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High Lonesome: Selected Stories, 1966-2006
An unprecedented collection of the best of Joyce Carol Oates's short stories combined with eleven new stories No other writer can match the impressive oeuvre of Joyce Carol Oates, and High Selected Stories, 1966-2006 gathers stories from Oates's seminal collections, including The Wheel of Love (1970), Marriages and Infidelities (1972), and Heat (1991), arranged by decade. All demonstrate what the Chicago Tribune has "the fierce originality of Oates's voice and vision, but also how she has imbued the American short story with an edgy vitality and raw social surfaces."
672 pages, Hardcover
First published April 1, 2006
About the author
Joyce Carol Oates
815 books8,761 followersJoyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Book Award and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction. She is also the recipient of the 2005 Prix Femina for The Falls. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University, and she has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978.
Pseudonyms: Rosamond Smith and Lauren Kelly.
Pseudonyms: Rosamond Smith and Lauren Kelly.
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October 26, 2021
my becoming-a-genius project, part 18!
the background:
i have decided to become a genius.
to accomplish this, i'm going to work my way through the collected stories of various authors, reading + reviewing 1 story every day until i get bored / lose every single follower / am struck down by a vengeful deity.
i was feeling like i might need a little break from this project, so instead i'm picking up a 700-page tome and signing myself up for a month-long installment.
i may be trying to become a genius, but i never said i was smart.
PROJECT 1: THE COMPLETE STORIES BY FLANNERY O'CONNOR
PROJECT 2: HER BODY AND OTHER PARTIES BY CARMEN MARIA MACHADO
PROJECT 3: 18 BEST STORIES BY EDGAR ALLAN POE
PROJECT 4: THE LOTTERY AND OTHER STORIES BY SHIRLEY JACKSON
PROJECT 5: HOW LONG 'TIL BLACK FUTURE MONTH? BY N.K. JEMISIN
PROJECT 6: THE SHORT STORIES OF OSCAR WILDE BY OSCAR WILDE
PROJECT 7: THE BLUE FAIRY BOOK BY ANDREW LANG
PROJECT 8: GRAND UNION: STORIES BY ZADIE SMITH
PROJECT 9: THE BEST OF ROALD DAHL BY ROALD DAHL
PROJECT 10: LOVE AND FREINDSHIP BY JANE AUSTEN
PROJECT 11: HOMESICK FOR ANOTHER WORLD BY OTTESSA MOSHFEGH
PROJECT 12: BAD FEMINIST BY ROXANE GAY
PROJECT 12.5: DIFFICULT WOMEN BY ROXANE GAY
PROJECT 13: THE SHORT NOVELS OF JOHN STEINBECK
PROJECT 14: FIRST PERSON SINGULAR BY HARUKI MURAKAMI
PROJECT 15: THE ORIGINAL FOLK AND FAIRY TALES OF THE BROTHERS GRIMM
PROJECT 16: A MANUAL FOR CLEANING WOMEN BY LUCIA BERLIN
PROJECT 17: SELECTED STORIES OF PHILIP K. DICK
PROJECT 18: HIGH LONESOME: SELECTED STORIES BY JOYCE CAROL OATES
DAY 1: SPIDER BOY
immediately i'm picturing a dollar-store superhero knockoff of tobey maguire, so this is off to a good start.
i'm not out of my reading slump, but i am out of my much longer and far worse analytical slump, in which looking below the surface of any book took a ton of effort. what a relief to notice themes and motifs and double meanings again!!!
the ending of this was kind of lame but overall i'm happy my slump ended here.
rating: 4
DAY 2: THE FISH FACTORY
another funny title that will probably once again give way to a very somber story.
this was a correct premonition (immediately this is about a child's murder). OR WAS IT?
rating: 3.75
DAY 3: THE COUSINS
was hungover (emotionally, because i'd been to a phoebe bridgers concert the night before, and physically, because even though i didn't drink much and i did eat dinner and i did drink water, the world hates me) yesterday and when i'm hungover i forget how to read.
playing catch up on a friday after completing only 2 days. this bodes well.
i liked this anyway.
rating: 4
DAY 4: SOFT-CORE
i don't have patience for women who don't love their sisters. and as the eldest, i DEFINITELY don't have patience for younger siblings who are haters.
rating:
DAY 5: THE GATHERING SQUALL
title could be the overall Bad Vibe and foreshadowing of destruction to come re: this project!
because today is monday, and i did not pick this up on saturday OR sunday.
it's a three-story day, but at least none of us can say we weren't warned by past me when i started this book.
i almost never like the way sexual assault is written about, and this is no exception.
rating: 2
DAY 6: THE LOST BROTHER
there is a sibling preoccupation happening here.
rating: 2.5
DAY 7: IN HOT MAY
good/sad one to round out the bad/sad ones.
rating: 3.5
DAY 8: HIGH LONESOME
title story title story title story!
i'm launching my high expectations like it's a spaceship in a sci-fi movie. flashing to establishing shots of the HQ at Houston, people pushing up levels and typing on sciency looking computers and talking into headsets.
you get it.
empathy is a real b*tch to have, and also there are some goddamn gruesome images in this.
rating: 3.75
DAY 9: *BD*11 1 87
this story is already testing me with this complicated f*cking title. i should look at a title once to type it. ONE TIME ONLY.
well this one was out of the typical oates wheelhouse.
rating: 3.5
DAY 10: FAT MAN MY LOVE
i don't know how many days behind i am - 3? 4? 1000? either way it's insurmountable on this day and i'll deal with it later.
seems like today's order of business is A Reminder Of How Far We Have Come Fatphobia-Wise In The Last 15+ Years.
i promise i do not make this claim lightly when i say stories like these are why people hate literary fiction.
rating: 1
DAY 11: OBJECTS IN MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR
same day, because this is a teeny story and i can actually play a bit of catch-up!!!
i liked the ending of this. also the title.
rating: 3.5
DAY 12: UPON THE SWEEPING FLOOD
we have suddenly moved to The 1960s from The New Stories, which seems like an odd construction but O.K.
we have also done some math and determined that after this story, i will be just one behind. look at us go.
a fun fact about me is that i find natural disaster stories very boring, which will surely prove to be my entertainment demise as the effects of climate change come for us all.
rating: 3
DAY 13: AT THE SEMINARY
have to read two stories to catch up today. i feel about as good about my chances of doing that as i do about my chances of cooking a healthy dinner: it's possible, but not likely.
true to expectation i read one story and i'm eating chips for dinner.
1960s joyce carol oates was a different breed.
rating: 4
DAY 14: IN THE REGION OF ICE
i kind of can't stress enough how much more interesting 1960s-oates' way of writing is than the dreaded 2000s.
rating: 3.75
DAY 15: WHERE ARE YOU GOING, WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN
i am both excited and scared to read this story, because i wrote one of the best papers of my life during one of my favorite times of my life on it a few years ago, and i loved it but at the same time a bout of nostalgia can take me down for 2-4 business days and i'm busy.
excited and scared was a good combo.
rating: 5
DAY 16: HOW I CONTEMPLATED THE WORLD FROM THE DETROIT HOUSE OF CORRECTIONS, AND BEGAN MY LIFE OVER AGAIN
again with the title i have to read more than once in order to write it down. joyce, we talked about this........
i love when i read a story and it piques my interest from the first word and never lets me down.
rating: 4.25
DAY 17: FOUR SUMMERS
it's giving me sisterhood of the traveling pants.
okay........a bit more going on thematically than the sisterhood of the traveling pants, i'll admit.
rating: 4.25
DAY 18: SMALL AVALANCHES
it's the 70s baby! groovy. we are too busy listening to disco and...wearing flared pants? to be sad at bidding 60s oates adieu.
if there's a subgenre of badass girls f*cking over creepy weird men, i'd sure like to know.
rating: 4
DAY 19: CONCERNING THE CASE OF BOBBY T.
aaaaaand i'm 4 days behind again.
i have become so fully weekend-illiterate.
i'll count it as a win if i read even one story today. catching up seems an impossible task, my dear boy!
this story is so ahead of its time it boggles the mind.
rating: 4
DAY 20: THE TRYST
still 4 days behind today. just going to...see what happens, i guess.
i love when a story written by a woman really seems to nail the male perspective. i read so many optimistic romance novels, it always surprises me.
rating: 4
DAY 21: THE LADY WITH THE PET DOG
yeesh. two affair stories in a row.
rating: 3
DAY 22: THE DEAD
james joyce moment!
i hope it is alike it only in name.
it wasn't.
that's enough for today.
rating: 3.5
DAY 23: LAST DAYS
it's the 1980s, baby! call it the last few days of my AP US history class in high school because we are just flying through these decades!
i did...not fly through this story, though.
mental breakdowns are like dreams - only your own are really interesting.
rating: 3
DAY 24: MY WARSZAWA: 1980
i desperately want to quit for the day after that last one, but then i wouldn't be able to cross "catch up on Oates" on my to-do list and we can't have that.
of course that would also mean the longest story yet is the next one.
mental breakdowns are slightly more interesting when women have them, but the effect is reduced when the page count is doubled.
rating: 3
DAY 25: OUR WALL
really upping my weekend-off habit by taking thursday and friday off, too.
if i have my sh*t together this will be a four-story day. thank you to ms. oates for making this one mercifully short.
this is, no joke, like the maze runner. and i know that the maze runner was written decades after this but that doesn't change that i hate stories like it.
rating: 2.5
DAY 26: RAVEN'S WING
another short one! everything's coming up emma.
i have to say, i don't get horse obsessions as a rule. i'm the anti-horse girl. i exist to balance them out in the universe.
rating: 3
DAY 27: GOLDEN GLOVES
there is nothing scarier on god's great green earth to me than boxing.
rating: 3.5
DAY 28: MANSLAUGHTER
okay fun title alert!!!
this one spooked me out and i have no idea why.
rating: 3.5
DAY 29: NAIROBI
my main associations with Nairobi to this point are from the classic children's internet game poptropica. i hope this is even a quarter as fun and education as poptropica is.
i have no idea what this was about, but there were certainly no puzzles OR mini-games.
rating: 3.5
DAY 30: HEAT
time to retire this as a title. like when good athletes have their numbers retired.
welcome to the 1990s, baby! the end is near, both of the book and of civilization as we know it!
i love when literary fiction writers write about genre fiction subjects. double interesting.
rating: 3.5
DAY 31: THE KNIFE
took a catastrophic 5 days off this project with just 6 stories to go. if i don't finish today or tomorrow i won't catch up ever. what a situation i have created!
it's now 9 pm and i just finished my first story. for context, i do almost all of my reading for the day before 6 pm.
and it was a goddamn doozy.
rating: none
DAY 32: THE HAIR
the ending of this was so fun. best thing for a story to be great at is an ending, because it always kinda gaslights me into thinking i liked the whole thing.
rating: 3.5
DAY 33: THE SWIMMERS
gotta admire the title consistency.
oh, i did like this one. admirable for a story to make you feel nostalgic for an experience you didn't live.
rating: 4
DAY 34: WILL YOU ALWAYS LOVE ME?
well, folks, if we can make today a three-story day, we'll finish this project up on time. somehow. crazier things have happened, i suppose, but not by the f*ckton.
a real doozy once again.
rating: 3.5
DAY 35: LIFE AFTER HIGH SCHOOL
hm. so true. it do be going on.
rating: 3.5
DAY 36: MARK OF SATAN
the final installment! and what a title!
bit anticlimactic but okay.
OVERALL
joyce carol oates is an insane twitter person and an insane writer person and i have found both entertaining to varying degrees. this collection had a lot of highs and lows for me (more like high LOWnesome oh my god), and the reliance on violence towards women got grueling (and was never as good as is was in where are you going, where have you been), but overall i'm still glad i picked this up.
rating: 3.5
the background:
i have decided to become a genius.
to accomplish this, i'm going to work my way through the collected stories of various authors, reading + reviewing 1 story every day until i get bored / lose every single follower / am struck down by a vengeful deity.
i was feeling like i might need a little break from this project, so instead i'm picking up a 700-page tome and signing myself up for a month-long installment.
i may be trying to become a genius, but i never said i was smart.
