Faithless

In this collection of 21 stories, the mysterious private lives of individuals are explored with vivid, unsparing precision and sympathy. By turn interlocutor and interpreter, magician and realist, Joyce Carol Oates dissects the psyches of ordinary people and their potential for good and evil. 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 invunerable to hurt, and in so doing hurts others; and in Lover a beautiful woman locked into an obsessive love affair seeks her revenge in a bizarre, violent manner.