Faithless: Tales of Transgression
Joyce Carol Oates
Language: English
Pages: 400
ISBN: 0060933577
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
In this collection of twenty-one unforgettable stories, Joyce Carol Oates explores the mysterious private lives of men and women with vivid, unsparing precision and sympathy. By turns interlocutor and interpreter, magician and realist, she dissects the psyches of ordinary people and their potential for good and evil with chilling understatement and lasting power.
the big bang. Before which there was nothing and after which there would be everything: cosmic cum. For all sentient beings derive from a single source and that source long vanished, extinct. The more you contemplated of origins the less you knew. He’d studied Wittgenstein—Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. (A photocopied handout for Communication Arts class, the instructor a cool youngish guy with a Princeton Ph.D.) Yet he believed he could recall the circumstances of his
this? Otto was saying, “We left everything in order, at the house. On my desk. Will, insurance policies, investment files, bankbooks, keys. Teresa had to nag me to update our wills. But I did, and I’m damned glad. Until you make out a final will, you just aren’t facing facts. You’re in a dreamworld. After eighty, you are in a dreamworld and you have to take control of the way the dream’s going.” Mitchell was listening, but he’d missed the beat. His thoughts crowded and flashed in his head like
I’d never seen a Glock before. It was a heavy gun, a man’s gun. I wondered why the barrel was so long. I guessed the gun had been carefully wiped down. I didn’t stoop to smell the barrel but rewrapped the gun in the chamois cloth. I shut up the valise and hid it away on a closet shelf with my other leather things. I had quite a collection, Mikal had given me things. He’d given me jewelry, too. I was feeling faint. A high ringing sound in my skull, unless it was a siren in the near distance. I
mother had said to them, how she’d looked and behaved, it had not been precisely that way, of course. Because how can you speak of confusion, where are the words for it? How to express in adult language the wild fibrillation of children’s minds, two child-minds beating against each other like moths, how to know what had truly happened and what was only imagined? Connie would swear that their mother’s eye looked like a nasty dark-rotted egg, so swollen, but she could not say which eye it was,
believed I disguised, by looping Karla’s long scarf around my neck and tying it in a bow at my jawline. In the mirror I saw an unnaturally pale girl with stark, shadowed, blood-veined eyes and windblown hair and a look about the mouth that might have been desperation or triumph. I’m here. I’m here! I’d missed my appointment of course. The dean was interviewing other students. His receptionist advised me to reschedule my interview for the following Saturday but I said that wasn’t possible—“I’ll