Give Me Your Heart

The need for love--obsessive, self-destructive, unpredictable--takes us to forbidden places, as in the chilling world of Give Me Your Heart, a new collection of stories by the inimitable Joyce Carol Oates. In the suspenseful "Strip Poker," a reckless adolescent girl must find a way of turning the tables on a gathering of increasingly threatening young men--can she "outplay" them? In "Smother!" a young woman's nightmare memory of childhood brings trouble on her professor mother--which of them will win? In "Split/Brain" a woman who has blundered into a lethal situation confronts the possibility of saving herself--will she take it? In "The First Husband," a jealous man discovers that his wife seems to have lied about her first marriage, and exacts a cruel revenge, years after the fact. In ten razor-sharp stories, National Book Award winner Oates shows that the most deadly mysteries often begin at home.