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Zero-Sum  By  cover art

Zero-Sum

By: Joyce Carol Oates
Narrated by: Olivia Rose Baressi, Amy Jensen, Max Meyers, Linda Jones, Karissa Vacker, Cassandra Campbell, Robert Fass
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Publisher's summary

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.

In these powerfully wrought stories that hold a mirror up to our time, Joyce Carol Oates has created a world of erotic obsession, thwarted idealism, and ever-shifting identities. Provocative and stunning, Zero-Sum reinforces Oates’s standing as a literary treasure and an artist of the mysterious interior life.

©2023 Joyce Carol Oates (P)2023 HarperCollins Publishers Limited

Critic reviews

Zero-Sum is brilliant – bloodied, breathless, weird’ A. K. Blakemore, author of The Manningtree Witches

‘A genuine, sharp chronicler of our times, with a remarkable ability to sway from keen modernity to complete Gothic’ Gillian Flynn, author of Gone Girl

‘A writer of extraordinary strengthsGuardian

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