Extenuating Circumstances: Stories of Crime and Suspense

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Extenuating Circumstances: Stories of Crime and Suspense
Extenuating Circumstance.jpg
First edition
Author Joyce Carol Oates
LanguageEnglish
Publisher The Mysterious Press
Publication date
2022
Publication placeUnited States
Media typePrint (hardback)
Pages615
ISBN 978-1638084051

Extenuating Circumstances: Stories of Crime and Suspense is a collection of previously collected and uncollected short fiction by Joyce Carol Oates published in 2022 by The Mysterious Press . [1]

Contents

“By the River” was anthologized in Best American Short Stories, 1969.

“Yarrow” was among the 1988 prize stories for the O. Henry Awards, as was “Why Don’t You Come Live With Me, It’s Time” in 1992.

“The Undesirable Table” won the Pushcart Prize XX, Best of the Small Presses (1996). [2]

Stories

Selected periodical or book of original publication are indicated. [3]

Reception

Describing the collection as “a real treat,” reviewer Ray Palen at Bookreporter.com writes:

These stories have a little of everything and do such a fine job representing her style of writing, which can be best described as surprising, unsettling, disturbing, unique and never predictable. [4]

New York Review of Books critic Richard Cytowic, characterizing the Oates’s tales as “unsettling” and “disquieting” writes:

She explores the forbidden corners of human experience. Joyce Carol Oates’ tales are unsettling, disquieting, some endings left hanging, leaving readers not answers but questions that implicate more horror yet to come to the normal-seeming characters who inhabit them. [5]

Footnotes

  1. Cytowic, 2022: “This collection of 24 stories spans the first 30 years of Joyce Carol Oates’s prolific career,,,Long out of print, these tales have not until now appeared in any form this past century.
  2. "Extenuating Circumstances: Stories of Crime and Suspense". Celestial Timepiece: A Joyce Carol Oates Patchwork. Celestial Timepiece.
  3. Oates, 2022: Acknowledgments
  4. Palen, 2022
  5. Cytowic, 2022

Sources