The Collector of Hearts: New Tales of the Grotesque

Joyce Carol Oates

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.

What people are saying

THE COLLECTOR OF HEARTS: New Tales of the Grotesque

User Review  - Kirkus

Oates's newest collection (and, to nobody's surprise, second major work of fiction this year) intriguingly revisits the "gothic" terrain surveyed in such earlier volumes as Night-Side (1977) and ...

LibraryThing Review

User Review  - sorell - LibraryThing

Collector of Hearts is another short story collection that centers around grotesque characters and plots. Despite the similarity with themes in Haunted, Collector of the Hearts pales in comparison. In ...

Contents

• The Sky Blue Ball: 3
• The Handpuppet: 37
• The Sepulchre: 70

About the author

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.

Bibliographic information

• Title: The Collector of Hearts: New Tales of the Grotesque; A William Abrahams book; Plume book
• Author: Joyce Carol Oates
• Publisher: Dutton, 1998
• Original from: the University of Michigan
• Digitized: Mar 11, 2008
• ISBN: 0525944451, 9780525944454
• Length: 321 pages
• Subjects: Fiction / Literary