Sourland - by Joyce Carol Oates (Paperback)

About the Book

"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.

Book Synopsis

"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.

From the Back Cover

Joyce Carol Oates is not only one of our most important novelists and literary critics, she is also an unparalleled master of the short story. Sourland--sixteen previously uncollected stories that explore the power of violence, loss, and grief to shape the psyche as well as the soul--shows us an author working at the height of her powers.

With lapidary precision and an unflinching eye, Oates maps the surprising contours of "ordinary" life, from a desperate man who dons a jack-o'-lantern head as a prelude to a most curious sort of courtship to a beguiling young woman librarian whose amputee state attracts a married man and father; from a girl hopelessly in love with her renegade, incarcerated cousin to the concluding title story of an unexpectedly redemptive love rooted in radical aloneness and isolation. Each story in Sourland resonates beautifully with Oates's trademark fascination for the unpredictable amid the prosaic--the commingling of sexual love and violence, the tumult of family life--and shines with her predilection for dark humor and her gift for voice.

Review Quotes

"Oates is a master of the dark tale--stories of the hunted and the hunter, of violence, trauma, and deep psychic wounds. Brilliant in her disclosure of the workings of minds under threat, Oates also possesses a heightened sense of the body's expressiveness, from a man's gait to the smell of his breath to the strength of his grip to the intensity of his stare. Oates grows more insightful, virtuosic, and audacious in her confrontations with fear, pain, and death. Her latest stories of sexual mayhem, family crisis, and shattered identity are barely contained beasts of narration, snorting, pawing, and pulling against the confines of the page...This is a trenchant book of "cruel fairy tales" in which people are severely tested, profoundly punished, and tragically transformed." - Booklist (starred review)
"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
"...Splendid yet shocking...Each of the tales does what only Oates can do - which is take us, easily, where we do not wish to go, rushing us headlong toward something cruel and unspeakable, something we don't want to know and are now bound never to forget. Gift or curse, it is Oates' great talent...These are devastating pieces -made more so by their brevity. For, if there is anything more disturbing than a Joyce Carol Oates novel, it is one of her short stories - with its ability to condense her dark intent to a handful of images that will be forever engraved upon our psyches." - Buffalo News
"Few writers are as energetic and prolific as Joyce Carol Oates...hers is an intensely truthful, explicitly emotional yet sometimes nightmarishly heightened world...This book is angry and tough and deeply, viscerally unsettling...throttlingly passionate prose...Oates is the most agile and effective of poets, able to pin down a moment while never compromising on pace or atmosphere...This collection could be used as 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. For a writer in her early 70s, she continues to be wonderfully, unnervingly anarchic, experimental, angry. As if her aim were not to satisfy or entertain - though she always does both - but to do the vandalistic prose equivalent of spray-painting or setting fire to bins in public parks. Never has she done this more relentlessly - and exhaustingly - than in this dazzling collection." - New York Times
"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
"...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
"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
"...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