In "The Man Who Fought Roland LaStarza" a woman’s world is upended when she learns the brutal truth about a family friend’s death—and what her father is capable of. Meanwhile, a businessman desperate to find his missing two-year-old grandson in "Suicide Watch" must determine whether the horrifying tale his junky son tells him about the boy’s whereabouts is a confession or a sick test. In "Valentine, July Heat Wave" a man prepares a gruesome surprise for the wife determined to leave him. And the children of a BTK-style serial killer struggle to decode the patterns behind their father’s seemingly random bad acts, as well as their own, in "Bad Habits."In these and other stories, Joyce Carol Oates explores with bloodcurdling insight the ties that bind—or worse. The Museum of Dr. Moses is another chilling masterpiece from "one of the great artistic forces of our time" (The Nation).

Joshua Seigl, a celebrated but reclusive author, is forced for reasons of failing health to surrender his much-prized bachelor's independence. Advertising for an assistant, he unwittingly embarks upon the most dangerous adventure of his privileged life.Alma Busch, a sensuous, physically attractive young woman with bizarre tattoos covering much of her body, stirs in Seigl a complex of emotions: pity? desire? responsibility? guilt? Unaware of her painful past and her troubled personality, Seigl hires her as his assistant. As the novel alternates between Seigl's and Alma's points of view, the naïve altruism of the one and the virulent anti-Semitism of the other clash in a tragedy of thwarted erotic desire.With her masterful balance of dark suspense and surprising tenderness, Joyce Carol Oates probes the contemporary tragedy of ethnic hatred and challenges our accepted limits of desire. The Tattooed Girl may be her most controversial novel.

I love this book so much, but don't know what to make of it at all. It really is very like a unicorn itself: you try to explain it and you just sound crazy. How seriously should you take it? And yet is it not the very most serious thing that ever was?This is my first Murdoch. I'm reading her because I read an interesting article recently that suggested that she and I have some overlapping ideas about morality. Reading this book, I suspect it's more than that. We have some overlapping and intersecting ways of being in the world and with other people, congruent preoccupations.I want to contrast her with Mieville, who I found so hard -- not difficult but hard-edged. I ricocheted off the surface of him; he kept me at a great distance. This is the opposite: there is no surface, just interpretations, and we are already inside from the get-go. Way inside, like Effingham sinking in the swamp.(That's the one thing I didn't quite believe: why didn't that sinking change him more?)And that makes no sense, but you see, that's the crux of the matter: we are both neo-touchy-feely-ists. The most important sense is intuitive sense.(I like this very much, but am gently suggesting that I can't tell if it's a good book by any objective measure. But then, I don't suppose it has to be.)

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