Joyce Carol Oates

The first poetry collection in twenty-five years by the National Book Award-winning author observes the human heart and mind while exploring subjects ranging from politics and racism to poverty and loss.

A gripping and moving new collection of stories that reimagines the meaning of loss-- through often unexpected and violent means.

This new collection brings together some of Joyce Carol Oates's most brilliant and provocative pieces, covering a diverse range of subjects and ideas. The rough country is both the treacherous geographical/psychological terrains of the writers she analyses--Flannery O'Connor, Shirley Jackson, Cormac McCarthy, Annie Proulx, and Margaret Atwood among others--and also the emotional terrain of Oates's own life following the unexpected death of her husband....

In The Oxford Book of American Short Stories, Joyce Carol Oates offers a sweeping survey of American short fiction, in a collection of nearly sixty tales that combines classic works with many "different, unexpected" gems, and that invites readers to explore a wealth of important pieces by women and minority writers.