x, 386 pp. "In this gathering of 24 stories by Joyce Carol Oates, the mysterious private lives of individuals are explored with vivid, unsparing precision and sympathy. In "Faithless", two adult sisters recall their mother's disappearance when they were children; in "Ugly Girl", a bitterly angry young woman defines herself as "ugly" as a way of making herself invulnerable to hurt, and in so doing hurts others; in "Lover", a beautiful young woman locked into an obsessive love affair seeks her revenge in a bizarre, violent manner; in "Gunlove", a woman in thrall to a powerful erotic fetishism recounts, in brief, deadpan vignettes, a history of her relations with firearms. These and the 19 other stories in Faithless provide startling and unexpected insights into the contemporary American psyche and the literary pleasures admirers of Oates's short fiction have come to expect."
