High Lonesome: Stories 1966-2006 - Hardcover

Oates, Joyce Carol

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0060501197 ISBN 13: 9780060501198

Publisher: Ecco, 2006

Synopsis

An unprecedented collection of the best of Joyce Carol Oates's short stories combined with eleven new stories

No other writer can match the impressive oeuvre of Joyce Carol Oates, and High Lonesome: Selected Stories, 1966-2006 gathers stories from Oates's seminal collections, including The Wheel of Love (1970), Marriages and Infidelities (1972), and Heat (1991), arranged by decade. All demonstrate what the Chicago Tribune has praised: "the fierce originality of Oates's voice and vision, but also how she has imbued the American short story with an edgy vitality and raw social surfaces."

About this title

About the Author

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.

From the Back Cover

An unprecedented collection of the best of Joyce Carol Oates's short stories combined with eleven new stories

No other writer can match the impressive oeuvre of Joyce Carol Oates, and High Lonesome: Selected Stories, 1966-2006 gathers stories from Oates's seminal collections, including The Wheel of Love (1970), Marriages and Infidelities (1972), and Heat (1991), arranged by decade. All demonstrate what the Chicago Tribune has praised: "the fierce originality of Oates's voice and vision, but also how she has imbued the American short story with an edgy vitality and raw social surfaces."

Reviews

Starred Review. This hefty collection, featuring 10 new pieces along with stories culled from four decades, further establishes the prolific and wide-ranging Oates as a gifted chronicler of American culture. The theme of girls and women preyed upon by violent men appears repeatedly, as in the much-anthologized "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" (1970) but also in lesser-known pieces like "Small Avalanches" (1974), which turns the tables, as a 13-year-old girl, nimble and laughing, evades a middle-aged, panting lech on a deserted path. Several stories feature characters whose mental instabilities lead to violence, as in "Last Days" (1984), in which a brilliant, manic college student with a Messiah complex assassinates a rabbi, then turns the gun on himself. Though Oates's world is often ugly, she also displays a more fanciful (if still creepy) impulse; the recent piece "Fat Man My Love" finds actress "Pippi" (indubitably Tippi Hedren) puzzling over the director (an unnamed Hitchcock) who both created and ruined her career. While the lurid events of some stories have a ripped-from-the-headlines feel, Oates is never merely sensational, tracking hidden motives and emotions with a sharp eye for psychological detail—everything conveyed in lucid, rhythmic prose. However much is made of her prodigious output, it's the consistent quality of the work that lifts Oates into the literary pantheon. (Apr.)
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*Starred Review* The Oates universe is tense and overcast when it isn't under assault by grimly devastating storms. An expert in the causes and effects of obsession, desolation, and annihilation, Oates has crafted hundreds of mesmerizing short stories of acute social and psychological insights, sinister sexuality, and stark violence. Nine new, hard-hitting stories of fractured families, death, and longing kick off this supreme retrospective collection. "High Lonesome" tracks the absurd and tragic circumstances that instigate a suicide and a revenge killing. In "Spider Boy," a son helplessly reveals the shocking truth about his father. In 'The Cousins," a woman writes to the thorny author of a controversial Holocaust memoir, certain that they're related. Oates even offers a chilling biotech cautionary tale. Two-dozen standout stories from the past four decades follow these new works, beginning with a harrowing tale of a hurricane, "Upon the Sweeping Flood," and moving on to quintessential Oatesean tales of cataclysms seeded in the human heart. Oates' daring oeuvre, immense in size, depth, and spirit, will stand as a pillar in American literature, and this collection of stories that Oates feels are her best is as significant as it is breathtaking. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Ecco
• Publication date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0060501197
• ISBN 13: 9780060501198
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 672