These are dark stories about dark days, suffused, like most of Oates’s work, with themes of violence, loss and longing. She offers possibility here, too, but only as if to say that while the myriad choices we can make may produce wildly different journeys, none of us, ultimately, is spared.

One or two of these stories are as good as James’s and Conrad’s. None of them is conventional or commercial, the 25 of them add up to a magnificent achievement.

These are small, hard gems, full of the same rich emotion and startling observation that readers of Oates’s fiction have come to expect.

The Hungry Ghosts crackles with tension and wit, and its subjects—the foibles of academia and the literati—are tantalizing.

Here are five splendid stories, imagining five major American authors on the verge of death each rooted in biographical facts and presented in the authors own particular style that are harrowing, heartfelt, incredibly moving, that cut to the depths of the psyche, probing with such laser-lean, honed prose that it’ll take your breath away.