Zero-Sum

‘Oates’s imagination is as unique, dystopian and vivid as Lewis Carroll’s’ ROSE TREMAIN 'A master storyteller' THE TIMES 'Electric' NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW Zero-sum games are played for lethal stakes in these arresting stories by one of America’s most acclaimed writers. A brilliant young philosophy student bent on seducing her famous philosopher-mentor finds herself outmaneuvered; diabolically clever high school girls wreak a particularly apt sort of vengeance on sexual predators in their community; a woman stalked by a would-be killer may be confiding in the wrong former lover; a young woman is morbidly obsessed by her unfamiliar new role as “mother.” In the collection’s longest story, a much-praised cutting-edge writer cruelly experiments with “drafts” of his own suicide.