These short stories are like novels, they condense the life within a few pages: terror, passion, loneliness, revenge, desire. Many truthful and important stories that speak about people's feelings or reputations.
This is my first book of Oates and I like the way of her writing. ( )

3.5 stars really. It's hard to rate a book of short stories. ( )

Overall, this was a great collection of stories - as always with collections, I liked some more than others. The stories I liked the best in this collection almost always involved a woman looking back on her past, telling a story and discovering or rediscovering something about her past or her family's past. These stories were quietly unsettling and somewhat hazy, often involving secrets or acts whose meaning the story's main character could not or would not comprehend. Among my favorites: "Faithless," in which a woman uncovers the truth about her mother and father's relationship; "The Scarf," in which a woman remembers buying a gift as a child for her now aged mother; and "What Then, My Life?", in which a woman tries to remember time spent on her grandparents' farm. All of these descriptions of course are stripped of the shocking violence and horribleness that appears in most Oates stories, to avoid spoilers. Less successful for me were the many stories about wronged lovers taking revenge and the stories that seemed "ripped from the headlines" about school violence.

It goes without saying that Oates is impressively prolific, but what's also amazing is her ability to write in so many different registers and prose styles while still remaining clearly herself. I read the ebook version, which also included an interview with the author. Most of the questions were quite silly, but I did enjoy learning about how Oates almost always "curates" her short story collections around a theme and arranges them so that as the reader progesses through the book, the reader moves from more concrete stories to more abstract stories with a greater sense of narrative instability. That progression was definitely clear toward the final stories. ( )