Description

The Ruins of Contracoeur and Other Presences by Joyce Carol Oates

Hardcover – Swan River Press – Oct 2021 – 209 pages

“To be fated, to be accursed — isn’t that also to be special?”

A group of resourceful young girls punish the men of a small town for unspeakable lusts by luring them to a derelict factory and into the toils of a bizarre contraption; a dead man tries to makes sense of a strange epiphany he experienced one day when out hiking amid gigantic ancient redwoods; and a state judge, fleeing disgrace, settles with his family on an isolated ruinous estate where some dread thing prowls in the night . . .

As Lisa Tuttle notes in her introduction, where most writers, as most people, tend to “settle down” as they age, to work within ever more constrained limits, Joyce Carol Oates’s remarkable imagination, in the sixth decade of her career, manifests no sign of such complacency. The six savage, glittering stories in this volume show it has, on the contrary, become ever more transgressive and restless.

Contents

“Introduction” by Lisa Tuttle
“Mr. Stickum”
“The Cold”
“Monstersister”
“Commencement”
“The Redwoods”
“The Ruins of Contracoeur”
“Sources”

Signed by Joyce Carol Oates, Lisa Tuttle and Meggan Kehrli, who did the cover art.