Beautiful Days: Stories

by Joyce Carol Oates

Overview

A new collection of thirteen mesmerizing stories by American master Joyce Carol Oates, including the 2017 Pushcart Prize–winning “Undocumented Alien”

The diverse stories of Beautiful Days, Joyce Carol Oates explore the most secret, intimate, and unacknowledged interior lives of characters not unlike ourselves, who assert their independence in acts of bold and often irrevocable defiance.

“Fleuve Bleu” exemplifies the rich sensuousness of Oates’s prose as lovers married to other persons vow to establish, in their intimacy, a ruthlessly honest, truth-telling authenticity missing elsewhere in their complicated lives, with unexpected results. 

In “Big Burnt,” set on lushly rendered Lake George, in the Adirondacks, a cunningly manipulative university professor exploits a too-trusting woman in a way she could never have anticipated. “The Nice Girl” depicts a young woman who has been, through her life, infuriatingly “nice,” until she is forced to come to terms with the raw desperation of her deepest self. In a more experimental but no less intimate mode, “Les beaux jours” examines the ambiguities of an intensely erotic, exploitative relationship between a “master” artist and his adoring young female model. And the tragic “Undocumented Alien” depicts a young African student enrolled in an American university who is suddenly stripped of his student visa and forced to undergo a terrifying test of courage.

In these stories, as elsewhere in her fiction, Joyce Carol Oates exhibits her fascination with the social, psychological, and moral boundaries that govern our behavior—until the hour when they do not.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780062795786
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	02/06/2018
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.29(d)

About the Author

Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Medal of Humanities, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Book Award, and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction, and has been several times nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the national bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys, Blonde, which was nominated for the National Book Award, and the New York Times bestseller The Falls, which won the 2005 Prix Femina. Her most recent novel is A Book of American Martyrs. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978.

Hometown:

Princeton, New Jersey

Date of Birth:

June 16, 1938

Place of Birth:

Lockport, New York

Education:

B.A., Syracuse University, 1960; M.A., University of Wisconsin, 1961

Editorial Reviews

12/04/2017
Oates (A Book of American Martyrs) toes the line between condemnation of and fascination with her characters in this collection of ethical failures. In part one, the characters’ self-definitions blind them to the pain they cause themselves and each other—as in “Fleuve Bleu,” in which lovers promise complete honesty and deliver needless pain. In the second part, assumptions, biases, and privilege stymie awareness among people of different races, genders, and body types. In “Except You Bless Me,” a white adjunct composition instructor suspects without clear cause that a black student has been sending her hate mail. In the collection’s speculative, fabulist third act, there are clear victims—the only characters readers will find sympathetic. In “Fractal,” a boy becomes separated (both physically and emotionally) from his mother as they tour a fractal museum. In “David Barthelme Saved from Oblivion,” a string of children leads an alcoholic writer away from his favorite liquor store. Throughout the book, the characters speak to themselves at least as often as they speak to each other. The Pushcart-winning “Undocumented Alien” is composed entirely of lab notes by postdocs more concerned with their work conditions than the ethics of their research. In Oates’s narrowly constructed cast of ivory tower intelligentsia, subtle, toxic failings go unchecked. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

09/15/2017
Two lovers married to others insist that they will at least be ruthlessly honest with each other. A young woman realizes that her good-girl persona doesn't match the intensity deep in her soul. And, in a 2017 Pushcart Prize-winning story, a young African studying in America must gather his courage and his wits when his student visa is inexplicably yanked. Including 13 pieces altogether; with a big push on social media, where Oates reigns.

Library Journal

2017-10-31
Haunted, wounded, isolated characters people Oates' latest collection.In most of these 12 previously published stories, Oates (DIS MEM BER and Other Stories of Mysteries and Suspense, 2017, etc.) reprises characters who appear in much of her fiction: lonely, frustrated, and obsessed individuals trapped in relationships that offer no solace, satisfaction, or even recognition of who they really are. Lest readers fail to see a Chekhov-ian influence, Oates' central character in "Big Burnt" is a 40-something, twice divorced actress who attracts the attention of a taciturn Harvard scientist when she performs in The Cherry Orchard. Accompanying him on a weekend outing, she tries to amuse her preoccupied lover by behaving like "the ingénue Nina of The Seagull. She heard her voice just too perceptibly loud, rather raw, over-eager." But she cannot alleviate Mikael's suffering: over his "disintegrated" marriage, his children's "disenchantment," and, most recently, the accusation that he deliberately falsified data. He toys with the idea of killing himself: "Blow out my brains," he reflects ruefully, had "a Chekhovian ring...a remark, melancholy, yet bemused. A joke!" There are no jokes, though, in Oates' dark fictions. In "Fleuve Bleu," the idea of illicit love, at first seeming like a "small gemstone" fingered in a secret pocket, turns into an unwanted burden. In "Owl Eyes," an unhappy single mother is preoccupied by failure. Three stories consider the plights of embittered, angry, and arrogant academics. Distinguished intellectuals, Oates reports, often display "aggression…masked by a perverse sort of passivity." Two surprisingly inventive tales appear in a section of fantasy and surrealism. "Les Beaux Jours" is narrated by a young girl so seduced by an erotic painting with that title that she enters its world to become the Master's model only to discover that she can never return to her "old, lost life." In "Fractal," a boy obsessed with fractals and architectural drawings is swallowed up in a windowless, labyrinthian Fractal Museum. The overly long "Undocumented Alien," though, about an immigrant who becomes a subject of neurological manipulation, is far less successful.A mixed, occasionally satisfying, volume.

Kirkus Reviews