PROJECT 1: THE COMPLETE STORIES BY FLANNERY O'CONNOR
PROJECT 2: HER BODY AND OTHER PARTIES BY CARMEN MARIA MACHADO
PROJECT 3: 18 BEST STORIES BY EDGAR ALLAN POE
PROJECT 4: THE LOTTERY AND OTHER STORIES BY SHIRLEY JACKSON
PROJECT 5: HOW LONG 'TIL BLACK FUTURE MONTH? BY N.K. JEMISIN
PROJECT 6: THE SHORT STORIES OF OSCAR WILDE BY OSCAR WILDE
PROJECT 7: THE BLUE FAIRY BOOK BY ANDREW LANG
PROJECT 8: GRAND UNION: STORIES BY ZADIE SMITH
PROJECT 9: THE BEST OF ROALD DAHL BY ROALD DAHL
PROJECT 10: LOVE AND FREINDSHIP BY JANE AUSTEN
PROJECT 11: HOMESICK FOR ANOTHER WORLD BY OTTESSA MOSHFEGH
PROJECT 12: BAD FEMINIST BY ROXANE GAY
PROJECT 12.5: DIFFICULT WOMEN BY ROXANE GAY
PROJECT 13: THE SHORT NOVELS OF JOHN STEINBECK
PROJECT 14: FIRST PERSON SINGULAR BY HARUKI MURAKAMI
PROJECT 15: THE ORIGINAL FOLK AND FAIRY TALES OF THE BROTHERS GRIMM
PROJECT 16: A MANUAL FOR CLEANING WOMEN BY LUCIA BERLIN
PROJECT 17: SELECTED STORIES OF PHILIP K. DICK
PROJECT 18: HIGH LONESOME: SELECTED STORIES BY JOYCE CAROL OATES
DAY 1: SPIDER BOY
immediately i'm picturing a dollar-store superhero knockoff of tobey maguire, so this is off to a good start.
i'm not out of my reading slump, but i am out of my much longer and far worse analytical slump, in which looking below the surface of any book took a ton of effort. what a relief to notice themes and motifs and double meanings again!!!
the ending of this was kind of lame but overall i'm happy my slump ended here.
rating: 4
DAY 2: THE FISH FACTORY
another funny title that will probably once again give way to a very somber story.
this was a correct premonition (immediately this is about a child's murder). OR WAS IT?
rating: 3.75
DAY 3: THE COUSINS
was hungover (emotionally, because i'd been to a phoebe bridgers concert the night before, and physically, because even though i didn't drink much and i did eat dinner and i did drink water, the world hates me) yesterday and when i'm hungover i forget how to read.
playing catch up on a friday after completing only 2 days. this bodes well.
i liked this anyway.
rating: 4
DAY 4: SOFT-CORE
i don't have patience for women who don't love their sisters. and as the eldest, i DEFINITELY don't have patience for younger siblings who are haters.
rating:
DAY 5: THE GATHERING SQUALL
title could be the overall Bad Vibe and foreshadowing of destruction to come re: this project!
because today is monday, and i did not pick this up on saturday OR sunday.
it's a three-story day, but at least none of us can say we weren't warned by past me when i started this book.
i almost never like the way sexual assault is written about, and this is no exception.
rating: 2
DAY 6: THE LOST BROTHER
there is a sibling preoccupation happening here.
rating: 2.5
DAY 7: IN HOT MAY
good/sad one to round out the bad/sad ones.
rating: 3.5
DAY 8: HIGH LONESOME
title story title story title story!
i'm launching my high expectations like it's a spaceship in a sci-fi movie. flashing to establishing shots of the HQ at Houston, people pushing up levels and typing on sciency looking computers and talking into headsets.
you get it.
empathy is a real b*tch to have, and also there are some goddamn gruesome images in this.
rating: 3.75
DAY 9: *BD*11 1 87
this story is already testing me with this complicated f*cking title. i should look at a title once to type it. ONE TIME ONLY.
well this one was out of the typical oates wheelhouse.
rating: 3.5
DAY 10: FAT MAN MY LOVE
i don't know how many days behind i am - 3? 4? 1000? either way it's insurmountable on this day and i'll deal with it later.
seems like today's order of business is A Reminder Of How Far We Have Come Fatphobia-Wise In The Last 15+ Years.
i promise i do not make this claim lightly when i say stories like these are why people hate literary fiction.
rating: 1
DAY 11: OBJECTS IN MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR
same day, because this is a teeny story and i can actually play a bit of catch-up!!!
i liked the ending of this. also the title.
rating: 3.5
DAY 12: UPON THE SWEEPING FLOOD
we have suddenly moved to The 1960s from The New Stories, which seems like an odd construction but O.K.
we have also done some math and determined that after this story, i will be just one behind. look at us go.
a fun fact about me is that i find natural disaster stories very boring, which will surely prove to be my entertainment demise as the effects of climate change come for us all.
rating: 3
DAY 13: AT THE SEMINARY
have to read two stories to catch up today. i feel about as good about my chances of doing that as i do about my chances of cooking a healthy dinner: it's possible, but not likely.
true to expectation i read one story and i'm eating chips for dinner.
1960s joyce carol oates was a different breed.
rating: 4
DAY 14: IN THE REGION OF ICE
i kind of can't stress enough how much more interesting 1960s-oates' way of writing is than the dreaded 2000s.
rating: 3.75
DAY 15: WHERE ARE YOU GOING, WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN
i am both excited and scared to read this story, because i wrote one of the best papers of my life during one of my favorite times of my life on it a few years ago, and i loved it but at the same time a bout of nostalgia can take me down for 2-4 business days and i'm busy.
excited and scared was a good combo.
rating: 5
DAY 16: HOW I CONTEMPLATED THE WORLD FROM THE DETROIT HOUSE OF CORRECTIONS, AND BEGAN MY LIFE OVER AGAIN
again with the title i have to read more than once in order to write it down. joyce, we talked about this........
i love when i read a story and it piques my interest from the first word and never lets me down.
rating: 4.25
DAY 17: FOUR SUMMERS
it's giving me sisterhood of the traveling pants.
okay........a bit more going on thematically than the sisterhood of the traveling pants, i'll admit.
rating: 4.25
DAY 18: SMALL AVALANCHES
it's the 70s baby! groovy. we are too busy listening to disco and...wearing flared pants? to be sad at bidding 60s oates adieu.
if there's a subgenre of badass girls f*cking over creepy weird men, i'd sure like to know.
rating: 4
DAY 19: CONCERNING THE CASE OF BOBBY T.
aaaaaand i'm 4 days behind again.
i have become so fully weekend-illiterate.
i'll count it as a win if i read even one story today. catching up seems an impossible task, my dear boy!
this story is so ahead of its time it boggles the mind.
rating: 4
DAY 20: THE TRYST
still 4 days behind today. just going to...see what happens, i guess.
i love when a story written by a woman really seems to nail the male perspective. i read so many optimistic romance novels, it always surprises me.
rating: 4
DAY 21: THE LADY WITH THE PET DOG
yeesh. two affair stories in a row.
rating: 3
DAY 22: THE DEAD
james joyce moment!
i hope it is alike it only in name.
it wasn't.
that's enough for today.
rating: 3.5
DAY 23: LAST DAYS
it's the 1980s, baby! call it the last few days of my AP US history class in high school because we are just flying through these decades!
i did...not fly through this story, though.
mental breakdowns are like dreams - only your own are really interesting.
rating: 3
DAY 24: MY WARSZAWA: 1980
i desperately want to quit for the day after that last one, but then i wouldn't be able to cross "catch up on Oates" on my to-do list and we can't have that.
of course that would also mean the longest story yet is the next one.
mental breakdowns are slightly more interesting when women have them, but the effect is reduced when the page count is doubled.
rating: 3
DAY 25: OUR WALL
really upping my weekend-off habit by taking thursday and friday off, too.
if i have my sh*t together this will be a four-story day. thank you to ms. oates for making this one mercifully short.
this is, no joke, like the maze runner. and i know that the maze runner was written decades after this but that doesn't change that i hate stories like it.
rating: 2.5
DAY 26: RAVEN'S WING
another short one! everything's coming up emma.
i have to say, i don't get horse obsessions as a rule. i'm the anti-horse girl. i exist to balance them out in the universe.
rating: 3
DAY 27: GOLDEN GLOVES
there is nothing scarier on god's great green earth to me than boxing.
rating: 3.5
DAY 28: MANSLAUGHTER
okay fun title alert!!!
this one spooked me out and i have no idea why.
rating: 3.5
DAY 29: NAIROBI
my main associations with Nairobi to this point are from the classic children's internet game poptropica. i hope this is even a quarter as fun and education as poptropica is.
i have no idea what this was about, but there were certainly no puzzles OR mini-games.
rating: 3.5
DAY 30: HEAT
time to retire this as a title. like when good athletes have their numbers retired.
welcome to the 1990s, baby! the end is near, both of the book and of civilization as we know it!
i love when literary fiction writers write about genre fiction subjects. double interesting.
rating: 3.5
DAY 31: THE KNIFE
took a catastrophic 5 days off this project with just 6 stories to go. if i don't finish today or tomorrow i won't catch up ever. what a situation i have created!
it's now 9 pm and i just finished my first story. for context, i do almost all of my reading for the day before 6 pm.
and it was a goddamn doozy.
rating: none
DAY 32: THE HAIR
the ending of this was so fun. best thing for a story to be great at is an ending, because it always kinda gaslights me into thinking i liked the whole thing.
rating: 3.5
DAY 33: THE SWIMMERS
gotta admire the title consistency.
oh, i did like this one. admirable for a story to make you feel nostalgic for an experience you didn't live.
rating: 4
DAY 34: WILL YOU ALWAYS LOVE ME?
well, folks, if we can make today a three-story day, we'll finish this project up on time. somehow. crazier things have happened, i suppose, but not by the f*ckton.
a real doozy once again.
rating: 3.5
DAY 35: LIFE AFTER HIGH SCHOOL
hm. so true. it do be going on.
rating: 3.5
DAY 36: MARK OF SATAN
the final installment! and what a title!
bit anticlimactic but okay.
OVERALL
joyce carol oates is an insane twitter person and an insane writer person and i have found both entertaining to varying degrees. this collection had a lot of highs and lows for me (more like high LOWnesome oh my god), and the reliance on violence towards women got grueling (and was never as good as is was in where are you going, where have you been), but overall i'm still glad i picked this up.
rating: 3.5
February 22, 2024
You take the blow then get on with living isn't that the history of the world?
This is an interesting quotation from the first person narrator of 'Golden Gloves', a story about a boxer (reminder to self: must investigate JCO's On Boxing), because this collection doesn't bear out this axiom, and so highlights JCO's ability to craft narrative voices with skill and imagination. Too often in these tales we see people felled by blows - some physical, some metaphorical - and while they may survive, at least some of them, they are the walking wounded, too often paying that trauma forward.
This is a collection chosen by JCO herself: she excludes any of her gothic-horror stories though there's much that is terrifying here in an all too human way. It starts with a set of new stories, then flips back to a chronology from the 1960s through to the 1990s, so a career-spanning selection. Almost all are superb - and one of my striking takeaways is how consistent is the quality of JCO's writing. The short story form suits her, reins in her slight tendency to over-indulgence that we sometimes find in her novels. These pieces are long enough to feel immersive and expansive and don't out stay their welcome, inviting us to think deeply about them when we finish.
Stylistically, JCO is a maverick: she switches easily from traditional 3rd person, to close 3rd person interiority, to first person and even some slips into 2nd person. Her writing seems realistic on the surface but it's worth paying attention to her figurative use of language as her imagery fills out the emotional and submerged aspects of her texts - word placement is precise but there's much below the surface to be productively attended to. These aren't traditional 'beginning-middle-end' stories: there are in media res starts, fractured and circular timeframes, abrupt stops - but the craft is meticulous and necessitates the active involvement of the reader.
It's hardly possible to discuss JCO without bringing up the topic of violence: yes, it's a thread which holds all these stories together, whether physical or psychological. Her overriding theme is modern America and she refuses to look away from what is savage, brutal and frightening. A prime concern is gendered violence against girls and women, and how female adolescence is itself a process of recognising and acknowledging that being female in the world is dangerous: there's something so poignant and enraging at seeing bold girls testing out their fearless and new-born sexuality discovering what it is to be terrified.
But these are not one-note stories as they engage with issues of families, mental breakdowns and love affairs. I'd say it's worth taking your time over this collection as it's rich, dense and deserving of some thought. A few favourite stories of mine perhaps don't fit into the 'typical' (if we can even say what's 'typical' for such a flexible writer as JCO!): 'The Cousins', 'How I Contemplated the World From the Detroit House of Corrections, and Began My Life Over Again', and 'My Warszawa: 1980'.
Overall, then, a spectacular collection from JCO and one which cements her as one of my favourite writers - it's staggering to think that her much commented on prolific, almost obsessive, approach to writing does not result in a deterioration of quality. Stunning.
November 18, 2016
Joyce Carol Oates has a way of telling really good stories. She knows how to create poignant characters and really twisted stories over the span of a few pages, and while some of the short stories in this collection didn't appeal as much to be as others, most of them left me wondering with a smile on my face.
The interesting thing about this specific collection is that it contains stories from 50 years back. Some stories are brand new, and the oldest are from the 60s. It was interesting to see how her stories have developed through the years, and it was astonishing to realize that her earliest stories are just as good as her most recent ones.
I am a fan of Oates because she is a talented writer. Her fiction appeals to me in a way that no other fiction does, and with every story I read of hers my fascination for Oates becomes bigger and deeper.
The interesting thing about this specific collection is that it contains stories from 50 years back. Some stories are brand new, and the oldest are from the 60s. It was interesting to see how her stories have developed through the years, and it was astonishing to realize that her earliest stories are just as good as her most recent ones.
I am a fan of Oates because she is a talented writer. Her fiction appeals to me in a way that no other fiction does, and with every story I read of hers my fascination for Oates becomes bigger and deeper.
Read
July 14, 2015The first thing one notices about Joyce Carol Oates is the sheer quantity of her output; in fact, it seems impossible to write anything about her without at least a passing reference to the huge amount of books she has published (apparently by now more than fifty novels and forty story collection, several volumes of essays and assorted other things). High Lonesome, then, although it is a fairly massive volume, probably presents only a very small selection of the first forty years of Oates’ writing (from 1966 to 2006), lumped together with eleven new stories (new at the time of publication, anyway).
I really only had a very vague idea what to expect when I ventured into this volume – I had read Mysteries of Winterthurn a long time ago as teenager and only remember that I was very confused by it but kind of liked it. It’s a bit of a mystery to me why I haven’t read anything by her since then, seeing how I read a lot of books and hence tend to like prolific authors who keep feeding my habit. A career-spanning collection of stories seemed like a good way to remedy that and to find out whether I actually liked the author or not – none of which, however really worked out as planned.
For one thing, Oates is not only known for her prolific output but also for the great variety in her work – and there is not really all that much of the latter noticeable in High Lonesome. Which, I hasten to add, is probably intentional – the collection is organized in decades, and each of the decades appears to have a thematic emphasis (violence, adultery, rape) which I (almost) certain is owed to the selection rather than giving a representative sample of the stories Oates has written in those periods. There is nothing wrong with that as it is a way of presenting the central themes of Oates’s fiction in general, but it does evoke a certain sense of samey-ness if (as I did) one reads the collection in one go. So maybe it would have been better to take things slowly and read the stories individually, with breaks between them. On the other hand, reading the collection as a whole not only made the thematic focal points obvious but also illuminated some general traits of Joyce Carol Oates’ writing which I found quite fascinating.
