The (Other) You: Stories
Written by Joyce Carol Oates
Narrated by Kate Reading and Malcolm Hillgartner
3.5/5
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About this audiobook
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.
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.
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Reviews for The (Other) You
19 ratings2 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5excellent collection by Oates -many of these left me feeling discombobulated and questioning my own existence and led to some extra bizarre dreams/nightmares
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5In this collection of short stories, Joyce Carol Oates looks at aging, grief and the idea of the other lives we might have lived had we chosen differently or had different things happen to us. The book begins with the author imagining her life had she never left her hometown, remaining to get married, run a bookstore and maintain and deepen her ties to that community. It's a different life, but not necessarily a worse one. That story sets the tone of the book, where widows grieve in complicated ways, men chase possibilities lost in the past and aging is confronted in a dozen different ways. The same place shows up in a few of the stories; the patio dining area of a California restaurant at lunchtime, and Oates uses this setting to play with ideas about time and self. In one, a woman sits at a table thinking about a tragic event that occurred there, until she realizes that the event may not yet have happened. In another, a man is annoyed that the person joining him for lunch is late, then notices a man sitting at a nearby table who resembles him and as they talk they discover they share a name and are waiting for the same man. This is only a collection that an author familiar with grief and contemplating the end of her life could write, and these stories are as sharp, imaginative and well-crafted as any she's written.