In the chilling world of Give Me Your Heart the need for love is obsessive self-destructive & unpredictable. It takes us to forbidden places confronts us with gruesome truths & leads us beyond our control. In the unsettling Strip Poker a reckless teenage girl must turn the tables on a group of threatening young men. Can she outplay them? In the award-winning Smother! a daughters nightmarish childhood memory brings trouble to the door of her bourgeois mother. Which of them will win? In The First Husband a jealous man discovers his wife lied about her first marriage & plans a cruel revenge. Will he go through with it? In these & other powerful tales children move beyond their parents reach wives & husbands wake up as strangers haunted pasts intrude upon uncertain futures & lives hang in the balance. In ten razor-sharp stories National Book Award winner Joyce Carol Oates shows that the most deadly mysteries often begin at home.""