The Frenzy
A master of the short story returns to Deep Water with a new collection that shows the form at its most compressed—and volatile. In The Frenzy, Joyce Carol Oates enters lives in charged moments when a single encounter, accident, or revelation seems to split time in two. The short story is uniquely suited to this kind of pressure: it can leap across years, distill a life to its turning point, and leave the future altered in the space of a few pages. A conversation with one of America’s greatest living writers on the way stories can bend time around a single decisive moment.
Joyce Carol Oates
Joyce Carol Oates is one of the most prolific and celebrated writers in American literature, and for more than four decades has been a defining presence at Princeton University, where she helped establish its reputation as a place committed to creative writing and the arts. The author of an extraordinary body of work spanning novels, short stories, essays, memoir, criticism, drama, poetry, and more, she has received the National Book Award, the National Humanities Medal, the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Art of the Short Story, two O. Henry Prizes, and numerous lifetime achievement honors. Since 1963, 40 of Oates’s books have been included on the New York Times list of notable books of the year. In her gripping new collection of short stories, The Frenzy, Oates plunges us into the lives of her characters at moments of crisis and confusion, when much of what they understand about themselves and those they love comes undone.
