Black Dahlia & White Rose: Stories

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Description

Unafraid to venture into no-mans-lands both real and surreal, Oates takes readers deep into dangerous territory in eleven stories that showcase the keen rewards of her relentless brio and invention. Whether charting the inner lives of two beautiful and mysteriously doomed young women in 1940s Los AngelesElizabeth Short, otherwise known as the Black Dahlia, and her roommate Norma Jeane Baker, soon to become Marilyn Monroethe psychological compulsion of the wife of a well-to-do businessman who is ravished by, and elopes with, a lover who is not what he seems, or the uneasily duplicitous relationships between young women and their parents, Black Dahlia & White Rose explores the menace that lurks at the edges of and intrudes upon even the seemingly safest of livesand maps with rare emotional acuity the transformational cost of such intrusions.

Reviews

"This latest collection... showcases [Oates's] talent for imbuing mundane events with menace and the kind of irony that springs from narrow brushes with disaster... Oates' hypnotic prose ensures that readers will be unable to look away." -- Kirkus "[A] masterfully honed collection of dark tales... With precision and force, the ever-mesmerizing Oates rips open the scrim of ordinariness to expose the chaos that undermines every human notion of control, reason, and sanctuary." -- Booklist

Author Bio

Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Book Award and the PEN / Malamud Award, and has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Her books include We Were the Mulvaneys, Blonde, Carthage, A Book of American Martyrs and Hazards of Time Travel. She is Professor of Humanities at Princeton University.