Beautiful days
Subtitle: stories
By: Joyce Carol Oates
Publisher: Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2018
Language: eng
Number of pages: 334
ISBN-13: 9780062795786
Work titles: Short stories
Description: "A new collection of thirteen mesmerizing stories by American master Joyce Carol Oates, including the 2017 Pushcart Prize-winning "Undocumented Alien." In the diverse stories of Beautiful Days, Joyce Carol Oates explores 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"--

"A new collection of stories by American master Joyce Carol Oates, mysterious and surreal, and perfectly pitched for the confusion of the current political landscape"--
Table of contents: title: Fleuve bleu --; title: Big burnt --; title: Owl eyes --; title: Except you bless me --; title: The quiet car --; title: The bereaved --; title: Les beaux jours --; title: Fractal --; title: Undocumented alien --; title: Donald Barthelme saved from oblivion --; title: The memorial field at Hazard, Minnesota.