Beautiful Days, Joyce Carol Oates
Beautiful Days, Joyce Carol Oates
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Beautiful Days
Stories

Author: Joyce Carol Oates

Narrator: Tavia Gilbert, Stephen Graybill, Caitlin Kelly

Unabridged: 13 hr 5 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: HarperAudio

Published: 02/06/2018


Synopsis

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.

About Joyce Carol Oates

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 2019 Jerusalem Prize, 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. 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.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Eric on June 19, 2018

For all the daring stylistic variations and rich diversity of subject matter found in Beautiful Days, Joyce Carol Oates’s latest collection of short stories, there is a common theme throughout of disruptively close encounters with the “other.” At the Key West Literary Seminar in 2012, Oates gave a t......more

Goodreads review by David on February 27, 2018

Oates's collections of short stories are often arranged into groupings or 'parts' - sometimes seemingly arbitrarily - and Beautiful Days follows this format, though this time it does at least make sense: Part 1 is a collection of realist stories, Part 2 is more fantastical or experimental. The first......more

Goodreads review by Emma on April 14, 2021

Perspektiv som med en van författarhand skiftas, knappt märkbart. Läsaren följer naturligt med i vändningarna. Oates för läsaren tryggt mellan nutid och minnen, lika naturligt som det vore ebb och flod. Det är livfulla dialoger, och precis som allt annat Oates skriver känns det angeläget. Hon unders......more

Goodreads review by Bonnie on March 11, 2018

Joyce Carol Oates is a celebrated writer who looks deep into the lives of people as if the reader is looking through a window at the intimate details off the people inside who assert themselves in defiance with acts that open up the secret lives they had so desperately tried to hide. The first story......more

Goodreads review by Kris (My Novelesque Life) on June 18, 2019

RATING: 3 STARS 2018; Ecco/HarperCollins (Review Not on Blog) Joyce Carol Oates is much like Munro in that she can pack a lot into a short story. Most of her stories in this collection are interesting - I think I did not read one story in it's entirety. It took me a while to finish the book, as I did n......more