Sourland

"Making sense of life in a cataclysmic inner and outer landscape has been Joyce Carol Oates' obsession for five decades. This evocative new collection shows just how much sense she can make of it now." -- Chicago Tribune "...Innovative, brilliant...there are sentences that leave a deeply sensuous pleasure in their wake..." -- San Francisco Chronicle "Oates's fiction has the curious, morbid draw of a flaming car wreck. It's a testament to Oates's talent that she can nearly always force the reader to look." -- Publishers Weekly "...Vivid...the work reflects a delicious boundary-crossing mix of literary artistry and genre-writing skill...This famously prolific writer continues to surprise us, and that in itself is something to celebrate." -- Library Journal "A master class in the art of pure, suspenseful storytelling...Oates is a dangerous writer in the best sense of the word, one who takes risks almost obsessively with energy and relish... [a] dazzling collection." -- New York Times "Oates is just a fearless writer... with her brave heart and her impossibly lush and dead-on imaginative powers." -- Los Angeles Times "Oates remains ... a living master of the short story-far more virtuosic in manner than the ecstatic realist she is usually taken to be and far more at home in the form, too." -- Buffalo News "We think of Oates, like Poe, as a master of terror, but her real mastery is in almost never depicting a strong emotion in isolation...Oates makes for a caustic companion in Sourland - a fearless experimenter forcing the reader ahead of her at knifepoint." -- Los Angeles Times