Zero-Sum: Stories (Short Story Collections) - Softcover

Oates, Joyce Carol

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0593469585 ISBN 13: 9780593469583

Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2024

Inhaltsangabe

Zero-sum games are played for lethal stakes in these arresting stories by one of America’s most acclaimed writers, the award-winning, best-selling 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’s standing as a literary treasure and an artist of the mysterious interior life.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

JOYCE CAROL OATES is a recipient of the National Humanities Medal, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Life Achievement Award, the National Book Award, and the 2019 Jerusalem Prize for Lifetime Achievement, and has been nominated several times for the Pulitzer Prize. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the national best sellers We Were the Mulvaneys; Blonde; and the New York Times best seller The Falls, which won the 2005 Prix Femina. In 2020 she was awarded the Cino Del Duca World Prize for Literature. She is the Roger S. Berlind ’52 Distinguished Professor of the Humanities emerita at Princeton University and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978.

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Zero-­Sum

1

K. has been invited. But only barely.

2

No more! Can’t endure it.

Excuses herself from the convivial gathering, enters her hosts’ house blundering and blinded in the shadowy interior after the dazzling outdoors above the lake.

Invisible she is not likely to be noticed.

Near-­inaudible when she (rarely, hesitantly) speaks she is not likely to be missed amid the bright chatter like flashing scimitars.

In search of a bathroom, most plausibly. A wounded heart requires privacy.

Of course: she might have simply asked the Professor’s wife where the bathroom is but too shy, sulky-­shy, damned if she will interrupt a conversation, draw attention to herself.

Also: could not possibly have asked Professor M. with whom she has not exchanged a single word beyond Hello! since arriving at the gathering a little more than an hour ago.

Just—­not—­possible—­to utter the vulgar word “bathroom” to Professor M., to whom words are so important . . .

And so, inside the unfamiliar house. Stumbling, like one with a prosthetic leg.

Blinking in the shadowy interior, like a nocturnal creature.

A single large room with a peaked ceiling, well-­worn sofas and crammed bookcases and a fireplace opening onto a dining-­kitchen area, long butcher-­block table cluttered with pans, kitchenware, printed material—­magazines, books. She stares, she is dismayed, evidence here of the eminent philosopher’s domestic life, jarring intimacy in the very casualness with which books are mixed with household items. On the rough-­hewn plank floor beside the fireplace a wavering six-­foot row of back issues of American Philosophical Journal. Nearby, a single very soiled girl’s sneaker.

Sharp smell of raw onions, cloying-­sweet smell of wine.

Steeling herself for a twinge of nausea.

How he has disappointed her! He will never know.

Beyond the kitchen area there’s a door, surely the bathroom she thinks as her hand reaches out, turns the doorknob but opens the door startled and abashed to discover, not a bathroom, not even a room, just a kitchen closet—­canned foods, cereal boxes, jellies and jams, Tabasco sauce . . . Quickly she shuts the door. What am I doing!

Blunders along a hallway. The T-­shaped log house above the jewel-­like lake is built into a hill at its rear, pine boughs casting a filigree of shadow against the window at the end of the hall.

He’d referred to it as a cottage. Far larger than any cottage she has ever seen.

Resenting this. Resenting him. Inviting her out to the lake to insult her in front of the derisive others.

Should have discovered a bathroom by now, obviously she has missed it. Boldly passing an opened door, glances inside to see a screened-­in porch, must be at the (older, more run-­down) rear of the house and not visible from the terrace above the lake and so she steps inside squinting—­but seeing then, to her embarrassment, that there’s a person on the porch, seated in a wicker swing with chintz cushions, reading.

“Hi!”—­K. is quick to preempt the situation since the girl, presumably a daughter of the household, has seen her.

The girl regards her coolly. Vexation like a shimmering reflection on water, in her small pale face.

A face in which, if you look closely, there is something wrong: a subtle asymmetry. The left eye rigid in focus, the right eye more alert, alive. Unusually dark eyebrows nearly meeting across the bridge of her nose, thin resolute lips.

A girl as like K. herself at the age of twelve or thirteen as a mirror image.

3

Come help us celebrate the end of the term. RSVP appreciated. Thank you!

How does K. know that she was invited to the gathering at Professor M.’s house on Lake Orion only barely?

Well—­she doesn’t know. Not with absolute certainty.

However, she has reason to (strongly) suspect that others in the seminar, Professor M.’s favorites, were invited several days before she was invited, a deduction based upon evidence inexplicable otherwise, overheard remarks in the seminar room and in the hallway outside the room, murmured replies, cautioning smiles (for she was near, though staring intently at her cell phone, still they seemed cautious of her, or wary of her: the two motives were often mixed in her experience, indistinguishable; though among her relatives another motive, a wish to protect, might be involved); a fact that, assuming what she’d deduced was true, at least several others received invitations the previous week, perhaps not everyone in the seminar (fifteen) but certainly several, thus it follows that she can know that her invitation was belated: arriving in her inbox at 10:28 a.m. Tuesday morning.

Of course, only the arrival of the invitation allowed her to know, in retrospect, what those (certain) others, Professor M.’s favorites, were talking about the previous Friday.

At the time she hadn’t a clue. Nor even a suspicion.

And there is no disputing this: the invitation to the end-­of-­term party was an email invitation, presumably the others’ invitations were email also, so, her brain spins tirelessly, the delay of a day, or two, or three could not be attributed to the U.S. Postal Service, obviously her invitation had been sent in a different/later mailing, impersonal, that’s to say not personal. Though addressed to her.

To clarify: addressed to S. L. Karrell.

Not by Professor M., she is certain. By his assistant. Issuing the invitation in Professor M.’s name.

Shameful: instead of declining the invitation, the insult of the invitation, for certainly the invitation came days after the first invitations were sent out, she, S. L. Karrell, eagerly accepted; worse yet, in an appropriated voice, a voice not her own, blithely cheerful, giving not a hint of the hurt she felt most justifiably, and most righteously, typing the breathless reply

Thank you very much. I will be there!

But thinking it over, calibrating the punctuation, deciding to amend to a less manic

Thank you very much. I will hope to attend.

And again thinking it over, considering the slovenly illogic of the future tense, deciding to amend to a more precise

Thank you very much. I hope to attend.

4

For always, K. gives in.

For rarely, K. will hold out.

As Professor M.’s (clearly precocious) daughter does not give in just because a stranger is smiling inanely at her. As instinctively perhaps, the daughter resists the urge of firing neurons in her brain triggered by the other’s smile, to smile.

She has thought she’d mastered such resistance(s). The (ill-­advised) journey to Lake Orion has unsettled her defenses.

Seven miles from the university. Meaning that those without vehicles (like K.) will have to beg rides with someone with a vehicle.

A forced mingling. Conviviality. With K.’s rivals. With those who, if they could, would tear out her throat with their teeth.

Where of necessity K. is out of place.

Where she (alone) is out of place.

It is always thus. Once out of place, one can never be in place.

For once out, the concatenation is broken.

A corollary: those in have no idea that they are in. For they have no idea of out.

Only those out have an idea. For out sharpens the brain like a razor-­sharp scimitar while in is a browsing meek-­necked creature in a herd in a pen oblivious.

5

Oh! That’s it.

Seeing, on the girl’s...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2024
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593469585
• ISBN 13: 9780593469583
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 272
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: EDITIONS GALLIMARD; ufficio.anagrafiche@meli.it; ; Via Verdi, 8.; Assago Milano; 20090; Italien