The Frenzy

Praise for The Frenzy

“Haunting . . . masterfully orchestrated . . . Oates’s best work is simmering and remorseless.”—Vogue

“Barely a year after the release of her last novel, Fox, prolific American writer Joyce Carol Oates returns with this astounding collection of short stories. As the title suggests, agitation and turmoil form the emotional foundation for all of these tales. Whether she’s writing about a young woman on vacation with her older and married lover or about a hiker coming across an arguing couple in the woods, Oates imbues this entire book with psychological suspense and high stakes.”—Harper’s Bazaar

“Yes, Oates’s fiction dwells on the dark side of life—‘I’m holding a mirror up to the world we’re in,’ she explained to AARP last year—but it’s also brilliant, as evidenced by these engrossing short stories that dive into the minds of characters prone to cruelty or struggling with destructive desires.”—AARP

“This terrific collection from Oates includes nine sly and sinister stories of human behavior at its most unsavory. . . . Delightfully subversive . . . Full of parenthetical asides that call much of what the reader knows into question, the stories range from sharply compressed to vertiginously recursive. Oates has few competitors as a purveyor of deeply disturbing fiction about the porous border between life and death.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review


Praise for Joyce Carol Oates

“Oates is one of the greatest writers among us today.”—Gillian Flynn

“Oates is a genius in the truest sense of the word.”—Rebecca Makkai

“Nobody else writes like the great Joyce Carol Oates. It’s remarkable.”—Joseph Finder

“Protean and prodigious are surely the words that describe Ms. Oates.”—Richard Ford

“[Oates] is one of the handful of great American novelists of the last hundred years.”—Edmund White

“That rarity in American fiction, a writer who seems to grow with each new book.”—Time