Beautiful Days

Stories

De: Joyce Carol Oates

Narrado por: Tavia Gilbert, Stephen Graybill, Caitlin Kelly

A new collection of 13 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.

©2018 The Ontario Review (P)2018 HarperCollins Publishers

Reseñas de la Crítica

"[A]ll three narrators read with tempered voices. Their no-frills deliveries capture the tension and hard realities of these modern tales of infidelity, deception, and broken dreams.... Oates also has a distinctly American voice, and Tavia Gilbert, Stephen Graybill, and Caitlin Kelly are quick to make the most of the straightforward rhythms and singular tones that can make a simple sentence sound at once brightly optimistic and devastating. Oates's work remains insightful, sometimes brutal, and always vital." (AudioFile)

Great at short story length

I discovered Joyce Carol Oates late and regret it. This is the second collection of short stories to which I’ve listened. I can’t say enough. They can’t be banished to a genre or theme but moreover do what short stories do in brilliant hands. The voice acting is superb.

Poor editing

There is barely a second of silence between stories, surely it should have been edited to allow a pause between each? very disconcerting and jarring. Returned.