One thing becomes clear very quickly on reading this collection, namely that Joyce Carol Oates is not Raymond Carver and not even Ernest Hemingway – she does not subscribe to the understatement school of story writing, and she is about as far from minimalism as it is possible get: She emphatically favours grand gestures and high-strung emotions and generally does so using a copious amount of words. In fact, as I was making my way through this collection I felt the nagging suspicion creeping up on me that through all the diversity of styles and genres Joyce Carol Oates utilizes, she in fact is only ever writing in a single genre, and that genre is melodrama. By the time I had finished High Lonesome, that suspicion had grown into certainty: Everything in this collection is high melodrama, all 690 pages of it. Even those stories masquerading as realism are only wearing camouflage, scratch a bit on the surface and the psychological veneer peels away, revealing the improbable plot, the outré characterisation and the excessive emotions so typical of melodrama.
That is admittedly not exactly an orignal insight, the connection between Joyce Carol Oates’ writing and melodrama is made quite frequently and generally not in a positive way but to the contrary, as criticism. This might be valid if psychological realism is the yardstick you measure all things literary with, but the 19th century has been over for a while now and there are more ways to write a novel; and there is no a priori reason why melodrama should not be just as valid as realism to give a form to the perception of contemporary life (not even to mention all the other possible purposes of literary writing). So, instead of rejecting these stories because they are melodrama, the question would be to ask why are they melodrama and does their chosen form and genre achieve what it sets out to do?
To answer that properly would require a detailed analysis if every story in this collection, which, even if I was inclined to do it, would be beyond the scope of a humble blog post. If I did have the time and leisure to take a close look at the stories, I’d argue that what Joyce Carol Oates employs here is a very specific kind of melodrama which I would like to call hysterical – connecting back to the old, pre-Freudian, openly misogynistic concept of hysteria and arguing that what Oates attempts in these stories (and quite possibly in her writing in general) is an appropriation of that concept for feminism. Hysteria traditionally has been a cipher for a supposed emotional instability in women, who allegedly would flow off on an emotional tangent on the slightest provocation, an effervescence of feeling that would retain only a very flimsy and strained connection to what caused it. And this seems to me a very good description of the modus operandi of every single story in this collection – there is a constant sense of emotional overdrive here, of feelings being in excess of what events (as horrid as they often are) seem to warrant, a relentless tension of high-strung emotions never relaxing. Almost 700 pages if this can become exhausting, leaving the reader drained and numb, or it can – as happened to me – induce a strange of kind of dizziness, a state of trance, almost a delirium-like state. And, increasingly the more stories I read, the nagging feeling that maybe the excesses of these stories are not so excessive after all – or rather, excessive only in that by being so emphatically over the top they break through the numbness and boredom with which these days we tend to receive any news about repeated violence, continued rapes and commonplace adultery. Oates’s hysterical tone marks a hyper-sensibility, it is a seismograph whose needle reacts sensitive to even faint tremblings – and that such a finely tuned instrument is necessary to make the shock value of the violence/rape/adultery/whatever else she happens to write about felt – to make it even felt at all, is already a comment on the state of things as they are on a purely formal level.
It will hardly come as a surprise that this method is not successful in every single story in this collection, in fact quality tends to vary wildly. It works best when Joyce Carol Oates either lets go and gives in to excess, where form and language adjust to the story’s tone, as if distorted by hysteria (as, for example, in “Fat Man My Love” – a story based blatantly on the relationship between Alfred Hitchcock and Tippi Hedren transformed into an utterly over-the-top psychodrama about art and patriarchal power structures), or in the reverse case of those stories that are most restrained on the surface, where Oates tells of mundane events but enhances them, elevates them to a different level of significance by telling them in her hysterical tone of voice (like “The Dead”, Oates’s feminist take on James Joyce’ story of the same title or the short “Nairobi” whose unassuming surface hides the abyss of gender relations into which it drops the reader).
Summing up, I still do not know whether I like Joyce Carol Oates or not. Quite a few people do seem to love her work, or else I’d suspect that she was just not the kind of writer to be liked. I suppose I will just have to read more of her work to find out, and at least I can say that much that I find her interesting enough that I do want to find out.
I really only had a very vague idea what to expect when I ventured into this volume – I had read Mysteries of Winterthurn a long time ago as teenager and only remember that I was very confused by it but kind of liked it. It’s a bit of a mystery to me why I haven’t read anything by her since then, seeing how I read a lot of books and hence tend to like prolific authors who keep feeding my habit. A career-spanning collection of stories seemed like a good way to remedy that and to find out whether I actually liked the author or not – none of which, however really worked out as planned.
For one thing, Oates is not only known for her prolific output but also for the great variety in her work – and there is not really all that much of the latter noticeable in High Lonesome. Which, I hasten to add, is probably intentional – the collection is organized in decades, and each of the decades appears to have a thematic emphasis (violence, adultery, rape) which I (almost) certain is owed to the selection rather than giving a representative sample of the stories Oates has written in those periods. There is nothing wrong with that as it is a way of presenting the central themes of Oates’s fiction in general, but it does evoke a certain sense of samey-ness if (as I did) one reads the collection in one go. So maybe it would have been better to take things slowly and read the stories individually, with breaks between them. On the other hand, reading the collection as a whole not only made the thematic focal points obvious but also illuminated some general traits of Joyce Carol Oates’ writing which I found quite fascinating.
One thing becomes clear very quickly on reading this collection, namely that Joyce Carol Oates is not Raymond Carver and not even Ernest Hemingway – she does not subscribe to the understatement school of story writing, and she is about as far from minimalism as it is possible get: She emphatically favours grand gestures and high-strung emotions and generally does so using a copious amount of words. In fact, as I was making my way through this collection I felt the nagging suspicion creeping up on me that through all the diversity of styles and genres Joyce Carol Oates utilizes, she in fact is only ever writing in a single genre, and that genre is melodrama. By the time I had finished High Lonesome, that suspicion had grown into certainty: Everything in this collection is high melodrama, all 690 pages of it. Even those stories masquerading as realism are only wearing camouflage, scratch a bit on the surface and the psychological veneer peels away, revealing the improbable plot, the outré characterisation and the excessive emotions so typical of melodrama.
That is admittedly not exactly an orignal insight, the connection between Joyce Carol Oates’ writing and melodrama is made quite frequently and generally not in a positive way but to the contrary, as criticism. This might be valid if psychological realism is the yardstick you measure all things literary with, but the 19th century has been over for a while now and there are more ways to write a novel; and there is no a priori reason why melodrama should not be just as valid as realism to give a form to the perception of contemporary life (not even to mention all the other possible purposes of literary writing). So, instead of rejecting these stories because they are melodrama, the question would be to ask why are they melodrama and does their chosen form and genre achieve what it sets out to do?
To answer that properly would require a detailed analysis if every story in this collection, which, even if I was inclined to do it, would be beyond the scope of a humble blog post. If I did have the time and leisure to take a close look at the stories, I’d argue that what Joyce Carol Oates employs here is a very specific kind of melodrama which I would like to call hysterical – connecting back to the old, pre-Freudian, openly misogynistic concept of hysteria and arguing that what Oates attempts in these stories (and quite possibly in her writing in general) is an appropriation of that concept for feminism. Hysteria traditionally has been a cipher for a supposed emotional instability in women, who allegedly would flow off on an emotional tangent on the slightest provocation, an effervescence of feeling that would retain only a very flimsy and strained connection to what caused it. And this seems to me a very good description of the modus operandi of every single story in this collection – there is a constant sense of emotional overdrive here, of feelings being in excess of what events (as horrid as they often are) seem to warrant, a relentless tension of high-strung emotions never relaxing. Almost 700 pages if this can become exhausting, leaving the reader drained and numb, or it can – as happened to me – induce a strange of kind of dizziness, a state of trance, almost a delirium-like state. And, increasingly the more stories I read, the nagging feeling that maybe the excesses of these stories are not so excessive after all – or rather, excessive only in that by being so emphatically over the top they break through the numbness and boredom with which these days we tend to receive any news about repeated violence, continued rapes and commonplace adultery. Oates’s hysterical tone marks a hyper-sensibility, it is a seismograph whose needle reacts sensitive to even faint tremblings – and that such a finely tuned instrument is necessary to make the shock value of the violence/rape/adultery/whatever else she happens to write about felt – to make it even felt at all, is already a comment on the state of things as they are on a purely formal level.
It will hardly come as a surprise that this method is not successful in every single story in this collection, in fact quality tends to vary wildly. It works best when Joyce Carol Oates either lets go and gives in to excess, where form and language adjust to the story’s tone, as if distorted by hysteria (as, for example, in “Fat Man My Love” – a story based blatantly on the relationship between Alfred Hitchcock and Tippi Hedren transformed into an utterly over-the-top psychodrama about art and patriarchal power structures), or in the reverse case of those stories that are most restrained on the surface, where Oates tells of mundane events but enhances them, elevates them to a different level of significance by telling them in her hysterical tone of voice (like “The Dead”, Oates’s feminist take on James Joyce’ story of the same title or the short “Nairobi” whose unassuming surface hides the abyss of gender relations into which it drops the reader).
Summing up, I still do not know whether I like Joyce Carol Oates or not. Quite a few people do seem to love her work, or else I’d suspect that she was just not the kind of writer to be liked. I suppose I will just have to read more of her work to find out, and at least I can say that much that I find her interesting enough that I do want to find out.
July 30, 2008
JCO is everything I hate about Jane Austen made sublime. Not one of her characters is believable, but they all act in the way we wish we could act under similar circumstances. They all utter the stunning, pithy lines we imagine speaking two days later. Oates smiles on the mundane shit of our lives, and honors the interior significance we fabricate in order to slog through each day.
"But that night as he falls slowly asleep he hears himself explaining to Annemarie in a calm measured voice that she will be risking something few men can risk, she should know herself exalted, privileged, in a way invulnerable to hurt even if she is very badly hurt, she'll be risking something he himself cannot risk again in his life. And maybe he never risked it at all.
You'll be going to a place I can't reach, he says.
He would touch her, in wonder, in dread, he would caress her, but his body is heavy with sleep, growing distant from him. He says softly, I'm not sure I'll be here when you come back.
But by now Annemarie's breathing is so deep and rhythmic she must be asleep. In any case she gives no sign of having heard."
High Lonesome is a collection of out-of-print stories with eleven new stories that, honestly, aren't necessary to sell me on the old ones. Her touch sort of faded after the 80s, which isn't to say that her later stories are crap but, rather, that her earliest stories are goddamn golden. Two pieces in this collection of 36 are padding. Find me another author who can say that after forty fucking years.
I counted three places where her voice took over -- moments that had no justification other than the pleasure she took in writing them. They were stunning. I found myself eagerly reading to find more of them. Each story on its own is perfect as cut glass; the collection itself was brilliantly organized. I couldn't stop, and for 664 pages, that's something considering how most authors' conceits and voices bore me after the first 150.
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I would also like to note that this book was gifted to me by a beautiful young woman who tenaciously tracked down JCO to sign the bugger for me. That's right, bitches. Suck it.
"But that night as he falls slowly asleep he hears himself explaining to Annemarie in a calm measured voice that she will be risking something few men can risk, she should know herself exalted, privileged, in a way invulnerable to hurt even if she is very badly hurt, she'll be risking something he himself cannot risk again in his life. And maybe he never risked it at all.
You'll be going to a place I can't reach, he says.
He would touch her, in wonder, in dread, he would caress her, but his body is heavy with sleep, growing distant from him. He says softly, I'm not sure I'll be here when you come back.
But by now Annemarie's breathing is so deep and rhythmic she must be asleep. In any case she gives no sign of having heard."
High Lonesome is a collection of out-of-print stories with eleven new stories that, honestly, aren't necessary to sell me on the old ones. Her touch sort of faded after the 80s, which isn't to say that her later stories are crap but, rather, that her earliest stories are goddamn golden. Two pieces in this collection of 36 are padding. Find me another author who can say that after forty fucking years.
I counted three places where her voice took over -- moments that had no justification other than the pleasure she took in writing them. They were stunning. I found myself eagerly reading to find more of them. Each story on its own is perfect as cut glass; the collection itself was brilliantly organized. I couldn't stop, and for 664 pages, that's something considering how most authors' conceits and voices bore me after the first 150.
--------------------------------------------
I would also like to note that this book was gifted to me by a beautiful young woman who tenaciously tracked down JCO to sign the bugger for me. That's right, bitches. Suck it.
November 24, 2024
New and Selected Stories: 1966 to 2006
Oates was born June 16 1938; she entered the world with a pen in her hand and a completed manuscript written on the placenta.
She is recognized as one of the world's most prolific writers. Many say she's among the great sages of storytelling, while others criticize her work as melodramatic fluff. I disagree with the latter. Oates is not afraid of experimentation, testing her range as a writer with each tap at the keyboard. (She openly admits she's lost track of how many stories she's written.)
This collection shows she is a chameleon, mastering many writing styles and techniques. If I hadn't known these were all her stories, I wouldn't have noticed her wax seal on the back of some of them, folded neatly in envelopes. She is comfortable with being uncomfortable; exploring the human psyche and human condition from various points-of-views. Some argue she lacks her own voice; I disagree. She has many voices, all at her bidding.
