In this collection of twenty-one unforgettable stories, Joyce Carol Oates explores the mysterious private lives of men and women with vivid, unsparing precision and sympathy. By turns interlocutor and interpreter, magician and realist, she dissects the psyches of ordinary people and their potential for good and evil with chilling understatement and lasting power.

Contains a collection of new and selected short stories by National Book Award winning author Joyce Carol Oates.

A brutal act of racial violence against a fourteen-year-old girl shocks and galvanizes a racially torn New Jersey community, which becomes a maelstrom of strong personalities, police responses, media hype, and secrets.

Abraham Licht, a nineteenth-century confidence artist, arrives with his family in Muirkirk and creates a criminal dynasty with his sons and daughter that changes their lives and all who come in contact with them.

The latest Ecco reissue of Joyce Carol Oates' early classics: a fiery gothic tale of doomed fates and demons of biblical proportions in rural New York state Nathan Vickery came into the world amid unfortunate circumstances. His mother, Elsa Vickery, daughter of an agnostic small town doctor and his pious wife, was brutally assaulted at the age of seventeen. The son she gave birth to in the wake of this event is brought up by his grandmother as a devoted...

I Am No One You Know contains nineteen startling stories that bear witness to the remarkably varied lives of Americans of our time. In "Fire," a troubled young wife discovers a rare, radiant happiness in an adulterous relationship. In "Curly Red," a girl makes a decision to reveal a family secret, and changes her life irrevocably. In "The Girl with the Blackened Eye," selected for The Best American Mystery Stories 2001, a girl pushed to an even greater...

"Oates is just a fearless writer ... with her brave heart and her impossibly lush and dead-on imaginative powers." - Los Angeles Times "[An] extraordinarily intense, racking, and resonant novel." - Booklist (starred review) One of the most acclaimed writers in the world today, the inimitable Joyce Carol Oates follows up her searing, New York Times bestselling memoir, A Widow's Story, with an extraordinary new work of fiction. Mudwoman is a riveting...