About the Author

Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Book Award and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction. 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. In 2003 she received the Common Wealth Award for Distinguished Service in Literature, and in 2006 she received the Chicago Tribune Lifetime Achievement Award.

Reviews

"...Innovative, brilliant...there are sentences that leave a deeply sensuous pleasure in their wake..."--San Francisco Chronicle

"...Vivid...the work reflects a delicious boundary-crossing mix of literary artistry and genre-writing skill...This famously prolific writer continues to surprise us, and that in itself is something to celebrate."--Library Journal

"A master class in the art of pure, suspenseful storytelling...Oates is a dangerous writer in the best sense of the word, one who takes risks almost obsessively with energy and relish... [a] dazzling collection."--New York Times

"Making sense of life in a cataclysmic inner and outer landscape has been Joyce Carol Oates' obsession for five decades. This evocative new collection shows just how much sense she can make of it now."--Chicago Tribune

"Oates is just a fearless writer. . . with her brave heart and her impossibly lush and dead-on imaginative powers."--Los Angeles Times

"Oates's fiction has the curious, morbid draw of a flaming car wreck. It's a testament to Oates's talent that she can nearly always force the reader to look."--Publishers Weekly

"We think of Oates, like Poe, as a master of terror, but her real mastery is in almost never depicting a strong emotion in isolation...Oates makes for a caustic companion in Sourland - a fearless experimenter forcing the reader ahead of her at knifepoint."--Los Angeles Times