Lovely, Dark, Deep: Stories
Language: English
Pages: 432
ISBN: 006235695X
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
From the legendary literary master, winner of the National Book Award and New York Times bestselling author Joyce Carol Oates, a collection of thirteen mesmerizing stories that maps the eerie darkness within us all.
Insightful, disturbing, imaginative, and breathtaking in their lyrical precision, the stories in Lovely, Dark, Deep display Joyce Carol Oates’s magnificent ability to make visceral the terror, hurt, and uncertainty that lurks at the edges of ordinary lives.
In “Mastiff,” a woman and a man are joined in an erotic bond forged out of terror and gratitude. “Sex with Camel” explores how a sixteen-year-old boy realizes the depth of his love for his grandmother—and how vulnerable those feelings make him. Fearful that that her husband is “disappearing” from their life, a woman becomes obsessed with keeping him in her sight in “The Disappearing.” “A Book of Martyrs” reveals how the end of a pregnancy brings with it the end of a relationship. And in the title story, the elderly Robert Frost is visited by an interviewer, an unsettling young woman, who seems to know a good deal more about his life than she should.
A piercing and evocative collection, Lovely, Dark, Deep reveals an artist at the height of her creative power.
for even a few seconds. Several times she inquired after the man and was told that he was undergoing emergency treatment for cardiac arrhythmia and she could not see him just yet. This news seemed terrible to her, unacceptable. He’d only been bitten by the damned dog! He had not seemed so badly injured initially, he’d insisted upon walking . . . The woman was light-headed, breathing quickly. Her bandaged hands and wrists throbbed with pain. She heard her thin plaintive voice begging—“Don’t let
child. There’s nothing mysterious or subtle about Lou-Lou—she is all heart. She isn’t obscure, and she isn’t devious. She’s an athlete.” (Though I hadn’t been an athlete for years. Most girls give up team sports forever after high school.) “Did I ever tell you about how Lou-Lou played field hockey—really down-dirty, competitive field hockey—at the Rye Academy? Up there in Connecticut? I’d drive up to watch her play—stay overnight in the little town—at one of the championship games she was hit in
president. He’d been brought to Garrison College from Bevell State to succeed a president whose tenure had prevailed for seventeen years—the Garrison trustees had thought it was time for a “radical change.” Rob Flint was boasting to his poet-guest in an almost boyish manner—as if making a reluctant statement of fact. Oddly then he said, as he led me back to the party, “I’m a deer hunter who hasn’t touched a rifle in years—almost twenty years.” Adding, “You’re a poet, you see into the heart. You
dazzling-beautiful Ethiopian girl; but there was no other Filipina-American adoptee so far as Leanda knew. Why did you adopt me, if you didn’t want me. If you couldn’t love me—this, Leanda had never asked Gabriele. SHE’D BEEN TOUCHING the tattoo area, that throbbed and burnt her fingers. She was sure this had to be the infection. But to call 911—this would be an irrevocable decision. She wondered if she was being ridiculous—Carroll would laugh at her. She thought If an ambulance comes for me,
Church of Christ. But I remembered the Death Song. Don’t know fucking why, when I forgot so much, I remembered the Lenape Death Song. How before the Indian baby was born the Death Song came to it in the womb and each song was different from the others. When the baby was born, the Death Song was forgotten. You open your eyes, you suck in your first deep breath of air—the Death Song is forgotten. The young Lenapes would fast, hunt until they were exhausted, the young boys beaten with sticks by the