Joyce Carol Oates

"This novel provides an examination of contemporary America through the prism of a family tragedy: when a powerful parent dies, each of his adult children reacts in startling and unexpected ways, and his grieving widow in the most surprising way of all. Stark and penetrating, it's an exploration of psychological trauma, class warfare, grief, and eventual healing" --Publisher.

Joyce Carol Oates shares her struggle to comprehend a life absent of the partnership that had sustained and defined her for nearly half a century.

"Two hitmen in a depressed rust belt town struggle with a job gone wrong. A girl witnesses a horrifying accident and carries it with her for the rest of her life. Medical students bring a severed foot to a college party. Five-time Pulitzer Prize finalist Joyce Carol Oates has made a career of exploring the forbidden corners of human experience, and the stories collected here, spanning her first three decades as a writer, are among her most unsettling...

"From one of the most important contemporary American writers, Cardiff, by the Sea is a bold, haunting collection of four previously unpublished novellas. Starting with the title novella - in which a romantic-minded young art historian is led to (re)discover a terrifying trauma after inheriting property in faraway Cardiff, Maine - through to "The Surviving Child" - which finds the young new wife of a famous poet's widow haunted by the dead poet's...

A reckless girl dares to test the perimeters of her tightly controlled future world and is punished by being sent to a region of North America eighty years in the past.

Four suburban high school girls are united when a mysterious stranger inspires them to take revenge on a sexually abusive teacher. But when the local jocks decide to teach the girls a lesson, their hard-won freedom becomes a violent trap.