Joyce Carol Oates is an unparalleled investigator of human personality. In these eight stories, she deftly tests the bonds between damaged individuals-brother and sister. teacher and student, two lonesome strangers on a subway-in the beautiful, bracing prose that has become her signature. In the title story, a white, aspiring professor in Detroit tries to shake a black, male shadow during the summer of the city's 1967 race riots. In "The Rescuer,"...

In letters to her recently deceased cat Mud, eleven-year-old Lorelei chronicles the ups and downs of her sixth-grade year, during which her parents separate, she gets a part in the school play, and she becomes friends with the cutest boy in her grade.

Now rich, Jacky Faber has purchased the Lorelei Lee to carry passengers across the Atlantic, and believing she has been absolved of past sins against the Crown, she docks in London, where she is arrested and sentenced to life in the newly formed penal colony in Australia.