Beautiful Days
Stories
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5.0 • 3 Ratings
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
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. 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
