Axe: Stories That Cut Deep

by Joyce Carol Oates (Contributor), Adam Szetela (Editor)

Heresy Press’s new anthology, Stories That Cut Deep, gathers dazzling short fiction from some of today’s most acclaimed voices, including National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize winners. Inspired by Kafka’s injunction that “a book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us,” these thirteen stories strike at complacency with audacity and style. Joyce Carol Oates, Sherman Alexie, Chuck Palahniuk, Lionel Shriver, Andrew Doyle, Richard North Patterson, Jeffrey Ford, David Sedaris, and Alice Walker deliver tales of cruelty, compassion, delusion, and revelation—from gothic horror and biting satire to surreal fables and lyrical meditations. Across these pages, the familiar world cracks open to reveal what lies violence, longing, and the possibility of grace.

In these daring tales by celebrated and boundary-pushing authors, nothing is as it seems. Joyce Carol Oates reveals the dark roots of genius, while Sherman Alexie charts a Native scholar’s mystical return to his heritage. Bradford Morrow turns inheritance into horror; Lionel Shriver and David Sedaris skewer modern taboos, and Chuck Palahniuk exposes the dark seamy side of child sex trafficking. Jonathan Santlofer’s seductive thriller and Andrew Doyle’s hallucinatory farce explore deception and madness; Alice Walker and Elizabeth Hand deliver haunting explorations of death and grieving, while Richard North Patterson, Jeffrey Ford, and James Morrow expose beauty, compassion, and absurdity in equal measure. Provocative, poignant, and richly imaginative, these thirteen stories dare to tell uncomfortable truths.

In a spirited afterword, Junot Díaz urges readers to read “hungrily, adventurously, and blasphemously”—the perfect benediction for a compilation filled with trenchant, impactful stories.

254 pages, Kindle Edition

Published July 14, 2026

About the author

Joyce Carol Oates is an American writer. Oates published her first book in 1963, and has since published 58 novels, a number of plays and novellas, and many volumes of short stories, poetry, and nonfiction. Her novels Black Water (1992), What I Lived For (1994), and Blonde (2000), and her short story collections The Wheel of Love (1970) and Lovely, Dark, Deep: Stories (2014) were each finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. She has won many awards for her writing, including the National Book Award, for her novel Them (1969), two O. Henry Awards, the National Humanities Medal, and the Jerusalem Prize (2019).
Oates taught at Princeton University from 1978 to 2014, and is the Roger S. Berlind '52 Professor Emerita in the Humanities with the Program in Creative Writing. From 2016 to 2020, she was a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley, where she taught short fiction in the spring semesters. She now teaches at Rutgers University, New Brunswick.
Oates was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2016.
Pseudonyms: Rosamond Smith and Lauren Kelly.

Reviews

[Esther · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm going to say that my favorite selection from Axe: Stories That Cut Deep was The Book Life by Jeffrey Ford. And that would be because I live in Susquehanna County, Pennsylvania, perhaps an hour from Vestal, New York, where the story is set. I may withdraw Axe from the library again just in order to reread that story.