This is the first time I've finished and reviewed an entire collection of short stories by the same author. I'm collecting the comments I made in the What Are You Reading? topic in the Library Classroom. I had thoughts on every story, but there are no spoilers, just general impressions. Oates is a favorite; partially due to my nostalgic youth, where I read her stories in my high school cafeteria and college courtyard.
This collection shows her works are worthy of the title: Modern Literary Classics. Her control over voice, character, point of view, use of punctuation, perspective, mood, and tone should be recognized.
Example: One story in particular varied greatly from any style I associate with her; If I hadn't known Oates wrote it, I would have been convinced it was written by a middle aged man.
This is a collection of observations, details, interactions, innuendos, and her ability to pause, reflect with precision, and transform those thoughts and observations into words. Oates painstakingly absorbs life, and she knows how to bring it to her readers. Here are her stories and my original thoughts. (It took a lot of willpower to not go back and edit or expand on them.)
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New Stories
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The short story Spider Boy (no relation to Spider-Man) by Joyce Carol Oates. She is immensely prolific. Her physiological horror tops, dare I say, Stephen King. I'd say she's on par with Edgar Allan Poe. Some stories can cause goose bumps, cold sweats and sleepless nights. But she defies genres. She has a keen eye for the human condition and everyday life. I recommend the three minute video provided if you're interested in her craftsmanship.
The short story The Fish Factory by Joyce Carol Oates. It's reminiscent of Faulkner's stream of consciousness prose. A chilling story; a tale of identity. Her use of second person point-of-view creeps up on YOU, hidden in the background. When it reaches YOU it makes the story even more terrifying and tragic. (Thank you Lovella. I had no idea The Hunger Games had prequels. I look forward to reading them.)
The short story The Cousins by Joyce Carol Oates. Her ability to create anxiety, emotion, and dread in a reader is masterful. The narrative is written as two corresponding letters. One person is a Holocaust survivor, the other claiming to be a distant cousin. At first, the letters between the two appear innocent, enthusiastic, contemplative and touching (one narrator less willing to reciprocate a response). But the tone shifts and escalates into resentment, anger, obsession and aggression. Another perfect example of Oates tapping into the human consciousness, exposing psychological horror at its best.
I'm currently reading the short story Soft-Core by Joyce Carol Oates. The opening line is: "Why are you showing me these?" That's a perfect example on how to grab a reader's attention with the first sentence. You'll discover what these are in her short story collection High Lonesome 1966-2006. Honestly, there isn't a work by her I haven't liked, or at least taken away some deeper meaning. The stories I mentioned above were psychological horror. I haven't finished Soft-Core yet, but it's more of a character study between two sisters. I probably say it every time I post about one of her stories: she is a master, highly prolific, and possesses an ability of capturing the human condition in short form. For any writers and readers in Mrs. Walker's class, I recommend diving into Joyce Carol Oates's work.
The short story The Gathering Squall by Joyce Carol Oates. At this rate I should finish this massive collection of her short stories between 2024 and 2030, contingent on life's variables.
The short story The Lost Brother by Joyce Carol Oates. It's written in fictional prose and letters. So far, it resembles a previous story I listed: The Cousins, in tone and rising action. I'm wondering if there is a connection. The opening word, not sentence, is: "Alone."
The short story In Hot May by Joyce Carol Oates. Another great opening: "Why's this door locked? Mom! Let me in." It's in a third person omniscient voice taken from a teenager's point of view. The tone is playful but the plot is very dark. It's a great contrast, showing how tone can be deceitful.
The short story High Lonesome by Joyce Carol Oates. "The only people I still love are the ones I've hurt. I wonder if it's the same for you." Do you see a pattern? Grab your reader immediately and they might stick around. This will be the first short story collection I read from start to finish by one author. The initial stories are new (relative to the 2006 publication date), the latter stories go from 1966 to 2006. The thing is, I often feel like I'm reading a different writer. It shows Oates's range as a writer. She has such control over voice, and easily switches from one style to another. Amazing. (Hi Devin. Welcome. It's great seeing you here.)
The short story *BD* 11 1 87 by Joyce Carol Oates. An example of withholding information from the reader, ensuring that the pages keep turning. Here's a slight reveal. It’s about a high school student. The teachers start acting differently towards him, and are reluctant to write a recommendation letter. Why is this happening? I recommend it to, um, high schoolers. And I have to praise Oates again. Her control over punctuation is awe inspiring. She uses it to maximum effect. Periods, colons, semicolons, etc, bend at her will. If the story goes in the direction I think, it will be disturbing. Very disturbing. Opening line: “The strangeness began shortly after his eighteenth birthday.”
Afterward
Confirmed. Psychological terror. She's the only author that gives me tremors. The ending was slightly predictable but it took a sharp turn, and was executed perfectly. The final reveal caused heart palpitations, followed by a wave of sorrow. Any writer that can make you feel so strongly towards characters relegated to twenty pages is a master.
The short story Fat Man My Love by Joyce Carol Oates. In the opening she repeats the pronoun "he" in short snappy sentences. It's irritating, no doubt the desired effect. The use of repetition is carried throughout, often stating the same sentence in a different way. She plays a lot with POV (1st, 2nd, 3rd) and format (italics, parentheses, parts resembling poetry and screenplays). The story is about a fat movie director and his relationship with women. Oates makes a statement at the end saying that the story is fictional but parts contain factual material from The Dark Side of Genius: Alfred Hitchcock by Donald Spoto. What I appreciated most was her chaotic use of style and form, but was able to meld it together, making it an enjoyable read. It starts messy but congeals at the end.
"Was he a Zombie Buddha, yes he was a Zombie Buddha but a Zombie Buddha of power."
The short story Objects in the Mirror are Closer than They Appear by Joyce Carol Oates. This is a first. I didn’t like this story. At all. I guess that’s good. It got me out of the mind set, “Oates can write no wrong.” The story started, then ended, abruptly. The start was clunky, a flat tire, like Oates couldn’t figure out how to narrate it. Jumping from point of view (mostly second person) and writing style, which didn’t work for me. It's basically about a teenage girl obsessing over an older pharmacist that drives by her house occasionally, thinking one day he’ll stop and whisk her away. Ok. So what? She had a crush. I couldn't see any hidden subtext. It’s three and half pages long, and when it ended, I kept flipping the last page back and forth thinking the rest of the story would appear. It didn’t. As if Oates got up for coffee, was called by her publisher and told to immediately send the collection for publication, so in her haste, she forgot to finish it. Now that I’m done complaining, the next set of stories is from the 1960s, a period critics say she produced her best work. I just wish the last story of the new story section hadn’t left such a bad aftertaste.
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The 1960s
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The short story Upon the Sweeping Flood by Joyce Carol Oates. A man is in the midst of a rising hurricane and attempts to save a teenage girl and her younger brother. It's told in long paragraphs with no dialogue breaks. It feels like the jumbled mess a hurricane leaves behind. It leans towards melodrama and alludes to religious dogma, which is kicked in the face at the end. The conclusion is dramatic but felt out of place. Like Oates was getting bored with telling a straightforward story and decided to give it shock value.
The short story At the Seminary by Joyce Carol Oates. This story was written in the 60s. The anthology starts with Oates' newest work (As of the 2007 publication). You can easily see how her writing has changed over the decades. So far I prefer her newer stories; they're much more experimental. At the Seminary is in omniscient voice but mostly slips into the thoughts of the father at the beginning and end, then the daughter throughout the middle. The family is driving to visit their son/brother in seminary school. It is a commentary on a woman's role in society, and the expectations placed on appearance.
The short story In the Region of Ice by Joyce Carol Oates. The title comes from Shakespeare’s play Measure for Measure. There are parallels between both. Sister Irene is a new English professor at a prestigious university. Her student is Allen Weinstein, who becomes infatuated with the nun, resembling Angelo’s love in Measure for Measure. He is intelligent, flamboyant, arrogant, and confident. Sister Irene struggles with life outside the university, finding the real world is too distressing. Allen is a bridge between the two. Again, Measure for Measure, insofar as finding a balance between two realities: our own world and the real world. A measure for measure also implies: treating those how you want to be treated. Allen Weinstein's character is what separates this story from others like it. He's a character you can love, hate, respect and ridicule.
The short-story Where Are You Going, And Where Have You Been by Joyce Carol Oates. This is an acclaimed Oates's story. It's been assigned in colleges, talked about in literary circles, and, at least for me, is ambiguous. You can read it as literal, supernatural, haunting, cautionary, or as a concoction of the narrator's fantasies. It's based on serial killer Charles Schmid. If you look at his Wiki page the connection is obvious. That's my history lesson.
It's psychological terror. Recurring motifs are music, vertigo, and independence. You'll question whether the events are real or imagined. The tone is chilling. Connie is a fifteen year old rebellious girl. She encounters a stalker. (?) She longs to escape her life, and the antagonist is an escape, so whether the story is literal or metaphor that's for you to decide. I lean towards figurative. There are enough clues that indicate as much. That's all I'll reveal.
The story is dedicated to Bob Dylan and based on his song It's All Over Now, Baby. If you read the story and listen to the song you immediately nod your head to the similarities and the catchy toon. It's a great song.
It's All Over Now, Baby by Bob Dylan
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L4HW3...
The short-story How I Contemplated the World from the Detroit House of Correction and Began My Life Over Again by Joyce Carol Oates. An unconventional story. The narrator refers to herself in third person, later, she adopts first person. It's prefaced with: "Notes for an English Class with..."
It's narrated with lists (1, 2, 3...) and subtitles (Characters, That Night, Detroit...). The style is challenging and fractured, some passages took multiple readings. The story takes shape, wherein lies a girl's "criminal" life that resulted in imprisonment.
A repeated motif is temperature dropping and “the bottom falling out,” perhaps implying characters that are hitting bottom. I enjoy Oates's experimental writing, always willing to challenge herself, and never fearful of breaking format. It helps that I love lists.
The short story Four Summers by Joyce Carol Oates. A lesson in loss, complacency, change and perspective. The beginning feels like a social party from The Great Gatsby, so by the end, dissolution sets in, and society's ugliness remains. What was once loved becomes hated, and what was new and exciting becomes tiresome and burdensome. The narrator mourns possibilities lost because of inaction, when she decided "to do nothing." Yet she still retains happiness from that decision.
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The 1970s
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The short story Small Avalanches by Joyce Carol Oates. This story starts the 1970s section of the collection High Lonesome. The title is literal and metaphorical. I’m noticing a pattern after reading her stories for months. Oates explores this territory a lot. A female being threatened by a male. A power struggle is usually involved, where Oates pushes back against an inferiority complex that women still face today. This story has another female protagonist who is stalked and threatened by a male, implying that his intention is rape. This climax went in a different direction than expected, and finished on a lighter tone than anticipated.
Online I looked for other opinions; I uncovered a surprise. Small Avalanches was adapted into a feature film. The below scene was taken from the story verbatim. It’s creepy.
https://youtu.be/Dchud6Bh7pk?feature=...
The short story Concerning the Case of Bobbie T . by Joyce Carol Oates. The story is a non-chronological time jumper, showing an antagonist and protagonist throughout the span of decades. An event took place, in front of the town, that altered their lives. It's reminiscent of a cliffhanger story, leaving you guessing as to what happened when you finish a time span. You'll continue onto the next section wondering: How could it have been so traumatic if it took place in public? Oates is great at serving these morsels slowly.
It's a deceiver. Oates smashes expectations. At first I thought it would fall into step (which has become an Oates's motif) of a young girl victimized by an older man - in this case a black man. Oates departs from her formula, where the perpetrator becomes the victim and the victim is a naive perpetrator. It's also a narrative on how racial discrimination quickly defines who is predator and victim.
The short story The Tryst by Joyce Carol Oates. I had to look this one up
I love it when writers break the rules, even small ones, as long as it serves a purpose. In The Tryst, Oates dropped quotation marks from character dialogue. I'm as confident as someone can be when writing an opinion piece as to why she loses inverted commas. The conversations are fictitious, constructed by the protagonist to mask the truth. A false narrative, a "hearing what he wants to hear," a defense mechanism to cope with guilt. I don't believe the girl is a figment of his imagination, but by dropping the quotation marks, Oates implies the conversations are coming from one source: the protagonist. The infatuation is real but the dialogue is internal. There's also enough physical actions, implying violent events are taking place why the protagonist imagines a romantic courtship. Some writers whimsically drop format, superficially breaking rules, but not Oates. If she breaks the rules it will serve the story. I can't be 100% certain; she ends with enough ambiguity to make you question, but Oates is no rookie, and even if I don't like all her stories, there's nothing superficial about them. Even if people criticize her for being melodramatic.
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End of Part 1
Continue to Part 2 (in the COMMENTS)
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Oates was born June 16 1938; she entered the world with a pen in her hand and a completed manuscript written on the placenta.
She is recognized as one of the world's most prolific writers. Many say she's among the great sages of storytelling, while others criticize her work as melodramatic fluff. I disagree with the latter. Oates is not afraid of experimentation, testing her range as a writer with each tap at the keyboard. (She openly admits she's lost track of how many stories she's written.)
This collection shows she is a chameleon, mastering many writing styles and techniques. If I hadn't known these were all her stories, I wouldn't have noticed her wax seal on the back of some of them, folded neatly in envelopes. She is comfortable with being uncomfortable; exploring the human psyche and human condition from various points-of-views. Some argue she lacks her own voice; I disagree. She has many voices, all at her bidding.
This is the first time I've finished and reviewed an entire collection of short stories by the same author. I'm collecting the comments I made in the What Are You Reading? topic in the Library Classroom. I had thoughts on every story, but there are no spoilers, just general impressions. Oates is a favorite; partially due to my nostalgic youth, where I read her stories in my high school cafeteria and college courtyard.
This collection shows her works are worthy of the title: Modern Literary Classics. Her control over voice, character, point of view, use of punctuation, perspective, mood, and tone should be recognized.
