"From literary icon Joyce Carol Oates comes a brand-new collection of haunting and, at times, darkly humorous mystery and suspense stories. These are tales of psyches pushed to their limits by the expectations of everyday life--from a woman who gets lost on her drive home to her plush suburban home and ends up breaking into a stranger's house, to a first-person account of a cloned 1940s magazine pinup girl being sold at auction and embodying America's...

"A new collection of stories by American master Joyce Carol Oates, mysterious and surreal, and perfectly pitched for the confusion of the current political landscape"--

"As a child, Abby had the same recurring nightmare night after night, in which she wandered through a field ridden with human skulls and bones. Now an adult, Abby thinks she's outgrown her demons until, the evening before her wedding, the terrible dream returns, forcing her to confront the dark secrets from her past that she has kept from her new husband, Willem. The following day--less than 24 hours after exchanging vows--Abby steps out into traffic....

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.

A young girl's disappearance rocks a community and a family in this stirring examination of grief, faith, justice, and the atrocities of war from Joyce Carol Oates, "one of the great artistic forces of our time" ( The Nation ) Zeno Mayfield's daughter has disappeared into the night, gone missing in the wilds of the Adirondacks. But when the community of Carthage joins a father's frantic search for the girl, they discover the unlikeliest of suspects—a...

"In the waning days of the 1970s, the lives of several residents of Detroit and its affluent white suburbs are drawn together following the disappearance of yet another child. Hannah, a wife and mother, begins an affair with a darkly charismatic stranger; Mikey, a young street hustler, finds himself on an unexpected mission to rectify injustice; and then there's the child serial killer known as Babysitter, an enigmatic and elusive figure at the periphery...

When evangelical Luther Dunphy assassinates abortion doctor Augustus Vorhees, the two grieving families find their lives intricately linked.

"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 voice...

When a fourteen-year-old girl is the alleged victim of a terrible act of racial violence, the incident shocks and galvanizes her community, exacerbating the racial tension that has been simmering in this New Jersey town for decades.