Lovely, Dark, Deep: Stories

From the legendary literary master, winner of the National Book Award and New York Times bestselling author Joyce Carol Oates, a collection of thirteen mesmerizing stories that maps the eerie darkness within us all.Insightful, disturbing, imaginative, and breathtaking in their lyrical precision, the stories in Lovely, Dark, Deep display Joyce Carol Oates’s magnificent ability to make visceral the terror, hurt, and uncertainty that lurks at the edges of ordinary lives.In “Mastiff,” a woman and a man are joined in an erotic bond forged out of terror and gratitude. “Sex with Camel” explores how a sixteen-year-old boy realizes the depth of his love for his grandmother—and how vulnerable those feelings make him. Fearful that that her husband is “disappearing” from their life, a woman becomes obsessed with keeping him in her sight in “The Disappearing.” “A Book of Martyrs” reveals how the end of a pregnancy brings with it the end of a relationship. And in the title story, the elderly Robert Frost is visited by an interviewer, an unsettling young woman, who seems to know a good deal more about his life than she should.A piercing and evocative collection, Lovely, Dark, Deep reveals an artist at the height of her creative power.

NPR Books

“Marvelous. Oates is a giant among us, as prolific as the worst of the writers who produce dreck and turn it into cash, but thoroughly wonderful and important.”

NPR Books

“Where Balzac wanted to give his readers Paris in its entirety, Joyce Carol Oates has dared to give her readers an entire country, our own… [A] collection as alive and as enlivening as any of the earlier volumes in Oates’s already distinguished body of work.”

Booklist

“Oates, one of few writers who achieves excellence in both the novel and the short story, has more than two dozen story collections to her name and she continues to inject new, ambushing power into the form… Oates’ stories seethe and blaze.”

Kirkus Reviews

“As unsympathetic as many of Oates’ mordant and quasi-anonymous characters may appear at first, en masse their fears and anxieties in the face of death and decline epitomize universal recognition of hard facts: We’re all in this together, and nobody gets out alive.”

Boston Globe

“Here Oates is at her empathetic best.”

Bookreporter.comAs the interloping fiancée of

“Oates, a master at work for five decades, is an American literary institution. Surely no collection of short stories, no matter how wonderful or terrible, could break her legacy now. The fact is that this is an excellent collection of short fiction in its own right.”

Publishers Weekly

“Patricide” says of her deceased lover, the Philip Roth-esque Roland Marks, ‘He knew women really well-you could say, the masochistic inner selves of women.’ We might well say the same of Oates, with the same complimentary awe.”

O, the Oprah Magazine

“A master cartographer of inner landscapes, the prolific Oates returns with a virtuosic collection that moves fluently across a range of characters, settings, and moods. In these 13 stories, she opts for a looser, more expressionistic palette as she gazes grimly, gorgeously, into the crucible of mortality.”

Kansas City Star

“[Thirteen] stories, structured into four sections, have a range of subjects and points of view while at the same time probing the innate insecurity in the lives of ordinary people... For readers who are already familiar with Oates, this book will not disappoint.”

Spartanburg Herald Journal

“Insightful, disturbing and mesmerizing in their lyrical precision, the stories in the book display Joyce Carol Oates’ astonishing ability to make visceral the fear, hurt and uncertainty that lurks at the edges of ordinary lives.”

Minneapolis Star Tribune

“With every new book… [Oates] proves anew that she is perhaps our greatest contemporary American writer.”

Roanoke Times

“The unity of Oates’ stories in this collection resides in their confrontation with aging and death, with the various ways life winds down and ends, and with the darker side of our human nature.”

From the Back Cover

A collection of thirteen spellbinding stories from the legendary literary master Joyce Carol Oates, National Book Award winner and New York Times bestselling author, that maps the eerie darkness within us allInsightful, disturbing, imaginative, and mesmerizing in their lyrical precision, the stories in Lovely, Dark, Deep display Joyce Carol Oates's astonishing ability to make visceral the fear, hurt, and uncertainty that lurks at the edges of ordinary lives.In "Mastiff," a woman and a man are joined in an erotic bond forged out of terror and gratitude. Fearful that her husband is vanishing from their life, a woman becomes obsessed with keeping him in her sight in "The Disappearing." "A Book of Martyrs" reveals how the end of a pregnancy brings with it the end of a relationship. And in the title story, the elderly Robert Frost is visited by an interviewer, a troubling young woman, who seems to know a good deal more about his life than she should.A piercing and evocative collection, Lovely, Dark, Deep reveals Joyce Carol Oates at her most imaginative and unsettling.

About the Author

Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Medal of Humanities, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Book Award, and the 2019 Jerusalem Prize, and has been several times nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the national bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys; Blonde, which was nominated for the National Book Award; and the New York Times bestseller The Falls, which won the 2005 Prix Femina. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978.

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