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.
