Zero-Sum

(Hardback)

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Zero-sum games are played for lethal stakes in these arresting stories by one of Americas most acclaimed writers.
A brilliant young philosophy student bent on seducing her famous philosopher-mentor finds herself outmaneuvered; diabolically clever high school girls wreak a particularly apt sort of vengeance on sexual predators in their community; a woman stalked by a would-be killer may be confiding in the wrong former lover; a young woman is morbidly obsessed by her unfamiliar new role as mother. In the collections longest story, a much-praised cutting-edge writer cruelly experiments with drafts of his own suicide.

In these powerfully wrought stories that hold a mirror up to our time, Joyce Carol Oates has created a world of erotic obsession, thwarted idealism, and ever-shifting identities. Provocative and stunning, Zero-Sum reinforces Oatess standing as a literary treasure and an artist of the mysterious interior life.

This writer is a phenomenon Daily Mail

Reviews

Americans pre-eminent fiction writer New Yorker

Simply the most consistently inventive, brilliant, curious and creative writer going Gillian Flynn, author of Gone Girl

A writer of extraordinary strengths Guardian

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.