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    Lovely, Dark, Deep: Stories
    Lovely, Dark, Deep: Stories
    Lovely, Dark, Deep: Stories
    Audiobook16 hours

    Lovely, Dark, Deep: Stories

    Written by Joyce Carol Oates

    Narrated by Jason Culp and Maggi-Meg Reed

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize

    From the legendary literary master, winner of the National Book Award and New York Times bestselling author Joyce Carol Oates, a collection of thirteen mesmerizing stories that maps the eerie darkness within us all.

    Insightful, disturbing, imaginative, and breathtaking in their lyrical precision, the stories in Lovely, Dark, Deep display Joyce Carol Oates’s magnificent ability to make visceral the terror, hurt, and uncertainty that lurks at the edges of ordinary lives.

    In “Mastiff,” a woman and a man are joined in an erotic bond forged out of terror and gratitude. “Sex with Camel” explores how a sixteen-year-old boy realizes the depth of his love for his grandmother—and how vulnerable those feelings make him. Fearful that that her husband is “disappearing” from their life, a woman becomes obsessed with keeping him in her sight in “The Disappearing.” “A Book of Martyrs” reveals how the end of a pregnancy brings with it the end of a relationship. And in the title story, the elderly Robert Frost is visited by an interviewer, an unsettling young woman, who seems to know a good deal more about his life than she should.

    A piercing and evocative collection, Lovely, Dark, Deep reveals an artist at the height of her creative power.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperAudio
    Release dateSep 9, 2014
    ISBN9780062362094
    Lovely, Dark, Deep: Stories
    Author

    Joyce Carol Oates

    Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Medal of Humanities, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Book Award, and the 2019 Jerusalem Prize, and has been several times nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the national bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys; Blonde, which was nominated for the National Book Award; and the New York Times bestseller The Falls, which won the 2005 Prix Femina. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978.

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    Reviews for Lovely, Dark, Deep

    3.5/5

    37 ratings2 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Joyce Carol Oates's short stories are unsettling and often have a creepy feel to them. Her newest collection is unsettling, but less creepy than usual. Here, she takes ordinary people and shows them undergoing ordinary ordeals; a retired couple are annoyed by the loud neighbors behind them, a wife discovers that her husband has gotten rid of his bicycle, a young woman goes with her cousin to get a small tattoo. It's in Oates' hands, that these events become menacing and portentous, with the characters unable to change the patterns of a lifetime. The opening story, Sex with Camel, was my favorite and was the kindest of the stories. In it, a seventeen year old boy accompanies his grandmother to the hospital where she is to undergo some testing. The boy is a typical teenager, with his smart phone and his sly attempts to be a little shocking. His grandmother is also typical, over-dressed for a medical procedure and determined to be casual about their reason for being there. But what shines through is the real affection they hold for one another, despite the years between them. There are a few stories that return to Oates's favorite themes of women with Daddy-issues and of women living in the shadow of a famous male relative, but here she is allowing her protagonists a bit of rebellion and independence, even if the men haven't altered their expectations. I'm not sure what I think of the title story, however, as it took as its target a real person. I've enjoyed stories that have done that (for example, Lydia Millet's Love in Infant Monkeys), but this story felt mean-spirited, despite footnotes indicating that the story was closely based on a real encounter. The final and longest story, Patricide, was the strongest in a strong collection.I've become a big fan of Oates's short stories and this collection is an excellent example of what a master at the top of her game can do.
    • 4/5
      In this collection of short stories, JCO continues her recent theme of how long-term marriages fair in the face of death or dying. The stories are dark and haunting, most with abrupt endings that let the reader decide what happens next. JCO is a master story teller who just keeps improving.