This collection merely offers a peek at the tip of the iceberg that is Oates' massive talent... Despite spanning four decades, Oates tells us in the afterword that she had to leave out many of her defining works like the miniature narratives and gothic/mystery stories.

She's brilliant at crafting characters who are just short of likeable, and yet you feel drawn in enough to want to know what happens to them.

Her female protagonists especially, seem to invite some of the catastrophes that happen to them, and there's that sense of inevitable disaster even as she lays out the path leading to their destruction, either by a seemingly harmless flirtation, or vain indulgence in (unwanted?) attention.

A sense of unease underlies most of these stories, and you go away from them wishing the characters could have made better choices. But perhaps this mirrors real life and makes her stories more painfully realistic. Painting pretty pictures was never Oates' intention to begin with...