Faithless

Ordinary men and women cross moral boundaries from which there is no turning back in these portraits of obsession and sudden violence.

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.

Equally observer and diagnostician, she tracks an abandoned lover tailing a silver Mercedes along rain-slick expressways, and an elderly couple retreating to an Adirondack cabin with stockpiled barbiturates.

The narratives examine domestic betrayals with relentless clarity, recording the quiet panic of two sisters on a Chautauqua farm after their mother vanishes and the vigil of a divorced man watching his former home through a rifle scope.

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.

• Psychological Suspense: An intense summer affair at an upstate arts institute unravels under the shadow of a hidden revolver; an indicted Manhattan prosecutor takes his young daughter on a desperate final excursion.
• Crime Short Stories: A high school runner faces a sudden eruption of violence behind a suburban convenience store; an investigative journalist covering police corruption is targeted by the very authorities he set out to expose.
• Small Town Setting: At an off-season seashore diner in New Jersey, a self-conscious waitress is drawn into the troubled life of an awkward former teacher who becomes the focus of local suspicion.
• Unreliable Narrator: A celebrated mystery author delivers an unsettling presidential address about a lethal high school incident, while a weary journalist arranges an extravagant final dinner for a condemned Alabama inmate.
• Also by This Author: Blonde, Carthage and Middle Age: A Romance.