An Exclusive, New Story from Joyce Carol Oates in 'The Atlantic' Fiction for Kindle Series

We're thrilled to announce that the second story featured this month as part of The Atlantic Fiction for Kindle series is by literary great, Joyce Carol Oates. Oates was the 2010 recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature. She's also been honored with the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction and the National Book Award. Oates is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University. You can pre-order her newest book, Sourland, which will be available on Kindle on September 14th. Her memoir, The Siege: A Widow's Story, will be published early in 2011. 
 
Exclusive to Kindle, Spotted Hyenas: A Romance follows hesitant, diffident Marianna from the first day she sensed someone was in her home—someone who wasn’t her stolid, uninterested husband. Marianna was certain she felt this man, or at least his presence, in the house, but she wasn’t sure the result was fear. Since she had dropped out of graduate school 20 years earlier, Marianna had lived what amounted to the same day, day after day: errands for her husband, decorations for the home; dinner on the table at the same time, with the same conversation. Suddenly distracted, and with a pang of yearning, she found herself thinking about Robb Gelder. Marianna knew Gelder had become a celebrated biologist renowned for his work with spotted hyenas; but when she last saw him, right before she left the campus, he was simply her lab instructor, and he had been kind to her. Something makes Marianna reach out to Gelder, lie to her husband, and drive north to the hyena laboratory in Maine. Thrilled, Robb takes great care to introduce her to his loved, and menacing, hyenas, one by one. In the days that follow, Marianna finds herself dazed, her sleep erratic and disturbed. Shreds of wild dreams haunt her during the day, at weak moments—making her heart jump, her mouth salivate. Making her feel that she should run...

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