|
|
|
 Faithless
Tales of Transgression
by Joyce Carol Oates
New York: Ecco Press, 2001
352 pages
Dust Jacket Blurb
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.
In "Faithless," two adult sisters recall their mother's disappearance when they were children. In "Ugly," 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 young woman locked into an obsessive love affair seeks her revenge in a bizarre, violent manner. In "Gunlove," a woman in thrall to a powerful erotic fetishism recounts in brief, deadpan vignettes a history of her relations with firearms.
Intense and provocative, Faithless is a startling look into the heart of contemporary America from the modern master of the short story.
Contents
Acknowledgments
PART ONE
Au Sable
Ugly
Lover
Summer Sweat
Questions
Physical
Gunlove
PART TWO
Faithless
The Scarf
What Then, My Life?
Secret, Silent
PART THREE
A Manhattan Romance
Murder-Two
The Vigil
We Were Worried About You
The Stalker
The Vampire
Tusk
The High School Sweetheart: A Mystery
Deathwatch
In *COPLAND*
Excerpt
From "Gunlove"
Luck runs in our family. Dad used to say. Maybe he was being ironic but it's a fact, it does. Like when Mother was knocked down, robbed, and raped in the ass, she wasn't murdered, too. See?
|
Reviews
- Publishers Weekly, January 29, 2001, p65
- Booklist, February 1, 2001, p1020
- Book, March 2001, p70
- Boston Globe, March 11, 2001
- New York Times Book Review, March 25, 2001, p5
- New Yorker, April 9, 2001, p135
- Entertainment Weekly, April 13, 2001, p71
- Library Journal, July 2001, p74
- Virginia Quarterly Review, Summer 2001, p99
- Toronto Sun, January 27, 2002, p. S24
Epigraph
When one does not love too much,
one does not love enough.
—Pascal
Awards
- New York Times Notable Books of the Year
- Best American Mystery Stories, 2002: "High School Sweetheart"
- Best American Mystery Stories, 1999: "Secret, Silent"
- Best American Mystery Stories, 1998: "Faithless"
- Pushcart Prize, XXIII: "Faithless"
Other Editions
|
Page address:
http://jco.usfca.edu/works/stories/faithless.html
|
|
Previous