Marriages and Infidelities

Journal and date of original publication provided after each title.^[3][4]

• "The Sacred Marriage" (The Southern Review, Summer 1972)
• "Puzzle" (Redbook, November 1970)
• "Love and Death" (Atlantic Monthly, June 1970)
• "29 Inventions" (The Antioch Review, Fall/Winter 1970–71)
• "Problems of Adjustment in Survivors of Natural/Unnatural Disasters" (Boston Review, Spring 1972)
• "By the River" (December, December 1968)
• "Extraordinary Popular Delusions" (Virginia Quarterly Review, Spring 1972)
• "Stalking" (The North American Review, June 1972)
• "Scenes of Passion and Despair" (Shenandoah, Summer 1971)
• "Plot" (The Paris Review, Summer 1971)
• "The Children" (The Transatlantic Review, January 1969)
• "Happy Onion" (The Antioch Review, January 1971)
• "Normal Love" (Atlantic Monthly, January 1971)
• "Stray Children" (Salmagundi, Winter 1971)
• "Wednesday's Child" (titled "Wednesday" in Esquire, August 1970)
• "Loving Losing Loving...a Man" (The Southern Review, Autumn 1971)
• "Did You Ever Slip on Red Blood?" (Harper's Magazine, April 1972)
• "The Metamorphosis" (titled "Others' Dreams" in The New American Review, November 1971)
• "Where I Lived and What I Lived For" (Virginia Quarterly Review, Autumn 1970)
• "The Lady With the Pet Dog" (The Partisan Review, Spring 1972)
• "The Spiral" (Shenandoah, Winter 1969)
• "The Turn of the Screw" (The Iowa Review, Spring 1971)
• "The Dead" (McCall's, July 1971)
• "Nightmusic" (Mundus Artium Journal, July 1972)

Literary critic William Abrahams, in Saturday Review, regards the collection as evidence placing Oates "among the most remarkable writers of her generation" and "a master" of the short story form. Abrahams praises the work for its "emotional effectiveness and intellectual credibility."^[5]

Critic Michael Wood in The New York Times finds the stories in the collection "full of melodrama and yet curiously dull," evidence of a writer "racking her brains for action, wanting to write even in the absence of anything to write about." Wood reports that there are several good stories in the volume - with special mention for "Problems of Adjustment in Survivors of Natural/Unnatural Disasters" - and offers this caveat:

But the successes make the failures seem self-indulgent...Oates is groping, then, for themes and forms in far too much of this book. But even her groping is worth looking at, reveals returning preoccupations that will surely blossom into better work.^[6]