Washoe County Library System

Presents a collection of stories that explores the musings of a writer, a prisoner, a student, and others who consider how their lives might have unfolded differently had they made different choices.

"Two hitmen in a depressed rust belt town struggle with a job gone wrong. A girl witnesses a horrifying accident and carries it with her for the rest of her life. Medical students bring a severed foot to a college party. Five-time Pulitzer Prize finalist Joyce Carol Oates has made a career of exploring the forbidden corners of human experience, and the stories collected here, spanning her first three decades as a writer, are among her most unsettling...

Explores the high price of success in the life of one woman--the first female president of an Ivy League university--and her hold upon her self-identity in the face of darkly shrouded secrets from her past.

"The book opens with a woman, naked except for her high-heeled shoes, seated in front of the window in an apartment she cannot, on her own, afford. In this exquisitely tense narrative reimagining of Edward Hopper's Eleven A.M., 1926, the reader enters the minds of both the woman and her married lover, each consumed by alternating thoughts of disgust and arousal, as he rushes, amorously, murderously, to her door. In "The Long-Legged Girl," an aging,...

Joyce Carol Oates is an unparalleled investigator of human flaws. In these eight stories, she deftly tests the bonds between damaged individuals-- a brother and sister, a teacher and student, two strangers on a subway-- in the fearless prose for which she's become so celebrated. In the title story "High Crime Area," a white, aspiring professor is convinced she is being followed. No need to panic, she has a handgun stowed away in her purse--just in...

Evil Eye: A young woman has recently become the fourth wife of a man who is demanding. When his first wife comes to stay with them, she warns her that he is insane and that she must protect herself. So Near, Anytime, Always: Shy teenager Lizbeth meets Desmond, a charming boy who offers this introverted girl the first sparks of young romance. Yet just as their relationship begins to blossom, Lizbeth realizes that beneath Desmond's perfect facade lies...