"From one of the most important contemporary American writers, Cardiff, by the Sea is a bold, haunting collection of four previously unpublished novellas. Starting with the title novella - in which a romantic-minded young art historian is led to (re)discover a terrifying trauma after inheriting property in faraway Cardiff, Maine - through to "The Surviving Child" - which finds the young new wife of a famous poet's widow haunted by the dead poet's voice dancing in the wind, an inexplicably befouled well, and a compulsive draw to the same garage that already took two lives - Cardiff, by the Sea is ceaselessly sinister. In these psychologically daring, chillingly suspenseful novellas, Joyce Carol Oates writes about women facing threats past and present"--Provided by publisher.