NIGHT, NEON

From literary icon Joyce Carol Oates comes a brand new collection of mystery & suspense stories, both haunting and darkly humorous.

Dusk, the heartbreak time. Slow-waning light falls upon the river like melting snow. The hour when neon begins. Oates eschews every convention of formal prose storytelling to capture the nuances of the human psyche - from a woman who gets lost on her drive home to her plush suburban home and ends up breaking into a stranger's house, to a freeform interview with a successful novelist that reads as Oates' scathing critique of her own profession, to a first-person account of a cloned 1940s magazine pinup girl being sold at auction and embodying America's ideals of beauty and womanhood. These stories come together to form a poignant tapestry of regular people searching for their place in a social hierarchy, women grappling with their self-worth in a culture that neglects to provide them the support they need to discover themselves. "It is difficult, particularly for a young person, and perhaps for a girl, to break free of the spell of familial love - which can be possessive and stultifying as well as nourishing and enlivening," Oates told The Guardian in 2019. Oates deftly weaves in and out of a stream-of-consciousness writing style to reflect the ways we process traumatic experiences and uncomfortable emotions - the late-night anxieties we often lack the language to adequately convey to anyone outside our own heads. Originally appearing in publications as disparate as Harper's, Vice, and Conjunctions, the stories comprising NIGHT, NEON showcase Oates decades into her illustrious career, in a 21st-century publishing landscape that is still catching up to her unapologetically honest explorations of American identity.