Sixteen previously published stories now collected in three sections on loss, grief, and forgetting from the renowned Joyce Carol Oates. Like DEAR HUSBAND, SOURLAND contains stories have appeared in the past few years in a myriad of journals including THE NEW YORKER, THE GUARDIAN, THE MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW, BOULEVARD, CONJUNCTIONS, and ELLERY QUEEN.
The sixteen stories of SOURLAND beautifully resonate with the author's trademark fascination for the unpredictable in the midst of the 'ordinary' -- the commingling of sexual love and violence, the tumult of family life, a predilection for dark humor and a gift for voice. The inhabitants of Sourland are as varied as a desperate man who dons a jack-o-lantern head as a prelude to a most curious sort of courtship, a 'story of a stabbing' many times recounted in the life of a lonely young girl, a beguiling young woman librarian whose amputee state attracts a married man and father, a girl hopelessly in love with her renegade, incarcerated cousin, and a professor's wife who finds herself tragically isolated at the party she is hosting for her beloved husband's colleagues.
