Sourland: Stories

by Joyce Carol Oates

Overview

“Oates is a fearless writer.”

—Los Angeles Times

 

“Oates is a master of the dark tale—stories of the hunted and the hunter, of violence, trauma, and deep psychic wounds.”

—Booklist (starred review)

 

Sourland is a gripping, haunting, and intensely moving collection of short stories by Joyce Carol Oates, one of America’s preeminent authors. Unforgettable tales that re-imagine the meaning of loss—often through violent means—Sourland is yet another extraordinary read from the literary icon who has previously brought us The Gravedigger’s Daughter, Blonde, We Were the Mulvaneys, and numerous other classic works of contemporary fiction.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780061996535
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	06/21/2011
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	384
Product dimensions:	5.31(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.86(d)

About the Author

Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Medal of Humanities, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Book Award, and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction, and has been several times nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the national bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys, Blonde, which was nominated for the National Book Award, and the New York Times bestseller The Falls, which won the 2005 Prix Femina. Her most recent novel is A Book of American Martyrs. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978.

Hometown:

Princeton, New Jersey

Date of Birth:

June 16, 1938

Place of Birth:

Lockport, New York

Education:

B.A., Syracuse University, 1960; M.A., University of Wisconsin, 1961

Editorial Reviews

...Innovative, brilliant...there are sentences that leave a deeply sensuous pleasure in their wake...

San Francisco Chronicle

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

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

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

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's latest collection explores certain favorite Oatesian themes, primary among them violence, loss, and privilege. Three of the stories feature white, upper-class, educated widows whose sheltered married lives have left them unprepared for life alone. In "Pumpkin-Head" and "Sourland," the widows--Hadley in the first story, Sophie in the second--encounter a class of Oatesian male: predatory, needy lurkers just out of prosperity's reach. In the first story, our lurker is Anton Kruppe, a Central European immigrant and vague acquaintance of Hadley whose frustrations boil over in a disastrous way. In the second story, Sophie is contacted by Jeremiah, an old friend of her late husband, and eventually visits him in middle-of-nowhere northern Minnesota, where she discovers, too late, his true intentions. The third widow story, "Probate," concerns Adrienne Myer's surreal visit to the courthouse to register her late husband's will, but Oates has other plans for Adrienne, who is soon lost in a warped bureaucratic funhouse worthy of Kafka. 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. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

In this atmospheric 16-tale collection, National Book Award winner Oates once again draws audiences into her characters' frighteningly surreal yet ordinary lives. Actress/narrator Coleen Marlo (The Blind Spot) is equally adept at rendering both the male and the female voices, the foreign and regional accents. While the production quality of the audio is high overall, bookmarking is difficult with just three to four tracks per disc, and there is a lack of thought repetition between discs. Nonetheless, this is a well-read, enjoyable, and thought-provoking work sure to be in demand by Oates's fans and those into the surreal. ["A delicious boundary-crossing mix of literary artistry and genre-writing skill," read the review of the Ecco: HarperCollins hc, LJ 7/10.—Ed.]—Laurie Selwyn, formerly with Grayson Cty. Law Lib., Sherman, TX

Library Journal