174 books · Joyce Carol Oates
"[Oates's] stories concern themselves with problems and situations that youth knows: the conflict between the hope of the young and the pessimism of the old; the realization of the injustices of the civilized order; the horror of the senseless cruelty condoned by society; the reality of evil, existing even in the good and the loving; brutality without motivation -- the ultimate horror; the senseless machinations of fate that condition all of life.