High Lonesome
New and Selected Stories 1966-2006
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $5.99
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
"This rich volume...succeeds in reminding us how far this indefatigable chronicler of all our lives has traveled, and how important it is that we keep on reading her." -Boston Globe
No other writer can match the impressive oeuvre of Joyce Carol Oates. High Lonesome: New and Selected Stories 1966-2006 gathers short fiction from the acclaimed author's seminal collections and includes eleven new tales that further demonstrate the breathtaking artistry and striking originality of an incomparable talent who "has imbued the American short story with an edgy vitality and raw social surfaces" (Chicago Tribune).
As Joyce Carol Oates writes in her Afterword: "I think that I can speak for most short story writers in saying that each of our stories exacts from us the same approximate commitment and hope. Prose fiction is, in essence, the realization of an elusive abstract vision in elaborate and painstaking construction, sentence by sentence, word by word. The daunting task for the writer is: what to
include? what to exclude? Through our lifetimes a Sargasso Sea of the discarded accumulates, far larger than what is called our “body” of work, for each story is an opening into the infinite, abruptly terminated and sealed in language."
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This hefty collection, featuring 10 new pieces along with stories culled from four decades, further establishes the prolific and wide-ranging Oates as a gifted chronicler of American culture. The theme of girls and women preyed upon by violent men appears repeatedly, as in the much-anthologized "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" (1970) but also in lesser-known pieces like "Small Avalanches" (1974), which turns the tables, as a 13-year-old girl, nimble and laughing, evades a middle-aged, panting lech on a deserted path. Several stories feature characters whose mental instabilities lead to violence, as in "Last Days" (1984), in which a brilliant, manic college student with a Messiah complex assassinates a rabbi, then turns the gun on himself. Though Oates's world is often ugly, she also displays a more fanciful (if still creepy) impulse; the recent piece "Fat Man My Love" finds actress "Pippi" (indubitably Tippi Hedren) puzzling over the director (an unnamed Hitchcock) who both created and ruined her career. While the lurid events of some stories have a ripped-from-the-headlines feel, Oates is never merely sensational, tracking hidden motives and emotions with a sharp eye for psychological detail everything conveyed in lucid, rhythmic prose. However much is made of her prodigious output, it's the consistent quality of the work that lifts Oates into the literary pantheon.
