Joyce Carol Oates

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Nicholas Calcott

A person sitting in a chair.

Joyce Carol Oates

One of America’s most honored living writers has also proven over the years to be one of our most prolific creators, in a dazzling array of forms and genres. Which, to the uninitiated, can seem daunting: where to start in Joyce Carol Oates bibliography? Why not with Oates' latest, Zero-Sum, a collection of short stories covering a range of disturbing-sounding modern-day issues. judging by the publisher’s description. Oates will discuss the book with Chloe Benjamin (The Immortalists) at this Wisconsin Book Festival event; all attendees will receive a free copy of Zero-Sum.

media release: Zero-sum games are played for lethal stakes in these arresting stories by one of America’s most acclaimed writers, the award-winning, best-selling author of Blonde. 

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.

Joyce Carol Oates will be in conversation with local Madison and New York Times best-selling author, Chloe Benjamin.

Copies of Zero-Sum will be distributed for free to all attendees courtesy of a gift from the Cheryl Rosen Weston Estate.