Dimensions
135 x 203 x 16mm
Joyce Carol Oates is not only one of our most important novelists and literary critics; she is also an unparalleled master of the short story.
Black Dahlia & White Rose- eleven previously uncollected stories that explore the slippage between fantasy and everyday life-shows us an author working at the height of her powers. With lapidary precision and an unflinching eye, Oates charts the surprising ways in which the world we think we know can unexpectedly reveal its darker contours.
From the title story, which maps the friendship between two beautiful and mysteriously doomed young women in 1940s Los Angeles-Elizabeth Short, otherwise known as the "Black Dahlia" victim of a long-unsolved and particularly brutal murder, and her roommate Norma Jeane Baker, soon to become Marilyn Monroe, to the tale of the wife of a well-to-do businessman who is ravished by, and elopes with, a lover who is a spotted hyena; from the uneasily duplicitous relationships between young women and their parents to the heartbreaking experiences of visitors to maximum security prisons whose vividly delineated experiences are not what they might have expected-Black Dahlia &White Rose explores the commingling of sexual love and violence, the tumult of family life, and resonates with Oates' predilection for dark humor and her gift for voice.
