
Zero-Sum
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About this listen
‘Oates’s imagination is as unique, dystopian and vivid as Lewis Carroll’s’ ROSE TREMAIN
'A master storyteller' THE TIMES
'Electric' NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
Zero-sum games are played for lethal stakes in these arresting stories by one of America’s most acclaimed writers.
A brilliant young philosophy student bent on seducing her famous philosopher-mentor finds herself outmaneuvered; diabolically clever high school girls wreak a particularly apt sort of vengeance on sexual predators in their community; a woman stalked by a would-be killer may be confiding in the wrong former lover; a young woman is morbidly obsessed by her unfamiliar new role as “mother.” In the collection’s longest story, a much-praised cutting-edge writer cruelly experiments with “drafts” of his own suicide.
In these powerfully wrought stories that hold a mirror up to our time, Joyce Carol Oates has created a world of erotic obsession, thwarted idealism, and ever-shifting identities. Provocative and stunning, Zero-Sum reinforces Oates’s standing as a literary treasure and an artist of the mysterious interior life.
‘Alluringly dark and spiky’ NEW STATESMAN
‘Zero-Sum is brilliant – bloodied, breathless, weird’ A. K. BLAKEMORE
‘Dark, unsettling stories … There’s a disquieting violence simmering … a shrill alarm of disquiet’ DAILY MAIL
‘Oates is an inspired writer, and a formidable psychologist’ INDEPENDENT
©2023 Joyce Carol Oates (P)2023 HarperCollins Publishers LimitedListeners also enjoyed...
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Performance
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Story
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Breathless!
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-
Overall
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Performance
-
Story
From the legendary literary master, winner of the National Book Award and New York Times best-selling author Joyce Carol Oates, a collection of ten spellbinding stories that maps the eerie darkness within us all. Insightful, disturbing, and mesmerizing in their lyrical precision, the stories in Lovely, Dark, Deep display Joyce Carol Oates's astonishing ability to make visceral the fear, hurt, and uncertainty that lurks at the edges of ordinary lives.
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Overall
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ARE YOU KIDDING ME? NO UNABRIDGED VERSION?
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Overall
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Performance
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Overall
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Before Purchasing
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Overall
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Performance
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The narration was brilliant…totally engrossing and beautifully spoken
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