The (Other) You
Stories
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
A powerful reckoning over the people we might have been if we’d chosen a different path, from a master of the short story
In this stirring, reflective collection of short stories, Joyce Carol Oates ponders alternate destinies: the other lives we might have led if we’d made different choices. An accomplished writer returns to her childhood home of Yewville, but the homecoming stirs troubled thoughts about the person she might have been if she’d never left. A man in prison contemplates the gravity of his irreversible act. A student’s affair with a professor results in a pregnancy that alters the course of her life forever. Even the experience of reading is investigated as one that can create a profound transformation: “You could enter another time, the time of the book.”
The (Other) You is an arresting and incisive vision into these alternative realities, a collection that ponders the constraints we all face given the circumstances of our birth and our temperaments, and that examines the competing pressures and expectations on women in particular. Finely attuned to the nuances of our social and psychic selves, Joyce Carol Oates demonstrates here why she remains one of our most celebrated and relevant literary figures.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Oates (Night. Sleep. Death. The Stars) delivers a dark, moody collection permeated by themes of obsession, remorse, and violence. In the title story, a secondhand bookstore owner ruminates over the college entrance exam that sealed her fate to remain in humdrum Yewville, N.Y. A sinister twist surprises in "The Women Friends," in which two women find themselves in the same caf as a jittery suicide bomber. The caf reappears throughout the book, culminating in the gripping "Final Interview," where a notoriously reclusive author imagines a final act of vengeance against the world. Dashed hopes and glances at the past interrupt another author's life in "The Unexpected," in which the protagonist returns to Yewville to deliver a commencement speech, only to be humbled by friends from her childhood. The recently widowed creative writing teacher at the center of the brilliant "The Happy Place" discovers not even a reckless obsession with a student could fill the gaping hollowness of her empty house, while mourning and blame overwhelm the parents of a deceased child in "Nightgrief." Oates's mastery of the form remains fierce and formidable in this unsettling collection of lamentations and missed opportunities.
