A family of six disintegrates after a daughter is raped by a high-school student. It happens to the wealthy Mulvaneys in upstate New York. The disgrace--there is some question if it was rape--sends the father to drink and financial ruin, the girl leaves home, the others follow. By the author of What I Lived For.

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.

"Amid a starkly beautiful but uncanny landscape in New Mexico, a married couple from Cambridge, MA takes residency at a distinguished academic institute. When the husband is stricken with a mysterious illness, misdiagnosed at first, their lives are uprooted and husband and wife each embarks upon a nightmare journey. At thirty-seven, Michaela faces the terrifying prospect of widowhood - and the loss of Gerard, whose identity has greatly shaped her...

Joyce Carol Oates here offers four chilling novellas of love so powerful that people might die-- or kill-- for it. Drenched with suspense and dread, this collection shows love as sporadically magical, mysterious, and murderous.

The inimitable Joyce Carol Oates returns with Dear Husband-a gripping and moving story collection that powerfully re-imagines the meaning of family in America, often through violent means. Oates, a former recipient of the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction-as well as the National Book Award, Prix Femina, and numerous other literary honors-dazzles and disturbs with an outstanding compilation. Dear Husband is another triumph for the author...

Sixteen-year-old Katya Spiva is walking with her two summer babysitting charges in Bayhead Harbor, New Jersey, when she's approached by silver-haired gentlemanly Marcus Kidder, a local resident of some renown. At first his interest in Katya seems harmless, innocent; Katya's interest in him seems precociously manipulative. His beautiful oceanside home, the children's books he has written, his classical music, his lavish present to her - Kidder's life...

"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the most important contemporary American writers, Cardiff, by the Sea is a bold, haunting collection of four previously unpublished novellas.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...

"In those days in the early Sixties we were not women yet but girls.This was, without irony, perceived as our advantage." So begins I'll Take You There, an astonishingly intimate and unsparing self-portrait of a nameless young student who, though, gifted with a penetrating intelligence, is drastically inclined to obsession. Funny, mordant, and compulsive, "Anellia" (as she sometimes calls herself) falls passionately in love with a brilliant yet elusive...

An anthology of short fiction selected by the author herself features selections from "The Wheel of Love," "Marriages and Infidelities," and "Heat," as well as nine previously unpublished works.

Reveling in the uncanny and richly in conversation with other creative minds, Night-Gaunts and Other Tales of Suspense stands at the crossroads of sex, violence, and longing--and asks us to interrogate the intersection of these impulses within ourselves. ""The Woman in the Window"...opens with a woman, naked except for her high-heeled shoes, seated in front of the window in an apartment she cannot, on her own, afford. In this exquisitely tense narrative...