Joyce Carol Oates continues a late-career hot streak with a collection of subversive suspense stories
Oates's pervading theme across her entire career involves an investigation into the nature of consciousness and the mysteries of personality.
A Blog About Books and Reading
A Blog About Books and Reading
Oates's pervading theme across her entire career involves an investigation into the nature of consciousness and the mysteries of personality.
"The problem in this country is that people seem to feel that if it's funny it's not serious."
The twelve stories in A Sunny Place for Shady People, ably translated by veteran collaborator Megan McDowell, hold their social subtexts more or less on their metaphorical sleeve.
The most blazingly unforgettable tale in the anthology has to be EC Dorgan's "Prairie Teeth."
The books in these stories are dangerous not just for the ideas they contain, but the wounds that they inflict.
The writers are for the most part clear-eyed about the realities of the world and adept at placing them in the context of speculative fiction.
The Newfoundland of Vigil is an unforgiving place, and Taylor treats it, along with her cast of characters, without an ounce of sentimentality.
O'Brien, who died on July 27 at the age of ninety-three, caused much uproar among conservative Irish Catholics for her frank and unsparing examinations of female sexuality.
Tremblay's entire fiction is built on contingency and ambiguity.
The stories in Dance of the Happy Shades establish many of the characteristics that would come to be associated with Munro's oeuvre.