Zero-Sum: Stories

Zero-sum games are played for lethal stakes in these arresting stories by one of America’s most acclaimed writers. A brilliant young philosophy student bent on seducing her famous philosopher-mentor finds herself outmaneuvered; diabolically clever high school girls wreak a particularly apt sort of vengeance on sexual predators in their community; a woman stalked by a would-be killer may be confiding in the wrong former lover; a young mother finds herself increasingly captivated by her infant. In the collection’s longest story, a much-praised cutting-edge writer cruelly experiments with “drafts” of his own suicide. In these powerfully wrought stories that hold a mirror up to our time, Joyce Carol Oates has created a world of erotic obsession, thwarted idealism, and ever-shifting identities. Provocative and stunning, Zero-Sum reinforces Oates’s standing as a literary treasure and an artist of the mysterious interior life.

• | Author: Joyce Carol Oates
• | Publisher: Knopf
• | Publication Date: Jul 18, 2023
• | Number of Pages: 272 pages
• | Language: English
• | Binding: Hardcover
• | ISBN-10: 0593535863
• | ISBN-13: 9780593535868