Joyce Carol Oates

"The Mulvaneys are blessed with a successful, hard-working father, a loving mother, three fine sons, and a sweet, pretty daughter. Their residence is picture-perfect High Point Farm, long since converted from actual farming to the cultivation of the joys of country living. Their position in the community seems secure. But something ahppens to 16-year-old Marianne on Valentine's Day, 1976, and incident that is hushed up in the town and never spoken...

Amid a starkly beautiful but uncanny landscape in New Mexico, a married couple from Cambridge, MA, takes residency at a distinguished academic institute. When the husband is stricken with a mysterious illness, misdiagnosed at first, their lives are uprooted and husband and wife each embarks upon a nightmare journey. At thirty-seven, Michaela faces the terrifying prospect of widowhood and the loss of Gerard, whose identity has greatly shaped her own....

Rebecca, the daughter of a German high school teacher who was forced to work as a gravedigger after immigrating to upstate New York, begins a life-changing pilgrimage throughout America in the wake of a prejudice-motivated tragedy.

In 20th century Princeton, New Jersey, a powerful curse, which besets the wealthiest of families, causes the disappearance of a young bride, and when her brother sets out to find her, he crosses paths with the town's most formidable people, including Grover Cleveland and Upton Sinclair.

In the waning days of the turbulent 1970s, in the wake of unsolved child-killings that have shocked Detroit, the lives of several residents are drawn together with tragic consequences. Hannah, wife of a prominent local businessman, has begun an affair with a darkly charismatic stranger whose identity remains elusive; Mikey, a canny street hustler finds himself on a chilling mission to rectify injustice; and the serial killer known as Babysitter, an...

Marguerite, a beautiful woman, has disappeared from her small town in Upstate New York. But is foul play involved? Or did she merely take an opportunity to get away for fun, or finally make the decision to leave behind her claustrophobic life of limited opportunities? Her younger sister Gigi wonders if the flimsy silk Dior dress, so casually abandoned on the floor, is a clue to Marguerite's having seemingly vanished. The police examine the footprints...

Nikki Eaton, single, thirty-one, sexually liberated, and economically self-supporting, has never particularly thought of herself as a daughter. Yet, following the unexpected loss of her mother, she undergoes a remarkable transformation during a tumultuous year that brings stunning horror, sorrow, illumination, wisdom, and even (from an unexpected source) a nurturing love.

Sixteen-year-old Katya Spiva is walking with her two summer babysitting charges in Bayhead Harbor, New Jersey, when she's approached by silver-haired, gentlemanly Marcus Kidder, a local resident of some renown. What does this mysterious rich man really want from Katya, who is young enough to be his granddaughter? And what will he risk to get it?

A volume of six stories and novellas by the National Book Award-winning author of We Were the Mulvaneys includes the title story, in which the disappearance of a sweet blonde-haired child is linked to her mother's indiscretions, a too-obvious schoolteacher and an older student with a fascination for a Native American legend.