Review
------
“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.” (NPR Books)
“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.”
(Booklist)
“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
re of hard facts: We’re all in this together, and nobody
gets out alive.” (Kirkus Reviews)
“Here Oates is at her empathetic best.” (Boston Globe)
“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.” (Bookreporter.com)
As the interloping fiancée of “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.” (Publishers Weekly)
“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.” (O, the
Oprah Magazine)
“[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.” (Kansas City Star)
“Inful, 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.”
(Spartanburg Herald Journal)
Read more ( javascript:void(0) )
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 s the eerie darkness
within us all
Inful, 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 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.
Read more ( javascript:void(0) )
See all Editorial Reviews (
/dp/product-description/006235695X/ref=dp_proddesc_0?ie=UTF8&n=283155&s=books&isInIframe=0
)