Oates is a better short story writer than novelist. Her writing style is best described as a manic rush, as clauses and phrases and complete sentences bump into each other, without punctuation, to recreate the fever pitch of life on edge. This style, naturally, works better in compressed form than when dragged out across a 700 page narrative. (Believe me, I've tried reading many of her novels.) In the WHEEL OF LOVE she is a little more restrained. This is an early collection of hers and contains some of her best and best-known stories. Forget "In the Region of Ice," the first story, but "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been" is a classic. It's frightening and can be read on so many levels. Oates is very good at describing the seamy side of otherwise "normal" people, but after a point I began to wonder what she thinks the point of her writing is. More interesting as a pschologist and sociologist than literary writer.

It's a shame this collection is no longer in print. When it came out in 1970, it created a huge stir (Oates had just won the National Book Award for the novel "them") and signalled the full flowering of a brilliant short story writer. Oates has released several fine collections over the years--my second favorite by her is "Last Days" (1984)--but this one has the strongest impact. Anyone who wants to know the soul of America in the 1950s and 1960s should read it. The title story (about a failed marriage told backwards--she beat Pinter's "Betrayal" by over a decade), "In the Region of Ice," "Accomplished Desires," "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been," and several other stories are among the best an American short story writer has produced since WWII. I am not just raving here. The only post-WWII collections (not career retrospectives but collections gathering recent publications) I know that hold up to it are Flannery O'Connor's A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955) and John Updike's Pigeon Feathers and Other Stories (1962). Oates has an uncanny way of getting into the psyches of her characters, particularly her women, and anatomizing them in short order. She has a dark view of human nature, but an artist is entitled to a view--and anyway, as D. H. Lawrence said (of Cooper), "The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer." You will see why I quote this statement when you read the stories in this book.

I read this in the early 80's and remember laughing aloud about something I read in it. This summer I had to re-read it. One of the marks of a good book is recognition and identification with the characters. Perhaps I laughed at the thoughts in Kasch's head - probably similar to my own. I recognize so many of the characters here, what they think and how they act. If there was one disappointment I found it was with Lyle - did music and his interest in it cure him of his problems? Did it cure him of his drug abuse and the ghosts of his Vietnam experience? The synopsis: a 42 year old man becomes obsessed with a 14 year old, influences her intellectually and falls in love with her trailer trash mother until disaster strikes ( a recurring Joyce Carol Oates theme). The characters are great. I knew someone like Laney named Ginger. I identify with Kasch, have family like Lyle etc. The language is shockingly crude for Oates, but the thoughts are what people think, the words are what people say. It's a great book and deserves to be in print, deserves to be read. Oates is really one of the best around. I love her works. Read this

This Book is about a king who lives in a castle. He has a baker called Adrian.The King always eats eggs. Adrian makes the king chicken eggs,goose eggs,duck eggs.Then he shouts More More More! The Next day he read in his Newspaper that a dodos egg was spotted on an island.So he told Adrian to prepare the boat.To get to The island.

Oates knows what happens to girls whose self-esteem has been shot to hell. Her depiction of such a girl and the pathologically passive woman she becomes made me ache. The hope-filled ending made me sigh.

Hover has beautiful, intriguing photographs. The stories are haunting and wonderfully written to match the photographs. I highly recommend this delightful book.

This short story collection centers on the impact of separations and divorce on the participants including extended family members. However, the twenty tales share a dark look at IRRECONCILABLE DIFFERENCES as the audience is treated to situations that do not end as peacefully as our current legal system expects.

Lia Matera has put together a remarkable anthology that has several excellent stories, some very good tales, and no poor entry. The cross-genre contributors are a modern day who's who with such noted authors like Oates, Cross, Deaver, Lutz, Buchanan, and Muller, etc. None of the writers are lightweights as they all hold their own with the heavyweights. Anyone who enjoyed the Battle of the Roses will fully relish each tale that paints a very dismal look at broken relationships.

Harriet Klausner

I begin by admitting some prejudice: I am one of the authors included, and the name of the volume was taken from my essay (publisher's choice, not my pushiness!) This is an excellent collection, including Mailer, Liebling, Oates, and many others. Not quite the wonderful cornucopia that The Fireside Book of Boxing was some 30 or 40 years ago (that was one of the great sports' anthologies of all time), but still well worth owning. (I don't get any royalties, honest!)

After September 11, 2001 many authors felt it necessary to respond in some way. But how? Joyce Carol Oates has chosen to write a novel, not about that historical event specifically, but about the nature of hate and evil. She chooses to concentrate this exploration in the intimate environment of a celebrated, reclusive writer named Joshua Seigl. He has reached a point in his life where he realises that he can no longer block the world out and needs human company. Searching for an assistant to help him organize his enormous body of work and attend to the menial chores of his large house, he encounters a drifter who calls herself Alma. Her body is covered in what may be scars, birthmarks or tattoos. Alma uses these mysterious marks on her body to fashion a personality for herself which can confront the uglier aspects of the world that her more sensitive self cannot combat. After hiring her there follows a working relationship in the intimate space of Seigl's house that unearths hidden aspects of both their identities. The unspoken antithesis that exists between them is built through months of a seemingly harmonious working relationship. Yet the hatred that exists between them is brought physically to the forefront by the exaggerated attitudes of Alma's dangerous, anti-Semitic lover Dmitri and Seigl's mentally unbalanced, passionately upper class sister Jet. Inevitably, the central characters own prejudices must come to the forefront where a tacit understanding is formed amidst tragic events.

The ultimate question this novel raises is: what place does art have in illuminating the past and dispensing with hatred? The answer is not as simple as it appears because fiction does not deal in truth. One can't help feeling that Oates herself is attempting to work out her own feelings over the matter in a heated argument toward the end of the novel where Joshua defends his writing:

"'Alma, I think of myself as writing stories for others. In place of others who are dead, or mute. Who can't speak for themselves.'"

This argument for the exhumation of buried events and people is the same that Oates has used in interviews to explain why she has written some novels such as Black Water and Blonde that reinvent historical situations. Alma's rebuttal is that he pretends to know these things, but doesn't actually know. However, one could argue that the point of fictional writing isn't to get at the "truth" but to convey an "idea" and in these "ideas" we discover the reality that has been hidden. The Tattooed Girl isn't a political novel in any obvious allegorical manner. It does, however, haunt your thoughts in the way it illuminates the divisions (economical, social, racial and religious) between people to such a startlingly intense degree. It is an incredibly important book that ought to be read now.

This book demonstrates once more why JCO's literary output is without rival. It would seem she goes without stop... not even to take a breath.

This tome includes witty, sensitive and accurate reviews of books and writers (including a tremendously touching piece on Sylvia Plath's work and eventual fate)... also features excerts rom diaries and unpublished works, selected as if to be part of a wie-range retrospective by a major plastic artist.... actually, that would be the best way to describe the purpose of this book. Only, instead of being pauintings, what we see are sentences, in perfect order, words perfectly crafted and honed to deliver a most astounding portrait of their author.

One of the nation's most talented writers is without a doubt, Joyce Carol Oates. This particular collection of short stories is a true pleasure to read. I have read "Area Man Found Crucified" and "Lethal" aloud to several of my friends. Her prose reads much like poetry to me. I find Joyce's ability to find her way into the dark underbelly of the human psyche astounding. Reading Joyce's work is not much unlike having the opportunity to talk with those people you normally only see in passing on the subway or driving through downtown. The best part is that this approach is much safer, and plausibly more enjoyable.

Even if one is unable to purchase this book due to lack of availability, he or she should seek it out in libraries. Her writings have changed the way I think about short story forever.