- "The Girl with the Blackened Eye" was selected for The Best American Mystery Stories 2001.
- "The Skull" was selected for Best American Mystery Stories, 2003.
- "Three Girls" was a National Magazine Awards 2003 finalist and also won the Pushcart Prize, XXVIII.
- "Curly Red" was a National Magazine Awards 2002 finalist.
- "The Instructor" won the Pushcart Prize, XXVII.
- "The Girl with the Blackened Eye" won Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards, 2001.
Jane Smiley of The New York Times Book Review said of Oates (on the back of the book cover of first edition 2004): With her prodigious gifts of invention and her systematic explorations of literary history, she has gone beyond the demands of the marketplace....Like J.S. Bach, Joyce Carol Oates often seems to be working in private, cultivating the variety and complexity of her vision in service to something larger than a literary career."
John Schwartz of New York Times Book Review (on the front cover of first Ecco paperback edition 2005): These are small, hard gems, full of the same rich emotion and startling observation that readers of Oates' fiction have come to expect.
Publishers Weekly: "In Oates's precise psychological renderings, victims are as complex as villains and almost always more interesting....[E]ven the strangest events in this sure-footed collection are painfully familiar."
Booklist: "Her new searing short stories explore the malevolent aspects of human sexuality with unflinching authenticity and a cathartic fascination."
Kirkus Reviews: "More of the same, from the most frustratingly uneven writer in the business....[T]he usual disjointed gathering of carefully composed and inexplicably slipshod work....Vintage Oates — and very much an acquired taste."
Library Journal: "Oates demonstrates her continued ability to create edgy stories that are still grounded in reality. She immerses the reader in disturbing dilemmas and then resolves them in unexpected ways."
