Zero-Sum

Joyce Carol Oates is a novelist, critic, playwright, poet and author of short stories and one of America’s most highly respected literary figures. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including We Were the Mulvaneys, which was an Oprah Book Club Choice, and Blonde, which was nominated for the National Book Award. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Princeton University and a recipient of the National Book Award and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction.

‘Zero-Sum is brilliant – bloodied, breathless, weird’ A. K. Blakemore, author of The Manningtree Witches‘A genuine, sharp chronicler of our times, with a remarkable ability to sway from keen modernity to complete Gothic’ Gillian Flynn, author of Gone Girl'A fierce chronicler of survival against the odds' Ali Smith, author of Companion Piece‘Oates’s imagination is as unique, dystopian and vivid as Lewis Carroll’s’ Rose Tremain, author of Lily‘A writer of extraordinary strengths’ Guardian‘American’s pre-eminent fiction writer’ New Yorker'Electric … A vein of feminist horror runs through Zero-Sum … [Zero-Sum’s] zero-sum games [advance] to an existential battle between humanity and the destructive forces it has unleashed' The New York Times Book Review'Oates presses the zero-sum principle to extremes … Reading these tales is a startling and disturbing adventure. Having finished one variation on the theme, the reader never knows what form the next will take' TLS'An electric story collection from a lit icon … Violence simmers and sometimes boils over' Vanity Fair'Taut, nervy, and often fantastically unsettling' Esquire'A prolific master of the short form' Kirkus