Zero-Sum

'Oates's imagination is as unique, dystopian and vivid as Lewis Carroll's' Rose Tremain Zero-sum games are played for lethal stakes in these arresting stories by one of America's 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 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. 'A master storyteller' The Times 'Feminist horror runs through Joyce Carol Oates's latest collection ... Electric' New York Times 'Alluringly dark and spiky' New Statesman 'Zero-Sum is brilliant - bloodied, breathless, weird' A. K. Blakemore, author of The Manningtree Witches 'Dark, unsettling stories ... There's a disquieting violence simmering ... a shrill alarm of disquiet' Daily Mail 'Oates is an inspired writer, and a formidable psychologist' Independent