<p>From the legendary literary master, winner of the National Book Award and <em>New York Times</em> bestselling author Joyce Carol Oates, a collection of thirteen mesmerizing stories that maps the eerie darkness within us all.</p><p>Insightful, disturbing, imaginative, and breathtaking in their lyrical precision, the stories in <em>Lovely, Dark, Deep</em> display Joyce Carol Oates’s magnificent ability to make visceral the terror, hurt, and uncertainty that lurks at the edges of ordinary lives.</p><p>In “Mastiff,” a woman and a man are joined in an erotic bond forged out of terror and gratitude. “Sex with Camel” explores how a sixteen-year-old boy realizes the depth of his love for his grandmother—and how vulnerable those feelings make him. Fearful that that her husband is “disappearing” from their life, a woman becomes obsessed with keeping him in her sight in “The Disappearing.” “A Book of Martyrs” reveals how the end of a pregnancy brings with it the end of a relationship. And in the title story, the elderly Robert Frost is visited by an interviewer, an unsettling young woman, who seems to know a good deal more about his life than she should.</p><p>A piercing and evocative collection, <em>Lovely, Dark, Deep</em> reveals an artist at the height of her creative power.</p>