The Collector of Hearts: New Tales of the Grotesque

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Dutton, 1998 - Fiction - 321 pages
Novelist, poet, dramatist and author of many of the best American short stories of our time, Joyce Carol Oates presents yet another aspect of her unbounded creativity in these mesmerizing tales of the grotesque--a follow-up to her highly acclaimed 1994 gothic short fiction collection, "Haunted." From the Kafkaesque "Scars, " to the ballad-like tale of erotic obsession that is "The Crossing, " to a fatal twist on the mother-daughter bond in "Death Mother, " Joyce Carol Oates presents horror that is both intellectual and visceral. Dream states, rampant evil, dizzying descents into madness, all are presented in spell-binding stories worthy to set alongside those of Edgar Allan Poe -- and far above all the rest.

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Contents

The Sky Blue Ball
3
The Handpuppet
35
IV
206
Copyright

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About the author (1998)

Joyce Carol Oates was born on June 16, 1938 in Lockport, New York. She received a bachelor's degree in English from Syracuse University and a master's degree in English from the University of Wisconsin. She is the author of numerous novels and collections of short stories. Her works include We Were the Mulvaneys, Blonde, Bellefleur, You Must Remember This, Because It Is Bitter, Because It Is My Heart, Solstice, Marya : A Life, and Give Me Your Heart. She has received numerous awards including the National Book Award for Them, the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction, and the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Lifetime Achievement in American Literature. She was a finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction with her title Lovely, Dark, Deep. She also wrote a series of suspense novels under the pseudonym Rosamond Smith. In 2015, her novel The Accursed became listed as a bestseller on the iBooks chart. She worked as a professor of English at the University of Windsor, before becoming the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Princeton University. She and her late husband Raymond J. Smith operated a small press and published a literary magazine, The Ontario Review.

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