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 10 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.