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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.
What are you reading this week? (7/31/2025)
I am reading Fox by Joyce Carol Oates. It is about a pedophile but don't let that scare you away. It is so well written. Oates gets into the depth of the character as well as how such a personality can manipulate the adults that knew him. This is a real page turner.
-Judi_Ross
What are you reading this week? (7/2/2025)
Just finishing Return to Sender by Craig Johnson and am ready to start Fox by Joyce Carol Oates. Both are favorite authors and never disappoint. My public library tells me I have three holds ready: My Friends by Fredick Bachman, Kill Your Darlings by Peter Swanson and South of Nowhere by Jeffrey ...
-Linda_O_donnell
What are you reading this week? (6/19/025)
Just finished Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt and am almost finished with Beartooth by Callan Wink. Up next, Fox by Joyce Carol Oates.
-Linda_O_donnell
What book or books are you reading this week? (01/09/2025)
Finished a re-read of The Executioner's Song by Norman Mailer. The Truth about the Harry Quebert Affair which was very different from what I expected, but quite interesting. The English Girl by Daniel Silva, Ordinary Grace by William Kent Krueger, and The Comfort of Crows by Margaret Renkl. Liste...
-Linda_O_donnell
"[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)
This information about The (Other) You was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Photo by Dustin Cohen
Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of a National Humanities Medal awarded by President Barack Obama, the National Book Critics Circle's Ivan Sandrof Life Achievement Award, the National Book Award in Fiction, the Jerusalem Prize, the Prix Femina, the Cino Del Duca World Prize, and is a five-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the bestsellers Blonde and We Were the Mulvaneys. She is the Roger S. Berlind '52 Distinguished Professor of the Humanities Emerita at Princeton University and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2024 she won the Raymond Chandler Lifetime Achievement Award given to "a master of the thriller and noir literary genre."
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