Example: One story in particular varied greatly from any style I associate with her; If I hadn't known Oates wrote it, I would have been convinced it was written by a middle aged man.
This is a collection of observations, details, interactions, innuendos, and her ability to pause, reflect with precision, and transform those thoughts and observations into words. Oates painstakingly absorbs life, and she knows how to bring it to her readers. Here are her stories and my original thoughts. (It took a lot of willpower to not go back and edit or expand on them.)
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New Stories
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The short story Spider Boy (no relation to Spider-Man) by Joyce Carol Oates. She is immensely prolific. Her physiological horror tops, dare I say, Stephen King. I'd say she's on par with Edgar Allan Poe. Some stories can cause goose bumps, cold sweats and sleepless nights. But she defies genres. She has a keen eye for the human condition and everyday life. I recommend the three minute video provided if you're interested in her craftsmanship.
The short story The Fish Factory by Joyce Carol Oates. It's reminiscent of Faulkner's stream of consciousness prose. A chilling story; a tale of identity. Her use of second person point-of-view creeps up on YOU, hidden in the background. When it reaches YOU it makes the story even more terrifying and tragic. (Thank you Lovella. I had no idea The Hunger Games had prequels. I look forward to reading them.)
The short story The Cousins by Joyce Carol Oates. Her ability to create anxiety, emotion, and dread in a reader is masterful. The narrative is written as two corresponding letters. One person is a Holocaust survivor, the other claiming to be a distant cousin. At first, the letters between the two appear innocent, enthusiastic, contemplative and touching (one narrator less willing to reciprocate a response). But the tone shifts and escalates into resentment, anger, obsession and aggression. Another perfect example of Oates tapping into the human consciousness, exposing psychological horror at its best.
I'm currently reading the short story Soft-Core by Joyce Carol Oates. The opening line is: "Why are you showing me these?" That's a perfect example on how to grab a reader's attention with the first sentence. You'll discover what these are in her short story collection High Lonesome 1966-2006. Honestly, there isn't a work by her I haven't liked, or at least taken away some deeper meaning. The stories I mentioned above were psychological horror. I haven't finished Soft-Core yet, but it's more of a character study between two sisters. I probably say it every time I post about one of her stories: she is a master, highly prolific, and possesses an ability of capturing the human condition in short form. For any writers and readers in Mrs. Walker's class, I recommend diving into Joyce Carol Oates's work.
The short story The Gathering Squall by Joyce Carol Oates. At this rate I should finish this massive collection of her short stories between 2024 and 2030, contingent on life's variables.
The short story The Lost Brother by Joyce Carol Oates. It's written in fictional prose and letters. So far, it resembles a previous story I listed: The Cousins, in tone and rising action. I'm wondering if there is a connection. The opening word, not sentence, is: "Alone."
The short story In Hot May by Joyce Carol Oates. Another great opening: "Why's this door locked? Mom! Let me in." It's in a third person omniscient voice taken from a teenager's point of view. The tone is playful but the plot is very dark. It's a great contrast, showing how tone can be deceitful.
The short story High Lonesome by Joyce Carol Oates. "The only people I still love are the ones I've hurt. I wonder if it's the same for you." Do you see a pattern? Grab your reader immediately and they might stick around. This will be the first short story collection I read from start to finish by one author. The initial stories are new (relative to the 2006 publication date), the latter stories go from 1966 to 2006. The thing is, I often feel like I'm reading a different writer. It shows Oates's range as a writer. She has such control over voice, and easily switches from one style to another. Amazing. (Hi Devin. Welcome. It's great seeing you here.)
The short story *BD* 11 1 87 by Joyce Carol Oates. An example of withholding information from the reader, ensuring that the pages keep turning. Here's a slight reveal. It’s about a high school student. The teachers start acting differently towards him, and are reluctant to write a recommendation letter. Why is this happening? I recommend it to, um, high schoolers. And I have to praise Oates again. Her control over punctuation is awe inspiring. She uses it to maximum effect. Periods, colons, semicolons, etc, bend at her will. If the story goes in the direction I think, it will be disturbing. Very disturbing. Opening line: “The strangeness began shortly after his eighteenth birthday.”
Afterward
Confirmed. Psychological terror. She's the only author that gives me tremors. The ending was slightly predictable but it took a sharp turn, and was executed perfectly. The final reveal caused heart palpitations, followed by a wave of sorrow. Any writer that can make you feel so strongly towards characters relegated to twenty pages is a master.
The short story Fat Man My Love by Joyce Carol Oates. In the opening she repeats the pronoun "he" in short snappy sentences. It's irritating, no doubt the desired effect. The use of repetition is carried throughout, often stating the same sentence in a different way. She plays a lot with POV (1st, 2nd, 3rd) and format (italics, parentheses, parts resembling poetry and screenplays). The story is about a fat movie director and his relationship with women. Oates makes a statement at the end saying that the story is fictional but parts contain factual material from The Dark Side of Genius: Alfred Hitchcock by Donald Spoto. What I appreciated most was her chaotic use of style and form, but was able to meld it together, making it an enjoyable read. It starts messy but congeals at the end.
"Was he a Zombie Buddha, yes he was a Zombie Buddha but a Zombie Buddha of power."
The short story Objects in the Mirror are Closer than They Appear by Joyce Carol Oates. This is a first. I didn’t like this story. At all. I guess that’s good. It got me out of the mind set, “Oates can write no wrong.” The story started, then ended, abruptly. The start was clunky, a flat tire, like Oates couldn’t figure out how to narrate it. Jumping from point of view (mostly second person) and writing style, which didn’t work for me. It's basically about a teenage girl obsessing over an older pharmacist that drives by her house occasionally, thinking one day he’ll stop and whisk her away. Ok. So what? She had a crush. I couldn't see any hidden subtext. It’s three and half pages long, and when it ended, I kept flipping the last page back and forth thinking the rest of the story would appear. It didn’t. As if Oates got up for coffee, was called by her publisher and told to immediately send the collection for publication, so in her haste, she forgot to finish it. Now that I’m done complaining, the next set of stories is from the 1960s, a period critics say she produced her best work. I just wish the last story of the new story section hadn’t left such a bad aftertaste.
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The 1960s
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The short story Upon the Sweeping Flood by Joyce Carol Oates. A man is in the midst of a rising hurricane and attempts to save a teenage girl and her younger brother. It's told in long paragraphs with no dialogue breaks. It feels like the jumbled mess a hurricane leaves behind. It leans towards melodrama and alludes to religious dogma, which is kicked in the face at the end. The conclusion is dramatic but felt out of place. Like Oates was getting bored with telling a straightforward story and decided to give it shock value.
The short story At the Seminary by Joyce Carol Oates. This story was written in the 60s. The anthology starts with Oates' newest work (As of the 2007 publication). You can easily see how her writing has changed over the decades. So far I prefer her newer stories; they're much more experimental. At the Seminary is in omniscient voice but mostly slips into the thoughts of the father at the beginning and end, then the daughter throughout the middle. The family is driving to visit their son/brother in seminary school. It is a commentary on a woman's role in society, and the expectations placed on appearance.
The short story In the Region of Ice by Joyce Carol Oates. The title comes from Shakespeare’s play Measure for Measure. There are parallels between both. Sister Irene is a new English professor at a prestigious university. Her student is Allen Weinstein, who becomes infatuated with the nun, resembling Angelo’s love in Measure for Measure. He is intelligent, flamboyant, arrogant, and confident. Sister Irene struggles with life outside the university, finding the real world is too distressing. Allen is a bridge between the two. Again, Measure for Measure, insofar as finding a balance between two realities: our own world and the real world. A measure for measure also implies: treating those how you want to be treated. Allen Weinstein's character is what separates this story from others like it. He's a character you can love, hate, respect and ridicule.
The short-story Where Are You Going, And Where Have You Been by Joyce Carol Oates. This is an acclaimed Oates's story. It's been assigned in colleges, talked about in literary circles, and, at least for me, is ambiguous. You can read it as literal, supernatural, haunting, cautionary, or as a concoction of the narrator's fantasies. It's based on serial killer Charles Schmid. If you look at his Wiki page the connection is obvious. That's my history lesson.
It's psychological terror. Recurring motifs are music, vertigo, and independence. You'll question whether the events are real or imagined. The tone is chilling. Connie is a fifteen year old rebellious girl. She encounters a stalker. (?) She longs to escape her life, and the antagonist is an escape, so whether the story is literal or metaphor that's for you to decide. I lean towards figurative. There are enough clues that indicate as much. That's all I'll reveal.
The story is dedicated to Bob Dylan and based on his song It's All Over Now, Baby. If you read the story and listen to the song you immediately nod your head to the similarities and the catchy toon. It's a great song.
It's All Over Now, Baby by Bob Dylan
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L4HW3...
The short-story How I Contemplated the World from the Detroit House of Correction and Began My Life Over Again by Joyce Carol Oates. An unconventional story. The narrator refers to herself in third person, later, she adopts first person. It's prefaced with: "Notes for an English Class with..."
It's narrated with lists (1, 2, 3...) and subtitles (Characters, That Night, Detroit...). The style is challenging and fractured, some passages took multiple readings. The story takes shape, wherein lies a girl's "criminal" life that resulted in imprisonment.
A repeated motif is temperature dropping and “the bottom falling out,” perhaps implying characters that are hitting bottom. I enjoy Oates's experimental writing, always willing to challenge herself, and never fearful of breaking format. It helps that I love lists.
The short story Four Summers by Joyce Carol Oates. A lesson in loss, complacency, change and perspective. The beginning feels like a social party from The Great Gatsby, so by the end, dissolution sets in, and society's ugliness remains. What was once loved becomes hated, and what was new and exciting becomes tiresome and burdensome. The narrator mourns possibilities lost because of inaction, when she decided "to do nothing." Yet she still retains happiness from that decision.
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The 1970s
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The short story Small Avalanches by Joyce Carol Oates. This story starts the 1970s section of the collection High Lonesome. The title is literal and metaphorical. I’m noticing a pattern after reading her stories for months. Oates explores this territory a lot. A female being threatened by a male. A power struggle is usually involved, where Oates pushes back against an inferiority complex that women still face today. This story has another female protagonist who is stalked and threatened by a male, implying that his intention is rape. This climax went in a different direction than expected, and finished on a lighter tone than anticipated.
Online I looked for other opinions; I uncovered a surprise. Small Avalanches was adapted into a feature film. The below scene was taken from the story verbatim. It’s creepy.
https://youtu.be/Dchud6Bh7pk?feature=...
The short story Concerning the Case of Bobbie T . by Joyce Carol Oates. The story is a non-chronological time jumper, showing an antagonist and protagonist throughout the span of decades. An event took place, in front of the town, that altered their lives. It's reminiscent of a cliffhanger story, leaving you guessing as to what happened when you finish a time span. You'll continue onto the next section wondering: How could it have been so traumatic if it took place in public? Oates is great at serving these morsels slowly.
It's a deceiver. Oates smashes expectations. At first I thought it would fall into step (which has become an Oates's motif) of a young girl victimized by an older man - in this case a black man. Oates departs from her formula, where the perpetrator becomes the victim and the victim is a naive perpetrator. It's also a narrative on how racial discrimination quickly defines who is predator and victim.
The short story The Tryst by Joyce Carol Oates. I had to look this one up
Tryst - A meeting of secret lovers. It originated in Middle English and referred to a designated hunting area. Seems about right, lovers are hunters. It's also, according to reviews, a bad dating app.That's the heart of the story. The secret relationship between two lovers, told from a limited third person omniscient narrator, who focuses on the male's adoration of a woman.
I love it when writers break the rules, even small ones, as long as it serves a purpose. In The Tryst, Oates dropped quotation marks from character dialogue. I'm as confident as someone can be when writing an opinion piece as to why she loses inverted commas. The conversations are fictitious, constructed by the protagonist to mask the truth. A false narrative, a "hearing what he wants to hear," a defense mechanism to cope with guilt. I don't believe the girl is a figment of his imagination, but by dropping the quotation marks, Oates implies the conversations are coming from one source: the protagonist. The infatuation is real but the dialogue is internal. There's also enough physical actions, implying violent events are taking place why the protagonist imagines a romantic courtship. Some writers whimsically drop format, superficially breaking rules, but not Oates. If she breaks the rules it will serve the story. I can't be 100% certain; she ends with enough ambiguity to make you question, but Oates is no rookie, and even if I don't like all her stories, there's nothing superficial about them. Even if people criticize her for being melodramatic.
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End of Part 1
Continue to Part 2 (in the COMMENTS)
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May 29, 2020
Perfection! While I haven’t loved all of JCO’s novels, I’ve always loved her short fiction and this compilation was a joy to read. Some of the stories I had already read and I enjoyed the re-read just as much. A MUST for JCO fans. If you’re not already a mega-fan, I wouldn’t start out with this supersized anthology.
February 18, 2016
Beautiful, disturbing, fascinating...There is something here for everyone.
January 29, 2020
3.4.
Well, that was painful. I decided to read a book of short stories by Joyce Carol Oates because I knew she was a well-known and respected American author, and I thought I would see what her oeuvre was all about. In order to avoid spoilers, I will summarize, in no particular order, the main events of the first twenty stories in this collection: there are two cases of a brother assaulting a sister, a serial killer-rapist, two cases of attempted rape and an actual rape, a suicide and an attempted suicide, girl killed by boyfriend, woman kills abusive husband, man kills cousin, attempted murder of a girl, a story which is a litany of various crimes less than felonies, man beats woman, boy is killed for body parts, one story about stalking and counter-stalking, man kills daughter’s supposed boyfriend, and one where nothing bad happens. Maybe that doesn’t add up to twenty, but take my word for it, there are only two or three stories where grievous harm does not enter into the picture, and in basically every case, a man is the perp, or his abusive behavior drives the woman to kill him or kill herself. Cheerful, eh?
