The (Other) You: Stories
Written by Joyce Carol Oates
Narrated by Kate Reading and Malcolm Hillgartner
3.5/5
()
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 novelist, critic, playwright, poet and author of short stories and one of America’s most respected literary figures. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including We Were the Mulvaneys and Blonde. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Princeton University and a recipient of the National Book Award and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction.
More audiobooks from Joyce Carol Oates
Night. Sleep. Death. The Stars.: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Falls Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Widow's Story: A Memoir Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Accursed Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Lovely, Dark, Deep: Stories Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Related to The (Other) You
Related audiobooks
Mudwoman Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Hole Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Doll-Master: And Other Tales of Terror Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Past: A Novel Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Book of X Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Double Blind: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The English Teacher Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Things We Lost in the Fire: Stories Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Beautiful Days: Stories Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Second Place: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Interpreter of Maladies Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5All My Puny Sorrows Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Drinking Coffee Elsewhere Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Lover's Discourse Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Night, Neon: Tales of Mystery and Suspense Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Decameron Project: 29 New Stories from the Pandemic Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Turbulence: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Breathe: A Novel Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Book of Extraordinary Tragedies Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Labyrinth Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Delicate Edible Birds and Other Stories Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Burning Girl Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Fourth Child: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Man Without a Shadow: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Accomplished Guest: Stories Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Kant's Little Prussian Head & Other Reasons Why I Write Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Lean Your Loneliness Slowly Against Mine: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Sourland: Stories of Loss, Grief, and Forgetting Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5little scratch Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Short Stories For You
Finn Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream and Other Works Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Midwinter Murder: Fireside Tales from the Queen of Mystery Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Bazaar of Bad Dreams: Stories Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Orgy: A Short Story About Desire Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5An Elderly Lady Is Up to No Good Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Nightmares & Dreamscapes, Volume II Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Full Dark, No Stars Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5UR Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Best of Edgar Allan Poe Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Stories of Your Life and Others Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Everything's Eventual: 14 Dark Tales Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Skeleton Crew: Selections Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Yellow Wallpaper: Classic Tales Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Drunken Fireworks Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Good Man Is Hard To Find And Other Stories Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Illustrated Man Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Full Throttle: Stories Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5LT's Theory of Pets Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Only Living Girl on Earth Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Minority Report and Other Stories Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Love in Color: Mythical Tales from Around the World, Retold Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Two Scorched Men Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Nineteen Claws and a Black Bird: Stories Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Her Body and Other Parties: Stories Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Night of the Living Rez Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
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.