The Assignation - Softcover

Oates, Joyce Carol

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0880014407 ISBN 13: 9780880014403

Publisher: HarperCollins, 1996

Synopsis

A woman's lover seems not to recognize her on the street. A teenage girl accepts a ride from a stranger in a rust-speckled Cadillac. An old man is obsessed by the memory of his innocent childhood intrusion on a half-dressed aunt.

In forty-four very short, very powerful stories, Joyce Carol Oates fashions brief, intensely compact dramas out of the unwieldy material of human experience. The stories in The Assignation are infused with a "radiant intensity," wrote James Atlas in the New York Times Book Review, and they convey the depth and scope of a novel in a few charged pages. The Assignation is an electric display of the talents that make Joyce Carol Oates one of our finest short story writers.

About this title

From the Publisher:

"Vintage Oates . . . short, sharp shots . . . from the master of moody foreboding."--Kirkus Reviews. "If the phrase 'woman of letters' existed, she would be, foremost in this country, entitled to it."--John Updike.

About the Author:

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 PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction, and has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including We Were the Mulvaneys; Blonde, which was nominated for the National Book Award; and the New York Times bestseller The Accursed. 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.

About this edition

• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0880014407
• ISBN 13: 9780880014403
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 208