Beautiful Days by Joyce Oates

Beautiful Days by Joyce Oates

The "woman in the window" in Edward Hopper's classic painting is beautiful, young, nude, and (seemingly) lost in melancholy contemplation by a window- perhaps abandoned by her lover; in Joyce Carol Oates's enthralling re-imagining, the woman is all of these but also alert to her situation, not at all passive but prepared to exact an unexpected revenge against one who has wronged her.

In the stories of Beautiful Days, we are allowed access into the most secret, intimate, and unacknowledged interior lives of persons very like ourselves, who do not take refuge in passivity but assert themselves in acts of bold and sometimes irrevocable defiance.

In "Big Burnt"-set on a lushly rendered Lake George, in the Adirondacks-a manipulative university professor exploits a too-trusting woman in a way she could never have anticipated; in "Owl Eyes" a prodigiously bright young adolescent confronts a mysterious stalker-with startling results. In "Friend of My Youth" a woman confronts a friend from college who has since become a world-famous feminist, for whom she feels violent emotions, and in "The Nice Girl" a young woman who has been, through her life, infuriatingly "nice" is forced to come to terms with her deepest motives.

“A very strong collection. . . Oates is a master of many different kinds of story.” — New York Times Book Review “In Beautiful Days, the prolific author once again delivers a selection of skillfully written stories as powerful as any she has produced in her long and distinguished career.” — Pittsburgh Post-Gazette “Perceptive, unmissable work.” — Library Journal (starred review)

Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Medal of Humanities, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Book Award, and the 2019 Jerusalem Prize, and has been several times nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the national bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys; Blonde, which was nominated for the National Book Award; and the New York Times bestseller The Falls, which won the 2005 Prix Femina. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780062795786
ISBN 10	0062795783
Title	Beautiful Days
Author	Joyce Oates
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	HarperCollins Publishers Inc
Year published	2018-03-22
Number of pages	416
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.