So, this pattern got me to thinking. I’ve known or been acquainted with many, many people in my life, thousands and maybe tens of thousands, and in all my years I have known personally of only one person who was murdered, and I knew her only slightly. And yet, I’ve known many people who were deathly afraid of home invasion, and consequently kept guns to defend themselves (the possession of which undoubtedly causes other suicides or homicides). I couldn’t help thinking that Ms. Oates was one of those upper middle-class people who fear assault or murder by the “others”. And this constant pattern of bad men killing or raping or sexually assaulting or beating women started to wear on me, until it really became a chore to finish the book. To be fair, in her later stories, some sympathetic male characters started to appear, but in such small numbers. Elizabeth Strout and Margaret Atwood do not write this way. Their male characters are sometimes bad, sometimes good; they are not monochromatic.
I am not naive, and I do not deny that such things happen, but they do not happen at even 1/100th the rate which one would assume they do if Ms. Oates' work was your only guide to life in the United States. In one of her stories, the male protagonist asks the female protagonist, “Do you just hate men, or is it the whole species?” Good question, Ms. Oates. Even in the stories where men are sympathetic, the story itself is usually a downer. The quality of the writing is quite good, but I’ll take Margaret Atwood any day of the week over Joyce Carol Oates' world in which 90% men are violent and 70% women are weak. Perhaps an even better antidote to this dismal experience might be to read some more Jane Austen books I've been meaning to start.
Oh well, now I know J.C. Oates is not for me.
Well, that was painful. I decided to read a book of short stories by Joyce Carol Oates because I knew she was a well-known and respected American author, and I thought I would see what her oeuvre was all about. In order to avoid spoilers, I will summarize, in no particular order, the main events of the first twenty stories in this collection: there are two cases of a brother assaulting a sister, a serial killer-rapist, two cases of attempted rape and an actual rape, a suicide and an attempted suicide, girl killed by boyfriend, woman kills abusive husband, man kills cousin, attempted murder of a girl, a story which is a litany of various crimes less than felonies, man beats woman, boy is killed for body parts, one story about stalking and counter-stalking, man kills daughter’s supposed boyfriend, and one where nothing bad happens. Maybe that doesn’t add up to twenty, but take my word for it, there are only two or three stories where grievous harm does not enter into the picture, and in basically every case, a man is the perp, or his abusive behavior drives the woman to kill him or kill herself. Cheerful, eh?
So, this pattern got me to thinking. I’ve known or been acquainted with many, many people in my life, thousands and maybe tens of thousands, and in all my years I have known personally of only one person who was murdered, and I knew her only slightly. And yet, I’ve known many people who were deathly afraid of home invasion, and consequently kept guns to defend themselves (the possession of which undoubtedly causes other suicides or homicides). I couldn’t help thinking that Ms. Oates was one of those upper middle-class people who fear assault or murder by the “others”. And this constant pattern of bad men killing or raping or sexually assaulting or beating women started to wear on me, until it really became a chore to finish the book. To be fair, in her later stories, some sympathetic male characters started to appear, but in such small numbers. Elizabeth Strout and Margaret Atwood do not write this way. Their male characters are sometimes bad, sometimes good; they are not monochromatic.
I am not naive, and I do not deny that such things happen, but they do not happen at even 1/100th the rate which one would assume they do if Ms. Oates' work was your only guide to life in the United States. In one of her stories, the male protagonist asks the female protagonist, “Do you just hate men, or is it the whole species?” Good question, Ms. Oates. Even in the stories where men are sympathetic, the story itself is usually a downer. The quality of the writing is quite good, but I’ll take Margaret Atwood any day of the week over Joyce Carol Oates' world in which 90% men are violent and 70% women are weak. Perhaps an even better antidote to this dismal experience might be to read some more Jane Austen books I've been meaning to start.
Oh well, now I know J.C. Oates is not for me.
February 14, 2008
i get the feeling that joyce carol oates can write an essay about taking a shit and it would be published and someone or another would laud it as a piece of great american writing. or, she can just smear the poo on a piece of paper and publish it, and someone would call it a "triumph" of literature.
okay, seriously, just because someone is well-published and well-known, doesnt mean that everything s/he writes is amazing. such is the case with this collection of short stories. when oates is on, shes on. when shes off, be prepared to read some of the most pretentious, overly indulgent writing that has no point, no plot (and not in that cool, pomo, im strung out on drugs kind of way) out there today.
okay, seriously, just because someone is well-published and well-known, doesnt mean that everything s/he writes is amazing. such is the case with this collection of short stories. when oates is on, shes on. when shes off, be prepared to read some of the most pretentious, overly indulgent writing that has no point, no plot (and not in that cool, pomo, im strung out on drugs kind of way) out there today.
Shelved as 'did-not-finish'
September 30, 2021After reading the first third of the stories – I only dipped into the collection once in a blue moon so it took me 11 months to read that first third – I’ve decided to cut my losses. I’ve enjoyed some of JCO’s longer works, but I don’t think I actually liked any of the stories I read here. Time to move on.
June 23, 2008
Okay I'm swearing off JCO for at least a year. While her writing is phenomenal, I've really had enough of death, despair and dark obsession. Seriously Ms. Oates...there's SOME good in life and people.
These 11 short stories were all so...heavy. There wasn't a single story that was uplifting in any way. They were certainly classic JCO..every character was of a "youthful middle age"...always breathless and confused. It started to irritate the shit out of me. The only reason why I gave this collection three stars was because I can't deny that her writing is singularly amazing. For instance, this one passage really stopped me short:
"You fall in love with what is not-known in the other. And what is not-known becomes the identity of the other. Sexual intercourse is the mining of the desire to make the not-known into the known. The strongest desire in the species - and sometimes the most ephemeral."
Whew.
These 11 short stories were all so...heavy. There wasn't a single story that was uplifting in any way. They were certainly classic JCO..every character was of a "youthful middle age"...always breathless and confused. It started to irritate the shit out of me. The only reason why I gave this collection three stars was because I can't deny that her writing is singularly amazing. For instance, this one passage really stopped me short:
"You fall in love with what is not-known in the other. And what is not-known becomes the identity of the other. Sexual intercourse is the mining of the desire to make the not-known into the known. The strongest desire in the species - and sometimes the most ephemeral."
Whew.
April 30, 2009
Again, another writer I've always avoided for fear of estrogen poisoning. But she's great, absolutely great.
Especially, and this is so very important. Her short stories are STORIES. Tense and fascinating conflict and just enough resolution to feel sated. This is hard to find in a lot of "literary" short stories.
Especially, and this is so very important. Her short stories are STORIES. Tense and fascinating conflict and just enough resolution to feel sated. This is hard to find in a lot of "literary" short stories.
October 3, 2019
Excellent. A great place to start Joyce Carol Oates, if you have never read her before. What are you waiting for?
October 3, 2022
I’m going to miss this book, with which I spent nearly half a year. This is my first time reading Oates, but hope it’s not my last. Who knows how many stories we are able to read before finally shuffling off.
September 30, 2023
Joyce Carol Oates is genius. These stories are brilliantly written & kept me turning pages.
August 8, 2019
Whoever said 'quantity has a quality all of its own' never read Joyce Carol Oates. It's not that she writes badly (she doesn't) or can't keep her ego out of the foreground (unusually for Yanks, she's quite self-effacing). The problem is Oates' stories are all too similar to each other - like a long unbroken line of link sausages. Is Oates capable of imagining a world without violence, passive-aggression and hysteria...?
February 8, 2020
I am still reading this collection but want to comment on these stories as I read them so they are fresh in mind.
Oates writes some dark material. She could easily be a writer in the Gothic version of literary Lifetime Channel. That said, there is often a good story in what she writes
The collection begins with “ Spider Boy “ about a young son who is a material witness to his Father’s crimes and “ The Fish Factory “ where a missing girl’s body is found and then disappears again
“ The Cousins “ and “ Soft Core “ are two stories I had read before. The first is told in letters between two Jewish cousins. One a retired housewife and one a renown scientist, the desire to engage changes as the story lengthens. The latter story follows two sisters going through their deceased Father’s things and coming face to face with proof of his infidelities
“ The Gathering Squall “ follows a young girl who is assaulted at a beach party by several young men. She had been sad that a boy she liked had abandoned her to this fate and let’s her parents think he was the attacker.
In “ The Lost Brother “ a wealthy widow decides the time is right to track down her older brother who lives a hermit existence in Northern Maine. He really does not want to be found.
“ In Hot May “ follows a young high school girl off the bus one day to discover her door locked. Both parents cars are in the driveway which adds to her worry, her Father has moved out. When her Mother finally appears disheveled an bruised and has the young girl drive her to her Aunts house the reader has an inkling of what has happened
“ High Lonesome “ is narrated by a young man who tells of growing up admiring an older Cousin who becomes a police officer. Later when the family’s patriarch is arrested in a prostitution sting he blames the Cousin for not intervening. One crime leads to another more serious
“ BD 11 1 87 “ is the best story in the collection so far. I know a Nobel Prize Winner however who might feel a little ripped off though. Still when the light goes off in your head it is a fine moment.
“ Fat Man, My Love “ acknowledges in its notes it is based on a tell all book about Hitchcock and his fascination with Tippi Hendren. Fictionalized a bit perhaps but clearly the great director had some predilections
“ Objects in the mirror are closer than they appear “ is a brief piece about a young girl who knows that the town pharmacist has become infatuated with her and admits to herself she enjoys the attention
“Upon the Sleeping Flood “ A man coming home to his family after his Fathers funeral is caught in a raging flood and helps two almost feral children ride out the storm.
“ At the Seminary “ follows a family ( Mother, Father, young twenties daughter) as they travel to the seminary where the oldest child is studying. They have been called to see what can be done to help the young man who seems to be cracking. The daughter has an event that seems to interrupt the original idea. This story is heavily anthologized, I must admit the explanation of the story I read don’t add up for me as easily.
“ In the Region of Ice “ A Catholic Nun, teaching at a Jesuit College, encounters a young Jewish man. This student challenges her but he also is clearly unbalanced and this requires mire from her than she is comfortable with
“ Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been “ I had read this story earlier. Recounts a young teen girl and her encounter with a dangerous predator who singles her out at a local diner.
“ How I Contemplated the World From the Detroit House of Corrections, and Began My Life Over Again “ Told in a bullet format we follow a young woman of privilege who ends up mixed up with drugs, sex and bad people.
“ Four Summers” Very good story narrated by a woman remembering childhood experiences centered around a lake resort and restaurant. Four different summer experiences related, the last of which occurs when she is a pregnant nineteen year old.
“Small Avalanches “ follows another young girl on the cusp of adolescence. A man spies her at the local store and later asks her if she needs a ride home. She says no but he ends up chasing her into a field. He is so out of shape he ends up collapsing of a possible heart attack. She never seems to fully grasp the danger she was in.
“ Concerning the Case of Bobby T “ A story told out of sequence from the viewpoint of the memory of a whites woman. When she was 12 , sassy and bored, she created a reaction from an 18 year old, intellectually dull, black man. She had been friendly with him before, daring even. She took a ride with him once even, knowing this would cause her serious trouble if discovered by her Father. On this day, however, after ( as she later admits to herself ) provoking Bobby he overreacts and wrestled her to the ground. This leads to his incarceration in a home until he is 40 when he comes to live with his sister, now so broken crossing the street scares him.
“ The Tryst “ A reputable man in a nice neighborhood is Mr. Reddinger. Of course he also is having an affair with a tall, young red headed woman who infatuates him. Feeling daring, almost self sabotaging, he brings her to his home to enjoy a day and she licks herself in the bathroom and attempts to cut her wrist. He saves her and gets her In a cab , the wound was superficial but still bloody. We never hear how he cleans his mess up, both literally and figuratively.
“ The Lady With the Pet Dog “ In an obvious homage to the Chekhov story we meet another couple who meet on a vacation and begin an affair that , against there better intentions, extends back into their lives in the real world.
“The Dead “ Follows a woman, a writer in the sixties, a Professor who has an affair, eventually leaving her husband and her lover to start over. Her third book meets with unexpected commercial success. Being the sixties campuses are on fire with causes. Later she finds out a passionate student from her early teaching days had died. It’s all too much to bear
“ Last Days” In a story from the eighties, rough in today’s headlines, a young man who denies his own Jewishness, or, at least hates it, we see a man I who ends up shooting his rabbi
“ My Warszawa “ :1980 : This story, almost novella length, was just not that entertaining
“ Our Wall “ : Another Story, about those around Berlin, does not work for me.
“ Ravens Wing “ “ Another weaker Story follows a working mans infatuation with a thoroughbred race horse
“ Golden Gloves “ Story follows a young man as he grows up, dealing with a club foot. Later he becomes a boxer, a successful teen fighter. He sees himself as future champion. When he is destroyed in a battle, his jaw and teeth, wrecked , his career ends.
“ Manslaughter “ Story follows a young woman who testified against a man in the death of his wife. Later a good friend of the accused starts dating this woman.
