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. Narrated by Angela Brazil, Susan Boyce, Stephen R. Thorne, Rachael Warren, Parker Leventer, Fred Sullivan, Emily Woo Zeller, Matt Clevy, and Mauro Hantman.
Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of a National Humanities Medal awarded by President Barack Obama, the National Book Critics Circle’s Ivan Sandrof Life Achievement Award, the National Book Award in Fiction, the Jerusalem Prize, the Prix Femina, the Cino Del Duca World Prize, and is a five-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the bestsellers Blonde and We Were the Mulvaneys. She is the Roger S. Berlind ’52 Distinguished Professor of the Humanities Emerita at Princeton University and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2024 she won the Raymond Chandler Lifetime Achievement Award given to “a master of the thriller and noir literary genre.”
Angela Brazil is an AudioFile Earphones Award–winning narrator and a professional actor who is proud to be a long-standing member of the Resident Acting Company at Trinity Repertory Company. She also teaches at the Brown/Trinity Conservatory.
Susan Boyce is the award-winning narrator of over 140 audiobooks. She performs in variety theater, is one half of the song-and-dance team of Jones & Boyce, and holds a degree in theater and biology. She can be heard in phone trees, in computer games, and as the voice of the pink “Care Bear.” She lives in St. Augustine, Florida, and summers in Greenville, Maine.
Stephen R. Thorne, winner of multiple AudioFile Earphones Awards for narration, is a professional actor and member of the resident acting company at Providence’s esteemed Trinity Repertory Company, where he has played Hamlet, Henry V, and Tom Joad.
Rachael Warren, an audiobook narrator and actress, is a member of the resident acting company at Trinity Repertory Company in Providence, Rhode Island, where she has played such roles as Eliza Doolittle, Sally Bowles, Ophelia, and Portia, as well as originating roles in world premieres by artists such as Paula Vogel and Charles Strouse. Her work has also been seen across the United States at regional theaters and on several national tours.
Parker Leventer is an actress and voice-over artist. She has worked at the Lark and the Working Theater in New York, as well as regionally at Trinity Repertory Company, California Shakespeare Theatre, and Magic Theatre. She has an MFA in acting from Brown University/Trinity Repertory in Providence, Rhode Island.
Fred Sullivan is an actor and an AudioFile Earphones Award-winning narrator. He has played over one hundred roles as an award-winning resident actor at Trinity Repertory Company in Providence, Rhode Island. He is resident director at Gamm Theatre and teaches acting at the Rhode Island School of Design.
Emily Woo Zeller is an Audie and Earphones Award–winning narrator, voice-over artist, actor, dancer, and choreographer. AudioFile magazine named her one of the Best Voices of 2013. Her voice-over career includes work in animated film and television in Southeast Asia.
Mauro Hantman has been a resident actor at Trinity Repertory Company in Providence, Rhode Island, where he has appeared in over fifty productions since 1999. He's the artistic director of the Providence Improv Fest and a founding member of Improv Jones, an improv troupe formed in 1992.