“Making sense of life in a cataclysmic inner and outer landscape has been Joyce Carol Oates’ obsession for five decades. This evocative new collection shows just how much sense she can make of it now.” — Chicago Tribune
“...Innovative, brilliant...there are sentences that leave a deeply sensuous pleasure in their wake...” — San Francisco Chronicle
“Oates’s fiction has the curious, morbid draw of a flaming car wreck. It’s a testament to Oates’s talent that she can nearly always force the reader to look.” — Publishers Weekly
“...Vivid...the work reflects a delicious boundary-crossing mix of literary artistry and genre-writing skill...This famously prolific writer continues to surprise us, and that in itself is something to celebrate.” — Library Journal
“A master class in the art of pure, suspenseful storytelling...Oates is a dangerous writer in the best sense of the word, one who takes risks almost obsessively with energy and relish… [a] dazzling collection.” — New York Times
“Oates is just a fearless writer. . . with her brave heart and her impossibly lush and dead-on imaginative powers.” — Los Angeles Times
“Oates remains . . . a living master of the short story-far more virtuosic in manner than the ecstatic realist she is usually taken to be and far more at home in the form, too.” — Buffalo News
“We think of Oates, like Poe, as a master of terror, but her real mastery is in almost never depicting a strong emotion in isolation...Oates makes for a caustic companion in Sourland - a fearless experimenter forcing the reader ahead of her at knifepoint.” — Los Angeles Times