Authors: Joyce Carol Oates
ISBN-13: 9780452274891, ISBN-10: 0452274893
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Penguin Group (USA)
Date Published: December 1996
Edition: (Non-applicable)
In a prolific and varied oeuvre that ranges over essays, plays, criticism, and several genres of fiction, Joyce Carol Oates has proved herself one of the most influential and important storytellers in the literary world.
Featuring contributions by Irving, Hawthorne, Poe, Stephen King, Anne Rice, and many others, this definitive collection of chilling American fiction includes more than 40 of the best examples of the genre.
In compiling 40 short stories that represent the 200-year history of "gothic" fiction in America, from Washington Irving's classic "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" to Stephen King's "The Reach," Oates employs a eclectic and elastic definition of the genre. In her cogent introduction, she writes that she sought "the range, depth, audacity and fantastical extravagance of the human imagination." The result is a tad confusing, straying as far as science fiction and surrealism, but Oates's taste in the quality of stories is always impeccable. The pieces also all share a certain darkness. Entries range from Edgar Allen Poe's sadistic "The Black Cat" to Charlotte Perkins Gilman's classic psychological horror story, "The Yellow Wallpaper." Shirley Jackson, Anne Rice and Katherine Dunn are also represented. Among the more idiosyncratic selections are Herman Melville's "The Tartarus of Maids"; Don DeLillo's beautiful tale of astronauts floating above the earth in "Human Moments in World War III"; and Paul Bowles's strange and powerful "Allal," about a Moroccan orphan boy who so identifies with a snake that they mysteriously change bodies-and meet gory fates. Fright-seekers and those with a taste for the frankly macabre might be won over by Oates's more artistic, subtle and compelling take on the gothic, where the "essential subject is the human psyche in confrontation with something (divine? demonic?) beyond human comprehension and control." (Dec.)
Introduction | 1 | |
from Wieland, or The Transformation | 10 | |
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow | 19 | |
The Man of Adamant, Young Goodman Brown | 45 | |
The Tartarus of Maids | 65 | |
The Black Cat | 78 | |
The Yellow Wallpaper | 87 | |
The Romance of Certain Old Clothes | 103 | |
The Damned Thing | 121 | |
Afterward | 129 | |
The Striding Place | 157 | |
Death in the Woods | 163 | |
The Outsider | 175 | |
A Rose for Emily | 182 | |
The Lonesome Place | 191 | |
The Door | 199 | |
The Lovely House | 204 | |
Allal | 226 | |
The Reencounter | 236 | |
In the Icebound Hothouse | 242 | |
The Enormous Radio | 253 | |
The Veldt | 264 | |
The Dachau Shoe, The Approved, Spiders I Have Known, Postcards from the Maginot Line | 278 | |
Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams | 286 | |
In Bed One Night | 301 | |
Schrodinger's Cat | 304 | |
The Waterworks | 312 | |
Shattered Like a Glass Goblin | 315 | |
Human Moments in World War III | 325 | |
The Anatomy of Desire | 339 | |
Little Things | 344 | |
The Temple | 346 | |
Freniere | 349 | |
A Short Guide to the City | 358 | |
In The Penny Arcade | 369 | |
The Reach | 378 | |
Exchange Value | 398 | |
Snow | 406 | |
The Last Feast of Harlequin | 420 | |
Time and Again | 455 | |
Replacements | 460 | |
Spirit Seizures | 475 | |
Cat in Glass | 486 | |
The Girl Who Loved Animals | 500 | |
Ursus Triad, Later | 518 | |
The Nuclear Family: His Talk, Her Teeth | 525 | |
Subsoil | 533 |