Product Description

An enthralling collection of short stories from the National Book Award shortlisted author of 'Blonde' and 'Middle Age'. In this collection of 21 stories, the mysterious private lives of individuals are explored with vivid, unsparing precision and sympathy. By turn interlocutor and interpreter, magician and realist, Joyce Carol Oates dissects the psyches of ordinary people and their potential for good and evil with chilling understatement and lasting power. In 'Faithless' two adult sisters recall their mother's disappearance when they were children; in 'Ugly Girl' a bitterly angry young woman defines herself as ugly as a way of making herself invulnerable to hurt, and in so doing hurts others; in 'Lover' a beautiful woman locked into an obsessive love affair seeks her revenge in a bizarre, violent manner. Intense and provocative, 'Faithless' is a startling look into the heart of contemporary America from the modern master of the short story.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #323276 in Books
• Published on: 2003-07-07
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 400 pages

Review
'Joyce Carol Oates is a writer who always takes your breath away.' Mail on Sunday '"Faithless: Tales of Transgression" makes its brisk incisions into the themes of terror, female passion, collapsing male identity, loneliness, divorce, revenge !Again and again [Oates] finds new language to describe the immensity of desire!She twists back against our assumptions, seeking always the gristly pop of revelation.' New York Times Book Review 'Oates is a massive literary heavyweight, and many earnestly believe she could knock the other contenders for the title of Great American Novelist -- Updike, Roth, Wolfe, Mailer.' Guardian 'Oates is an inspired writer, and a formidable psychologist. She has a thrilling way of grasping an emotion, wasting no time in judicious rumination but launching herself straight at the aching heart of the matter.' Independent 'Oates's precise and inspired writing is close to witchcraft.' Jeanne Moreau 'Novelists such as John Updike, Philip Roth, Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer slug it out for the title of the Great American Novelist. But maybe they're wrong. Maybe, just maybe, the Great American Novelist is a woman.' The Herald

About the Author
Joyce Carol Oates is a novelist, critic, playwright, poet and author of short stories and one of America's most highly respected literary figures. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Princeton University. Her most recent novel, 'The Gravedigger's Daughter', was published in 2007.

Customer Reviews

Transgressive extremes
This is a very good collection of short stories that gets some way towards delineating the transgressive extremes in relationships. American in its social setting, it is nonetheless international in its exploration of family disloyalties, family failings and what men and women can't seem to help doing to one another. It is not a serene or easy read, but it is unflinchingly laced with the realism that is Oates' forte.

In some of the stories here, people are pinned down and laid out for view with a forensic touch. Sometimes the writing lacks intimacy. However, more often her voice is in your head as the pulse of a story beats with your own.

One thing about Oates' work is that she consistently tries new viewpoints. Here she does men as well as she does women, as one would expect from a writer of her generation (i.e. before we all became 'lads' and 'chicks' in marketing parlance). I don't know many writers with whom you can feel such a strong confidence, but Oates at her best is one such. She is good on characterisation, and excellent on situating the reader in whatever milieu she writes about. She ranges wider than many writers too, with great ease, taking in working-class protagonists as well as the inevitable middle classes. She is also the writer of one of the most hair-raising stories I've ever read (not in this collection) about a mother who is a drug addict, and her very small children.

I like the way she wants to get inside her people and see events through their unique perspective. She's good at this although she doesn't seem to be considered at the top of the tree along with members of the great white male cabale - Updike, Wolfe, Roth, DeLillo, et al. To my mind that's not altogether fair, since her insight and versatility are as good if not greater than theirs. No one ever accuses Updike of writing badly about sex (which he often does) or of DeLillo lacking in warmth (which he often is). Oates, at her best, is better than both.