Black Dahlia & White Rose

The prolific Joyce Carol Oates never fails to immerse us in her fiction, and in these tales her talent for exposing the darkness underlying the ordinary world proves as gripping as ever. From a noir-inflected Los Angeles to heartbreak on a maximum-security cellblock, Oates is in top form: heady and headlong reading pleasure.

May 25: On this day in 1938 Raymond Carver was born. Carver's poem "Luck," about a nine-year-old who wakes to an empty house and the leftovers of his parents' party, is all too autobiographical: "What luck, I thought. / Years later,…

Angry robots! Aren't they all? Well, not the line of fine science fiction and fantasy books that comes to readers under the rubric Angry Robot. In fact, their offerings…

advertisement