Faithless: Tales of Transgression

A vengeful former lover on the highway. A father on the run. Twenty-one gripping portraits of ordinary lives pushed to the brink.

In this collection of twenty-one unforgettable stories, Joyce Carol Oates explores the mysterious private lives of men and women with vivid, unsparing precision and sympathy.

Here, Oates follows men and women driven past the boundaries of domestic safety: an abandoned husband keeping an armed night vigil outside his former home, a woman trailing her ex-lover along rain-slick expressways, and an aging couple retreating to an Adirondack cabin.

With relentless psychological precision, the collection traces the long silence after a mother vanishes from a Chautauqua Valley farm, uncovering the impulses that shatter ordinary lives.

By turns interlocutor and interpreter, magician and realist, she dissects the psyches of ordinary people and their potential for good and evil with chilling understatement and lasting power.

• Psychological Suspense: Seventeen-year-old Derek Peck professes total innocence after his mother is found bludgeoned on their East End Avenue townhouse floor, leaving his ambitious defense attorney to untangle a web of filial resentment and denial.


• Crime Short Stories: A disgraced Manhattan prosecutor takes his five-year-old daughter on an extravagant shopping spree through Fifth Avenue department stores, desperately outrunning an arrest warrant before barricading them in the Hotel Pierre.


• Infidelity: At an upstate arts institute, a young scholar plunges into an all-consuming summer affair with an erratic composer, testing the fragile boundaries between self-destruction and obsession.


• American Literature: In a salt-bleached Jersey Shore diner, an insecure young waitress endures the callous scrutiny of local patrons while navigating a perilous connection with an eccentric former teacher.


• Also by This Author: Blonde, Carthage and Middle Age: A Romance.