary critics, she is also an unparalleled master of the short story. <i>Sourland</i>—sixteen previously uncollected stories that explore how the power of violence, loss, and grief shape both the psyche and the soul—shows us an author work-ing at the height of her powers. </p> <p> With lapidary precision and an unflinching eye, Oates maps the surprising contours of “ordinary” life. From a desperate man who dons a jack-o’-lantern head as a prelude to a most curious sort of courtship, to a “story of a stabbing” many times recounted in the life of a lonely girl; from a beguiling young woman librarian whose amputee state attracts a married man and father, to a girl hopelessly in love with her renegade, incarcerated cousin; from a professor’s wife who finds herself tragically isolated at a party in her own house, to the concluding title story of an unexpectedly redemptive love rooted in radical aloneness and isolation, each story in <i>Sourland</i> resonates beautifully with Oates’s trademark fascination for the unpredictable amid the prosaic—the comming-ling of sexual love and violence, the tumult of family life—and shines with her predilection for dark humor and her gift for voice. </p>