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Zero-Sum

Name: Zero-Sum
Price: 20.00 USD
Availability: InStock
Author: Joyce Carol Oates
ISBN: 9780593741634

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Published on Jul 18, 2023 | 9 Hours 46 Minutes

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Published on Jul 18, 2023 | 9 Hours 46 Minutes

Buy from Other Retailers:

Zero-sum games are played for lethal stakes in these arresting stories by one of America’s most acclaimed writers, the award-winning, best-selling author of Blonde

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 collection’s 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 Oates’s standing as a literary treasure and an artist of the mysterious interior life.

Cover image: Zeno’s Arrow. 1964 by René Magritte © 2022 C. Herscovici / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Banque d’Images, ADAGP / Art Resource, NY

“Electric . . . A vein of feminist horror runs through Zero-Sum . . . [Zero-Sum’s] zero-sum games [advance] to an existential battle between humanity and the destructive forces it has unleashed.”
—Kate Folk, The New York Times Book Review

“A bewitching collection of speculative stories about women dealing with society and violence . . . [The stories in Zero-Sum contain] quintessential Oates intrigue and mystery.”
—Sophia June, Nylon

“An electric story collection from a lit icon . . . Violence simmers and sometimes boils over.”
—Keziah Weir, Vanity Fair

“Powerfully wrought . . . Zero-sum games are played for lethal stakes in this collection of arresting stories by one of America’s most acclaimed writer . . . Joyce Carol Oates has created a world of erotic obsession, thwarted idealism and ever-shifting identities.”
—Heather Steele, SheerLuxe

“Dark, powerful new tales by the masterful literary icon.”
—AARP The Magazine

“Captivating . . . Humanity in all its devilishness is on vibrant display in these short and potent flashes of life in bleak corners. Readers will be spellbound.”
—Publishers Weekly, starred

Author

Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of a National Humanities Medal awarded by President Barack Obama, the National Book Critics Circle’s Ivan Sandrof Life Achievement Award, the National Book Award in Fiction, the Jerusalem Prize, the Prix Femina, the Cino Del Duca World Prize, and is a five-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the bestsellers Blonde and We Were the Mulvaneys. She is the Roger S. Berlind ’52 Distinguished Professor of the Humanities Emerita at Princeton University and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2024 she won the Raymond Chandler Lifetime Achievement Award given to “a master of the thriller and noir literary genre.”

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Zero-Sum

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By Joyce Carol Oates