“ Nairobi” Short piece follows an attractive woman on a shopping expedition with her man. He picks out outfits for her and then we learn they are to go meet some important couple... he instructs her how to act etc. Later after the brief meeting , them begging off that they have another appointment, he pays her and we assume they will never see her again
In “ Heat “ we meet two twin girls and learn the story of their disappearance. The narrator admits she was not their but then states there are things you just know. The young man responsible for their death is a mentally deficient young man who works at his family’s ice business
In “ The Knife “ we read about a burglary that goes wrong and ends up with the woman of the house raped
“ The Hair “ follows two couples in their friendly relationship. The Riegels and the Carsons. The Riegels are just that much more refined, confident, and wealthy. It is like a high school relationship in a way. The Carsons basking in their glow yet also feeling subservient and angry at them. Eventually they break free and feel better for it
“ The Swimmers “ Our narrator tells us the take of a relationship that took place between her bachelor uncle and an attractive but mysterious woman who moved to their town. She, the niece, met the woman first swimming at the town pool. Joan Lunt was an incredible swimmer. She mentions this to Clyde who arranges to swim at the same time. A rely does develop to everyone’s surprise. The woman is holding back and when we find out what it dies affect the relationship fatally.
“ Will You Always Love Me “ A man is in a relationship with a woman when she tells a story from her past. Her older sister was attacked, taped and murdered , when she was 19 and she, herself , was 14. Now the man is up for parole after serving a portion of a life sentence. The man, a trained lawyer, wanting to be supportive, researches the case. He begins to suspect the guilt of the man convicted, the statements seem boilerplate. The woman he is with needs him in jail. She needs Him to be the guilty party.
“ Life After High School “ We follow a young couple in upstate New York in 1959. Not even a couple really, just a boy, a senior in high school, obsessed. Finally, rejected as easily as the girl can arrange, he ends his life. Thirty years later the woman and another boy from their class, both successful in the art and academic world meet. The man reveals that more was involved in the young mans death and the guilt she has felt was not all hers to hold
“Mark of Satan” Story didn’t quite work for me, scattered, disjointed, besides the normal darkness
Not a bad set of stories though you will question the goodness of everyone you meet. I’ve read a good amount of her work. I’m not sure this was the best representation of her work.
Oates writes some dark material. She could easily be a writer in the Gothic version of literary Lifetime Channel. That said, there is often a good story in what she writes
The collection begins with “ Spider Boy “ about a young son who is a material witness to his Father’s crimes and “ The Fish Factory “ where a missing girl’s body is found and then disappears again
“ The Cousins “ and “ Soft Core “ are two stories I had read before. The first is told in letters between two Jewish cousins. One a retired housewife and one a renown scientist, the desire to engage changes as the story lengthens. The latter story follows two sisters going through their deceased Father’s things and coming face to face with proof of his infidelities
“ The Gathering Squall “ follows a young girl who is assaulted at a beach party by several young men. She had been sad that a boy she liked had abandoned her to this fate and let’s her parents think he was the attacker.
In “ The Lost Brother “ a wealthy widow decides the time is right to track down her older brother who lives a hermit existence in Northern Maine. He really does not want to be found.
“ In Hot May “ follows a young high school girl off the bus one day to discover her door locked. Both parents cars are in the driveway which adds to her worry, her Father has moved out. When her Mother finally appears disheveled an bruised and has the young girl drive her to her Aunts house the reader has an inkling of what has happened
“ High Lonesome “ is narrated by a young man who tells of growing up admiring an older Cousin who becomes a police officer. Later when the family’s patriarch is arrested in a prostitution sting he blames the Cousin for not intervening. One crime leads to another more serious
“ BD 11 1 87 “ is the best story in the collection so far. I know a Nobel Prize Winner however who might feel a little ripped off though. Still when the light goes off in your head it is a fine moment.
“ Fat Man, My Love “ acknowledges in its notes it is based on a tell all book about Hitchcock and his fascination with Tippi Hendren. Fictionalized a bit perhaps but clearly the great director had some predilections
“ Objects in the mirror are closer than they appear “ is a brief piece about a young girl who knows that the town pharmacist has become infatuated with her and admits to herself she enjoys the attention
“Upon the Sleeping Flood “ A man coming home to his family after his Fathers funeral is caught in a raging flood and helps two almost feral children ride out the storm.
“ At the Seminary “ follows a family ( Mother, Father, young twenties daughter) as they travel to the seminary where the oldest child is studying. They have been called to see what can be done to help the young man who seems to be cracking. The daughter has an event that seems to interrupt the original idea. This story is heavily anthologized, I must admit the explanation of the story I read don’t add up for me as easily.
“ In the Region of Ice “ A Catholic Nun, teaching at a Jesuit College, encounters a young Jewish man. This student challenges her but he also is clearly unbalanced and this requires mire from her than she is comfortable with
“ Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been “ I had read this story earlier. Recounts a young teen girl and her encounter with a dangerous predator who singles her out at a local diner.
“ How I Contemplated the World From the Detroit House of Corrections, and Began My Life Over Again “ Told in a bullet format we follow a young woman of privilege who ends up mixed up with drugs, sex and bad people.
“ Four Summers” Very good story narrated by a woman remembering childhood experiences centered around a lake resort and restaurant. Four different summer experiences related, the last of which occurs when she is a pregnant nineteen year old.
“Small Avalanches “ follows another young girl on the cusp of adolescence. A man spies her at the local store and later asks her if she needs a ride home. She says no but he ends up chasing her into a field. He is so out of shape he ends up collapsing of a possible heart attack. She never seems to fully grasp the danger she was in.
“ Concerning the Case of Bobby T “ A story told out of sequence from the viewpoint of the memory of a whites woman. When she was 12 , sassy and bored, she created a reaction from an 18 year old, intellectually dull, black man. She had been friendly with him before, daring even. She took a ride with him once even, knowing this would cause her serious trouble if discovered by her Father. On this day, however, after ( as she later admits to herself ) provoking Bobby he overreacts and wrestled her to the ground. This leads to his incarceration in a home until he is 40 when he comes to live with his sister, now so broken crossing the street scares him.
“ The Tryst “ A reputable man in a nice neighborhood is Mr. Reddinger. Of course he also is having an affair with a tall, young red headed woman who infatuates him. Feeling daring, almost self sabotaging, he brings her to his home to enjoy a day and she licks herself in the bathroom and attempts to cut her wrist. He saves her and gets her In a cab , the wound was superficial but still bloody. We never hear how he cleans his mess up, both literally and figuratively.
“ The Lady With the Pet Dog “ In an obvious homage to the Chekhov story we meet another couple who meet on a vacation and begin an affair that , against there better intentions, extends back into their lives in the real world.
“The Dead “ Follows a woman, a writer in the sixties, a Professor who has an affair, eventually leaving her husband and her lover to start over. Her third book meets with unexpected commercial success. Being the sixties campuses are on fire with causes. Later she finds out a passionate student from her early teaching days had died. It’s all too much to bear
“ Last Days” In a story from the eighties, rough in today’s headlines, a young man who denies his own Jewishness, or, at least hates it, we see a man I who ends up shooting his rabbi
“ My Warszawa “ :1980 : This story, almost novella length, was just not that entertaining
“ Our Wall “ : Another Story, about those around Berlin, does not work for me.
“ Ravens Wing “ “ Another weaker Story follows a working mans infatuation with a thoroughbred race horse
“ Golden Gloves “ Story follows a young man as he grows up, dealing with a club foot. Later he becomes a boxer, a successful teen fighter. He sees himself as future champion. When he is destroyed in a battle, his jaw and teeth, wrecked , his career ends.
“ Manslaughter “ Story follows a young woman who testified against a man in the death of his wife. Later a good friend of the accused starts dating this woman.
“ Nairobi” Short piece follows an attractive woman on a shopping expedition with her man. He picks out outfits for her and then we learn they are to go meet some important couple... he instructs her how to act etc. Later after the brief meeting , them begging off that they have another appointment, he pays her and we assume they will never see her again
In “ Heat “ we meet two twin girls and learn the story of their disappearance. The narrator admits she was not their but then states there are things you just know. The young man responsible for their death is a mentally deficient young man who works at his family’s ice business
In “ The Knife “ we read about a burglary that goes wrong and ends up with the woman of the house raped
“ The Hair “ follows two couples in their friendly relationship. The Riegels and the Carsons. The Riegels are just that much more refined, confident, and wealthy. It is like a high school relationship in a way. The Carsons basking in their glow yet also feeling subservient and angry at them. Eventually they break free and feel better for it
“ The Swimmers “ Our narrator tells us the take of a relationship that took place between her bachelor uncle and an attractive but mysterious woman who moved to their town. She, the niece, met the woman first swimming at the town pool. Joan Lunt was an incredible swimmer. She mentions this to Clyde who arranges to swim at the same time. A rely does develop to everyone’s surprise. The woman is holding back and when we find out what it dies affect the relationship fatally.
“ Will You Always Love Me “ A man is in a relationship with a woman when she tells a story from her past. Her older sister was attacked, taped and murdered , when she was 19 and she, herself , was 14. Now the man is up for parole after serving a portion of a life sentence. The man, a trained lawyer, wanting to be supportive, researches the case. He begins to suspect the guilt of the man convicted, the statements seem boilerplate. The woman he is with needs him in jail. She needs Him to be the guilty party.
“ Life After High School “ We follow a young couple in upstate New York in 1959. Not even a couple really, just a boy, a senior in high school, obsessed. Finally, rejected as easily as the girl can arrange, he ends his life. Thirty years later the woman and another boy from their class, both successful in the art and academic world meet. The man reveals that more was involved in the young mans death and the guilt she has felt was not all hers to hold
“Mark of Satan” Story didn’t quite work for me, scattered, disjointed, besides the normal darkness
Not a bad set of stories though you will question the goodness of everyone you meet. I’ve read a good amount of her work. I’m not sure this was the best representation of her work.
September 6, 2019
I read this collection of Oates' short fiction months ago but simply forgot to log it here on GR.
For those already acquainted with Oates' writing or those looking to get into her work, this is the best introduction I can think of. The stories contained herein give a wide range of examples of Oates' writing over the years and across different styles, from dark fantasy to realism tinged with desperation and malice to atmospheric pieces that ruminate on the darker side of the human heart. The latter is a major theme that runs through all of JCO's writing, and these stories are no different. If you like literary fiction with a darker shade to it, then Oates' is the writer for you. And if you're looking for a captivating books of short fiction with a dark, mature nature, this will be a go-to.
For those looking into an entryway in to Joyce Carol Oates' massive oeuvre, I would definitely start here. These stories were picked by Oates herself to give readers the best representational works from her her career spanning the 60's, 70's, 80's 90's and the aughts. The exceptions here are short, vignette-type pieces she writes and her forays into gothic/supernatural fiction. But for those looking into getting into her more realistic tales of the macabre and her distinctly menacing and grim nature of the world, start here.
Oates is a fantastic writer and just about everything by her is well-worth the read (and with a huge output of fiction, novels, essays, poetry, plays, criticism and plays, there's lots to read by her)and these stories are no exception. Perfect for the long-time Oates fan or the aspiring Oates reader alike.
My personal favorites in this collection include "Where Are You Going? Where Have You Been?" "In a Region of Ice," "Last Days," Small Avalanches," "Tryst," "Life After High School," "Will You Always Love Me?", "Swimmers," "Raven's Wing," "Heat," "Gathering Squall," "Our Wall," "At the Seminary," and "Cousins."
When reading her work, it's no wonder why she's regarded as one of the most important and influential voices of our time. And it's personally great to know she's showing no signs of slowing down or stopping. She's a true storyteller who obviously loves the craft, and we need more like her in the world.
For those already acquainted with Oates' writing or those looking to get into her work, this is the best introduction I can think of. The stories contained herein give a wide range of examples of Oates' writing over the years and across different styles, from dark fantasy to realism tinged with desperation and malice to atmospheric pieces that ruminate on the darker side of the human heart. The latter is a major theme that runs through all of JCO's writing, and these stories are no different. If you like literary fiction with a darker shade to it, then Oates' is the writer for you. And if you're looking for a captivating books of short fiction with a dark, mature nature, this will be a go-to.
For those looking into an entryway in to Joyce Carol Oates' massive oeuvre, I would definitely start here. These stories were picked by Oates herself to give readers the best representational works from her her career spanning the 60's, 70's, 80's 90's and the aughts. The exceptions here are short, vignette-type pieces she writes and her forays into gothic/supernatural fiction. But for those looking into getting into her more realistic tales of the macabre and her distinctly menacing and grim nature of the world, start here.
Oates is a fantastic writer and just about everything by her is well-worth the read (and with a huge output of fiction, novels, essays, poetry, plays, criticism and plays, there's lots to read by her)and these stories are no exception. Perfect for the long-time Oates fan or the aspiring Oates reader alike.
My personal favorites in this collection include "Where Are You Going? Where Have You Been?" "In a Region of Ice," "Last Days," Small Avalanches," "Tryst," "Life After High School," "Will You Always Love Me?", "Swimmers," "Raven's Wing," "Heat," "Gathering Squall," "Our Wall," "At the Seminary," and "Cousins."
When reading her work, it's no wonder why she's regarded as one of the most important and influential voices of our time. And it's personally great to know she's showing no signs of slowing down or stopping. She's a true storyteller who obviously loves the craft, and we need more like her in the world.
January 19, 2009
This collection of short stories (which fills 650 pages) took me a few weeks to finish reading, which means that it took the Oatster--in total--a few days to write. Nearly everyone has an opinion of Joyce Carol Oates and, after seeing her in person, would add to that opinion. Despite her prolific writing schedule, she even had time once to take a picture with Mike Tyson. Really think about that: Joyce Carol Oates and Mike Tyson (Google Images has the evidence). I belong to the camp of thought that believes Oates' best days are behind her (though The New Yorker would beg to differ; she has a carrier pigeon that takes her stories directly to the fiction editor's desk). Among the "eleven new stories" in this collection, only one is well-crafted, dynamic, and artful.
