The (Other) You

by Joyce Carol Oates

Overview

A powerful reckoning over the people we might have been if we’d chosen a different path, from a master of the short story

In this stirring, reflective collection of short stories, Joyce Carol Oates ponders alternate destinies: the other lives we might have led if we’d made different choices. An accomplished writer returns to her childhood home of Yewville, but the homecoming stirs troubled thoughts about the person she might have been if she’d never left. A man in prison contemplates the gravity of his irreversible act. A student’s affair with a professor results in a pregnancy that alters the course of her life forever. Even the experience of reading is investigated as one that can create a profound transformation: “You could enter another time, the time of the book.”

The (Other) You is an arresting and incisive vision into these alternative realities, a collection that ponders the constraints we all face given the circumstances of our birth and our temperaments, and that examines the competing pressures and expectations on women in particular. Finely attuned to the nuances of our social and psychic selves, Joyce Carol Oates demonstrates here why she remains one of our most celebrated and relevant literary figures. 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780063035201
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	02/09/2021
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	5.80(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

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

Hometown:

Princeton, New Jersey

Date of Birth:

June 16, 1938

Place of Birth:

Lockport, New York

Education:

B.A., Syracuse University, 1960; M.A., University of Wisconsin, 1961

Table of Contents

1.

The (Other) You 3

The Women Friends 15

The Bloody Head 27

Where Are You? 41

The Crack 43

Waiting for Kizer 55

Blue Guide 89

Assassin 133

2.

Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God 145

Hospice/Honeymoon 177

Subaqueous 183

The Happy Place 189

Nightgrief 209

Final Interview 231

The Unexpected 259

Acknowledgments 289

Editorial Reviews

★ 10/19/2020

Oates (Night. Sleep. Death. The Stars) delivers a dark, moody collection permeated by themes of obsession, remorse, and violence. In the title story, a secondhand bookstore owner ruminates over the college entrance exam that sealed her fate to remain in humdrum Yewville, N.Y. A sinister twist surprises in “The Women Friends,” in which two women find themselves in the same café as a jittery suicide bomber. The café reappears throughout the book, culminating in the gripping “Final Interview,” where a notoriously reclusive author imagines a final act of vengeance against the world. Dashed hopes and glances at the past interrupt another author’s life in “The Unexpected,” in which the protagonist returns to Yewville to deliver a commencement speech, only to be humbled by friends from her childhood. The recently widowed creative writing teacher at the center of the brilliant “The Happy Place” discovers not even a reckless obsession with a student could fill the gaping hollowness of her empty house, while mourning and blame overwhelm the parents of a deceased child in “Nightgrief.” Oates’s mastery of the form remains fierce and formidable in this unsettling collection of lamentations and missed opportunities. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

09/01/2020

From Chen, a Wall Street Journal correspondent formerly based in Beijing, Land of Big Numbers depicts the Chinese both in and out of China, longing for broader horizons in stories sometimes touched by the surreal. In Kink, John Leonard/Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist Kwon (The Incendiaries) and British Book Award-winning Greenwell (What Belongs to You) collate stories of outré sex by authors like Alexander Chee, Roxane Gay, and Carmen Maria Machado (50,000-copy first printing). Already a multiaward winner, Moniz debuts with Milk Blood Heat, which examines race, womanhood, human connection, and our inherent darkness in stories that have Florida settings. The protean, mega-award-winning Oates limns characters boldly considering how their lives might have turned out differently in The (Other) You. In Prayer for the Living, Nigerian-born, British-based Booker Prize winner Okri ranges worldwide in stories that test the boundaries of reality.

Library Journal

★ 2020-11-18
Crackling with pent-up emotion and deadly devices, a suite of neatly intertwining stories by a masterful storyteller.

“Whichever side the Professor espoused in an issue, the wife felt obliged to take the opposite side. Sometimes in the midst of their squabbles the wife lost interest abruptly and allowed the subject to fade.” If Oates has a trademark theme, it is in people talking past and against each other instead of getting a clue. In the first story in this collection, a woman, addressed in the second person, who has given up most of her dreams to live in a small town near Buffalo, “gnawing at your embittered heart,” thinks only fleetingly about what might have been. Though she seems to have accepted her lot, we have reason to think that, now late in life, she might have regrets. So does the woman who goes to a place the reader will see several times, the Purple Onion Café, where something terrible will happen. It would be a spoiler to say what, but Oates expertly folds the episode up in a Twilight Zone–ish wrinkle in time, one that we will return to at several points. One character dies in a way of which Edward Gorey would surely approve; most, in these stories laden with somber meditations on death (“For when ‘hospice’ is uttered, it is at last acknowledged—There is no hope”), succumb to the ordinary: cancer, accidents, and now terrorism. “Their friends and neighbors are collapsing all around them!” ponders one academic, aging but not yet old, who has been playing a parlor game of sorts in guessing whom the Reaper will harvest first. In the end, not many people in Yewville or the leafy suburbs of New York make it out of Oates’ pages without at least a few scars, and the Purple Onion suffers plenty of dings as well, which makes it a book that seems just right for the times.

Few short story writers do as much in so few words as the economical, enigmatic Oates.

Kirkus Reviews

"Trenchant and moody."  — New York Times Book Review

"...A series of well-written stories about the what-if wonders of a life that’s been, well, lived...Oates is a master of tension and form, her writing dashing across the page to an often devastating conclusion. Her singular style works well here, fueling the stories even as you oftentimes dread them."  — USA Today

"Oates delivers a dark, moody collection permeated by themes of obsession, remorse, and violence. . . . Oates's mastery of the form remains fierce and formidable in this unsettling collection of lamentations and missed opportunities."
— Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Crackling with pent-up emotion and deadly devices, a suite of neatly intertwining stories by a masterful storyteller. . . . Few short story writers do as much in so few words as the economical, enigmatic Oates.” — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

From the Publisher