Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Beautiful Days: Stories
    Beautiful Days: Stories
    Beautiful Days: Stories
    Audiobook13 hours

    Beautiful Days: Stories

    Written by Joyce Carol Oates

    Narrated by Tavia Gilbert, Stephen Graybill and Caitlin Kelly

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    A new collection of thirteen mesmerizing stories by American master Joyce Carol Oates, including the 2017 Pushcart Prize–winning “Undocumented Alien”.

    The diverse stories of Beautiful Days, Joyce Carol Oates explore the most secret, intimate, and unacknowledged interior lives of characters not unlike ourselves, who assert their independence in acts of bold and often irrevocable defiance.

    “Fleuve Bleu” exemplifies the rich sensuousness of Oates’s prose as lovers married to other persons vow to establish, in their intimacy, a ruthlessly honest, truth-telling authenticity missing elsewhere in their complicated lives, with unexpected results. 

    In “Big Burnt,” set on lushly rendered Lake George, in the Adirondacks, a cunningly manipulative university professor exploits a too-trusting woman in a way she could never have anticipated. “The Nice Girl” depicts a young woman who has been, through her life, infuriatingly “nice,” until she is forced to come to terms with the raw desperation of her deepest self. In a more experimental but no less intimate mode, “Les beaux jours” examines the ambiguities of an intensely erotic, exploitative relationship between a “master” artist and his adoring young female model. And the tragic “Undocumented Alien” depicts a young African student enrolled in an American university who is suddenly stripped of his student visa and forced to undergo a terrifying test of courage.

    In these stories, as elsewhere in her fiction, Joyce Carol Oates exhibits her fascination with the social, psychological, and moral boundaries that govern our behavior—until the hour when they do not.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperAudio
    Release dateFeb 6, 2018
    ISBN9780062842565
    Beautiful Days: Stories
    Author

    Joyce Carol Oates

    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.

    More audiobooks from Joyce Carol Oates

    Related to Beautiful Days

    Related audiobooks

    Short Stories For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      The Lighter Side of Dan Chaon

      Apr 11, 2022

      I had a dystopian idea in the beginning, and in the end the dystopia caught up with me. The post The Lighter Side of Dan Chaon appeared first on The Millions.

      4 min read

    • Article

      Re-Covered: The Mischief

      Dec 2, 2019

      Re-Covered: The Mischief
      8 min read

    • Article

      Push

      Aug 4, 2022

      Push
      5 min read

    • Article

      Freedom

      Aug 6, 2020

      Freedom
      7 min read

    • Article

      Two Poems by Noah Warren

      Dec 1, 2020

      Some waves came up overnight, though in Norderney, there was no weather.At the commercial wharf, a thin stream of white exhaust rose vertically from the ferry.The first service would depart soon. The puddles lay dark in the stone streetsand in the ga

      3 min read

    • Article

      The Last Friend on Earth

      May 4, 2023

      It was as if Doreen Saunders had been waiting for me, passing the time until my arrival. She might as well have been sitting in a rocking chair, knitting needles clicking, jam tarts cooling on the side, the door wide open, waiting for the next visito

      6 min read

    • Article

      That Particular Sunday

      Jul 6, 2023

      That Particular Sunday
      26 min read

    • Article

      Justice

      Mar 15, 2018

      I had been told that the interviewer was waiting for me outside in the hotel garden. The muffled oceanic roar of traffic rose steadily from the nearby road. She was sitting alone on a bench amid the raw planted beds and network of gravel paths, gazin

      22 min read

    • Article

      A Simple Heart (1997)

      Mar 1, 2022

      A Simple Heart (1997)
      3 min read

    • Article

      Poets

      Dec 1, 2020

      Poets
      19 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Beautiful Days

    3.5/5

    14 ratings1 review

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 4/5
      Between 3 & 4 stars - some stories were exceptional, a few I couldn't read at all.