This book is divided into decades, with the '60s being the strongest. The rest of the stories dip their ladles into the familiar ingredients of an Oates story: predatory male, violence ridden male, "deep-socketed" women, a fairy tale understanding of the world outside routine. Sometimes these ingredients translate into stories with a truly ominous sense of indeterminacy; it is the reader's mind which sharpens the edges just outside the periphery of the story. Interestingly enough one of the worst stories (ever?) precedes one of the best stories: "*BD*11 1 87" (yes that's the name of the story) and "Fat Man My Love". When Oates wants to deconstruct her narrative and engage her prose with poetic flare the result is extremely compelling and reminds me of some of the best Jayne Anne Phillips stories.
The following are, I feel, the best stories in this collection:
"Fat Man My Love"
"Upon the Sweeping Flood"
"At the Seminary"
"In the Region of Ice"
"How I Contemplated the World from the Detroit House of Corrections, and Began My Life Over Again"
The stories about infidelity are duds, which means I have to revise my hypothetical situation: Oates did not sleep with Mike Tyson.
This book is divided into decades, with the '60s being the strongest. The rest of the stories dip their ladles into the familiar ingredients of an Oates story: predatory male, violence ridden male, "deep-socketed" women, a fairy tale understanding of the world outside routine. Sometimes these ingredients translate into stories with a truly ominous sense of indeterminacy; it is the reader's mind which sharpens the edges just outside the periphery of the story. Interestingly enough one of the worst stories (ever?) precedes one of the best stories: "*BD*11 1 87" (yes that's the name of the story) and "Fat Man My Love". When Oates wants to deconstruct her narrative and engage her prose with poetic flare the result is extremely compelling and reminds me of some of the best Jayne Anne Phillips stories.
The following are, I feel, the best stories in this collection:
"Fat Man My Love"
"Upon the Sweeping Flood"
"At the Seminary"
"In the Region of Ice"
"How I Contemplated the World from the Detroit House of Corrections, and Began My Life Over Again"
The stories about infidelity are duds, which means I have to revise my hypothetical situation: Oates did not sleep with Mike Tyson.
August 16, 2008
Unsurprisingly, the city of San Diego gives meager funding to its libraries, and thus the collections range from tolerable to horrible depending what branch one is at. I hate Joyce Carol Oates, but this was literally the only reasonable 'literary fiction' I could find while visiting a nearby branch.
Ugh, is she morbid. Every story it's like, you think oh, maybe this one's gonna be normal, but no, by the end, one character is always killing another character like, with a hammer (and usually with elaborate detail). Mercifully it didn't include her recent New Yorker story about the death of a fraternity pledge, which was truly excruciating for his humiliation as well as for the author's speculation about exactly what killed him in the end. The icing on the cake was the letter the following week from a reader chastising Oates for sensationalizing an actual news story -- barely deviating from the facts of what happened except to embellish the violence by hypothesizing about the amount of pain the boy went through when he died. Why is this woman so famous? Not sure.
Have I mentioned that the anthology is organized by decade? Apparently in the 90s JCO was really into rape. One where a housewife was raped made me have to sleep with the lights on (Is literary fiction supposed to be this scary? How come JCO isn't painted with the 'genre' brush as is say Steven King, who is also p.s. a much better writer than her?). Also the previous story had twin ten-year-old girls being raped. But oh, then afterward they were partially dismembered with an ice pick, so don't worry, JCO hasn't given up on gore. Seriously, she's disturbed.
Ugh, is she morbid. Every story it's like, you think oh, maybe this one's gonna be normal, but no, by the end, one character is always killing another character like, with a hammer (and usually with elaborate detail). Mercifully it didn't include her recent New Yorker story about the death of a fraternity pledge, which was truly excruciating for his humiliation as well as for the author's speculation about exactly what killed him in the end. The icing on the cake was the letter the following week from a reader chastising Oates for sensationalizing an actual news story -- barely deviating from the facts of what happened except to embellish the violence by hypothesizing about the amount of pain the boy went through when he died. Why is this woman so famous? Not sure.
Have I mentioned that the anthology is organized by decade? Apparently in the 90s JCO was really into rape. One where a housewife was raped made me have to sleep with the lights on (Is literary fiction supposed to be this scary? How come JCO isn't painted with the 'genre' brush as is say Steven King, who is also p.s. a much better writer than her?). Also the previous story had twin ten-year-old girls being raped. But oh, then afterward they were partially dismembered with an ice pick, so don't worry, JCO hasn't given up on gore. Seriously, she's disturbed.
December 5, 2023
For decades I have boycotted the writing of Joyce Carol Oates because back when I was struggling to get published and collecting rejection slips, her work was appearing in every literary magazine, or so it seemed. That was petty of me, I know, so I decided to read this collection of her short fiction. Quite unexpectedly, Ms. Oates has scared the hell out of me more times than I care to recall! Her tales are more frightening than Stephen King's, because the monsters are real, all-too-human, and live in your neighborhood, in your family, in your home, and perhaps even in your own soul. It pains me to admit it, but no wonder she is so widely published.
June 10, 2017
Extremely readable and often striking collection of short stories spanning 40 years, from 1966 to 2006. As with all collections of this length, and shorter, you may find some swings and misses here, but there are far more hits than misses. At worst, a few stories were okay, unimpressive, but not bad, exactly. Some are stunning. Some are memorable, sometimes for the writing, sometimes for the things that happen. (In one, an unhappy woman in her early 20s allows herself to have a messy, unstopped period while she and her family spoke with a priest at a seminary, where her brother would've been kicked out but for that spectacle.) Other stories are memorable for what they don't show, or say. (In one, a young man kills himself in his car. In the glove compartment is found an object that may insinuate he also would've killed someone else, but for some reason didn't. The story ends with a character asking the other what that object had been for--and the story ends right there.) Anyway, there are 11 new stories here (as of 2006), one of them the title story. This one is also perhaps the best of the bunch--a nice comment to be able to make, considering Carol Oates has been writing now for over 50 years, and apparently hasn't lost a thing. If anything, she may be getting better. So these are all good, and highly recommended, though I prefer her gothic stories, none of which are here.
A short bulleted commentary:
--"Spider Boy" is very good. Chilling and short, as usual about the unknown side of someone's personality.
--"The Cousins" is an award-winning story.
--"The Gathering Squall" has a nice metaphor, tying a painting in with the story's theme. I tried Googling the painting, couldn't find it. Possibly invented for the story.
--"The Lost Brother" is a good story about the hopelessness of having hope for a lost soul in your family. And perhaps why you shouldn't.
--"High Lonesome" motivated me to start my own story. The best part of the story--the old, desperate, lonely man getting pinched while only wanting conversation from a hooker who's not a hooker--isn't even the main part.
--"Upon the Sweeping Flood" is good and memorable, and has a recurring image of children suffering at the hands of insane adults.
--"At the Seminary" was referred to above. Not to be missed, if only for the scene I described.
--"Where Are You Going...?" is perhaps the most anthologized story here, one the author says she regrets having to include in this volume because it's so prevalent elsewhere. I have it in the tons of other sweeping anthologies downstairs. However, it continues to impress, even after a great many readings. Sly, slow, charming, disturbing, seductive (not in a sensual sense) evil has perhaps never been captured to well, not even by Hawthorne.
--The collection is broken down into the decades. Stories from "The 1970s" are all good, though representative (except for "Manslaughter") of John Updike. Maybe Cheever, too.
--"The Hair" was a very good, very John Cheever, expose of suburban couples and the illusion of social and marital perfection that one couple holds over the other, until the ending. Reminiscent of reality; been there, done that. Got away just in time.
--"Life After High School" was referred to above. Interesting. The woman in the story reminds me of someone I know.
--"Mark of Satan" was a story I was highly critical of on my blog, a long time ago, for reasons that now escape me. I'd read just the last few stories of the whole collection at the time, and responded in anger about this one. I think I mentioned I thought it was a rip-off, but it's not, and I can't even begin to tell you what the hell my problem was. Anyway, it's okay, not great and not bad.
A short bulleted commentary:
--"Spider Boy" is very good. Chilling and short, as usual about the unknown side of someone's personality.
--"The Cousins" is an award-winning story.
--"The Gathering Squall" has a nice metaphor, tying a painting in with the story's theme. I tried Googling the painting, couldn't find it. Possibly invented for the story.
--"The Lost Brother" is a good story about the hopelessness of having hope for a lost soul in your family. And perhaps why you shouldn't.
--"High Lonesome" motivated me to start my own story. The best part of the story--the old, desperate, lonely man getting pinched while only wanting conversation from a hooker who's not a hooker--isn't even the main part.
--"Upon the Sweeping Flood" is good and memorable, and has a recurring image of children suffering at the hands of insane adults.
--"At the Seminary" was referred to above. Not to be missed, if only for the scene I described.
--"Where Are You Going...?" is perhaps the most anthologized story here, one the author says she regrets having to include in this volume because it's so prevalent elsewhere. I have it in the tons of other sweeping anthologies downstairs. However, it continues to impress, even after a great many readings. Sly, slow, charming, disturbing, seductive (not in a sensual sense) evil has perhaps never been captured to well, not even by Hawthorne.
--The collection is broken down into the decades. Stories from "The 1970s" are all good, though representative (except for "Manslaughter") of John Updike. Maybe Cheever, too.
--"The Hair" was a very good, very John Cheever, expose of suburban couples and the illusion of social and marital perfection that one couple holds over the other, until the ending. Reminiscent of reality; been there, done that. Got away just in time.
--"Life After High School" was referred to above. Interesting. The woman in the story reminds me of someone I know.
--"Mark of Satan" was a story I was highly critical of on my blog, a long time ago, for reasons that now escape me. I'd read just the last few stories of the whole collection at the time, and responded in anger about this one. I think I mentioned I thought it was a rip-off, but it's not, and I can't even begin to tell you what the hell my problem was. Anyway, it's okay, not great and not bad.
April 17, 2020
The short story--was there ever a golden age? I don't know, but Joyce Carol Oates (JCO) is certainly a master (mistress?) of the genre! How a Princeton professor in the ultimate ivory tower has proven so adept at getting into the minds and lives of so many 'ordinary' people is simply, well amazing to me. A product of upstate NY many of her stories are set there and her sense of place and time is uncanny. She may be best in that period from the late 50s to the 80s. Her prime I suppose, and where and when she had her life-forming experiences. Some of her more successful novels are from that area and time--The Falls, We Were the Mulvaneys are two I have read. How she is able to portray a horny teenage girl in a rural upstate NY, a male factory worker, a lonely old dairy farmer (with a musical gift), or a disturbed and lost upper-crust woman with almost equal veracity or at least credibility is astounding. The effective short story is a tough job, the characters and setting have to grab you early or they never will, but she can do it a single sentence sometimes. How we sweat inconveniently, feel uncomfortable in our own bodies, seethe over the hands we are dealt by life, are unhappy with our families, our mates and ultimately our choices. The list goes on and on is endless, it is the story of humanity. I guess that is how JCO is able to produce such a large oeuvre. There isn't a lot 'uplifting' here, her view is essentially pessimistic or at least very realistic I think. I cannot condemn her for that but I stopped short of a 5-star perhaps because of that?
November 1, 2018
Joyce Carol Oates has a striking style of writing. Her stories are packed full of direct characterization. The stories all dealt with dark sides of humanity with common topics of rape, abuse, addiction, broken relationships, murder, and mental illness. In almost all of her stories their is a death, either literal or figurative. Often times characters lose their personalities or passion at the end of the stories. This is a reflection of Oates who, in a video, said that she does not feel she has a personality. It is common for Oates to write a story surrounding one specific event or object. The main character will fixate on this object and the story will build around this.
Overall, I recommend this book. The short stories average at about fifteen pages and each one is different. They leave you with a question or a puzzling thought. Perfect for someone who does not want to commit to a book but still wants to read.
Overall, I recommend this book. The short stories average at about fifteen pages and each one is different. They leave you with a question or a puzzling thought. Perfect for someone who does not want to commit to a book but still wants to read.
March 22, 2024
I've been trying to expand my choice of authors and decided to give Oates a try. The writing isn't bad, but this might be the third book of my life I've decided to tap out on.
I'm not against dark subjects in literature, however, there seemed no point to the 200 some odd pages of intrusive thoughts and sick characters created in this anthology that I grappled with. I was either bored or disgusted, I didn't walk away with food for thought or quotes that better describe life in some way that I had overlooked.
If you enjoy bad situations and bad shit happening to people with no resolution, or perhaps your days are flying by with too much satisfaction and you're too happy, this might be the book for you.
I'm not against dark subjects in literature, however, there seemed no point to the 200 some odd pages of intrusive thoughts and sick characters created in this anthology that I grappled with. I was either bored or disgusted, I didn't walk away with food for thought or quotes that better describe life in some way that I had overlooked.
If you enjoy bad situations and bad shit happening to people with no resolution, or perhaps your days are flying by with too much satisfaction and you're too happy, this might be the book for you.
September 26, 2021
I read about a quarter of the way through this book. Breathtaking stories, masterfully written. But it reminded me of why I had to stop reading Joyce Carol Oates after a huge binge in high school and college. The stories are just so damn dark, that by a quarter of the way through I could not digest a another single one. If you don’t mind dark and deeply disturbing, definitely pick up this book, it’s amazing. But I must put it down!
March 19, 2024
UGH I will admit I have high standards for short stories - no one better than O Henry in my opinion! - but these were such rubbish. Just absolutely nothing stories containing heaping loads of sadness and pain. No thank you! This helped me establish a secondary reading goal of not finishing more books instead of continuing to sink time into them in order to add them to my "finished" pile.
Want to read
November 9, 2024Apparently Oates ripped into J.K. Rowling this morning after Rowling smugly reacted a tweet Oates made in support of and concern for the trans community after the election. I just downloaded this collection onto my e-reader because we must stan.
March 13, 2018
I could only take a little bit of this at a time. Stunning.
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