Zero-sum games are played for lethal stakes in these arresting stories by one of America’s most acclaimed writers, the award-winning, bestselling author of BLONDE.

A brilliant young philosophy student bent on seducing her famous philosopher-mentor finds herself outmaneuvered. Diabolically clever high school girls wreak a particularly apt sort of vengeance on sexual predators in their community. A woman stalked by a would-be killer may be confiding in the wrong former lover. A young woman is morbidly obsessed by her unfamiliar new role as “mother.” In the collection’s longest story, a much-praised cutting-edge writer cruelly experiments with “drafts” of his own suicide.

In these powerfully wrought stories that hold a mirror up to our time, Joyce Carol Oates has created a world of erotic obsession, thwarted idealism and ever-shifting identities. Provocative and stunning, ZERO-SUM reinforces Oates’ standing as a literary treasure and an artist of the mysterious interior life.