Everyman fiction

Three players of a summer game. The important thing. One arm. Portrait of a girl in glass. The coming of something to the Widow Holly. Two on a party. The yellow bird. The field of blue children. The malediction. The angel in the alcove. The resemblance between a violin case and a coffin. The night of the iguana.

Miss Oates turns her piercing eye upon the men and women who people a prestigious upstate college, probing the marriage, affairs, and comic intrigues that lie beneath the school's serene exterior.

"The reader follows folklorist Stan Binstead and his unwanted wife Millie into the bush and watches her transformation, by virtue of a new haircut and a couple of smashing outfits, from dependence to self-awareness. Millie becomes the admired center of the expedition; more significantly, she meets and falls in love with Henry Lewis, the fabled hunter about whose person has grown up precisely the lore that Stan has set out to research. Nicknamed Simba (Bantu for lion), Lewis is envied, even hated, by the other hunters, but made one of their own by the beasts of the bush, a rite of passage he transfers to the woman he has chosen. As the hunting party, frozen, looks on, a lion materializes from the thicket of trees, glides up to Millie, as if to memorize her, then suddenly turns and streaks away. The scene glows, like a painting in primary color. Deep in the forest a dark and subtle magic is taking place, and thereby hangs this impressive tale, taut with the thrill of the hunt and the spell of the unknown"--Publisher's Weekly online review.