The (Other) You: Stories

A powerful reckoning over the people we might have been if we’d chosen a different path | from a master of the short storyIn 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.