Will You Always Love Me?

Obsession with loss, fear of betrayal, and sudden violence plague the characters who inhabit these twenty-two stories in Will You Always Love Me? Joyce Carol Oates uses her talent like a scalpel to cut swiftly and precisely through the surface of everyday life to lay bare the powerful, perilous emotional currents swirling below. In the title story, a woman's rage over the savage murder of her sister years ago crowds out all reason and hope of happiness. A respectable suburban matron becomes her son's accomplice in sexually humiliating a glamorous new neighbor in the prize-winning "The Goose-Girl." In all of the stories-characters, male and female, young and old, rich and poor, sophisticated and naive-come to vivid life in a world of dangerous truths and fateful consequences. Joyce Carol Oates's uncanny eye for physical detail, her flawless ear for American speech, and her X-ray vision of the human heart and psyche make the stories she tells indelibly and inescapably real.