Joyce Carol Oates shares her struggle to comprehend a life absent of the partnership that had sustained and defined her for nearly half a century.

"Andrew J. Rush has achieved the kind of critical and commercial success most authors only dream about: he has a top agent and publisher in New York, and his twenty-eight mystery novels have sold millions of copies around the world. He also has a loving wife and three grown children and is a well-known philanthropist in his small New Jersey town. But Rush is hiding a dark secret. Under the pseudonym "Jack of Spades," he pens another string of novels--...

A collection of six stories and novellas includes the title story, in which the disappearance of a sweet blonde-haired child is linked to her mother's indiscretions and an older student with a fascination for a Native American legend.

"In the waning days of the 1970s, the lives of several residents of Detroit and its affluent white suburbs are drawn together following the disappearance of yet another child. Hannah, a wife and mother, begins an affair with a darkly charismatic stranger; Mikey, a young street hustler, finds himself on an unexpected mission to rectify injustice; and then there's the child serial killer known as Babysitter, an enigmatic and elusive figure at the periphery...

Six terrifying tales to chill the blood from the unique imagination of Joyce Carol Oates. A young boy plays with dolls instead of action figures. But as he grows older, his passion takes on a darker edge...A white man shoots dead a black boy creating a media frenzy. But could it be that it was self-defense as he claims? A nervous woman tries to escape her husband. He says he loves her, but she's convinced he wants to kill her...These quietly lethal...

Presents nine tales of psyches puyshed to their limits by the expectations of everyday life--from a woman who gets lost on her drive home to her plush suburban home and ends up breaking into a stranger's house, to a first-person account of a cloned 1940s magazine pinup girl being sold at auction and embodying America's ideals of beauty and womanhood.

When Little Reynard, the only orange kitten in his litter, meets some foxes, he feels more at home with them than with his own family.

A chronicle of the author's hardscrabble childhood in rural western New York State describes the family members, first friendships, and early experiences with death that shaped her literary career.

After a single mother is assaulted, her attackers are allowed to go free and a detective angered at the lack of justice sets out for revenge.