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.
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Bought a bookstore. Mostly second-hand books. THE OTHER (YOU)
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(@eccobooks, 9 February 2021, ebook, 299 pages, bought from @AmazonKindle)
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It's been a few years since JCO released a collection of short stories so I couldn't wait to read The Other (You). The collection is everything I'd expect from a collection of JCO's short stories; intense, beautifully written and unforgettable. Nobody does short fiction like JCO and each story is a piece of art as characters from every walk of life, male and female find themselves thrust into often familiar circumstances twisted into something strange and new and are forced to see and contemplate what their life could look like if they had made different choices or gone down a slightly different path. The stories are quite dark at times and unsettling. This is a corker of a collection.
