Often times they appear neurotic, but is that them or the choices life has made them make? There's a focus on the schism of womanhood between modern and traditional roles and how it tears. Oates holds up a mirror of middle-age, suburban white women. That is, the woman had as many children as God directed the husband to afflict upon her." "Once upon a time, a man and a woman had as many children as God sent them. The quality is higher than my rating implies, and I want to read more Oates-after a spell. The themes are heavy, disappointment-filled, and agitative. It is worth experiencing Oates craftsmanship, but that said, this is not easy reading. The title is a trap, which is very representative of the story themes. 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. 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 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. 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. “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. 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. A new collection of thirteen mesmerizing stories by American master Joyce Carol Oates, including the 2017 Pushcart Prize–winning “Undocumented Alien”
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