'Oates's imagination is as unique dystopian and vivid as Lewis Carroll's' ROSE TREMAIN 'A
master storyteller' THE TIMES 'Electric' NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW 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 woman is morbidly obsessed by her unfamiliar new role as
"mother." 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. 'Alluringly dark
and spiky' NEW STATESMAN ' Zero-Sum is brilliant - bloodied breathless weird' A. K. BLAKEMORE
'Dark unsettling stories ... There's a disquieting violence simmering ... a shrill alarm of
disquiet' DAILY MAIL 'Oates is an inspired writer and a formidable psychologist' INDEPENDENT
