A new collection of eleven mesmerizing stories by American master Joyce Carol Oates, including the 2017 Pushcart Prize–winning “Undocumented Alien”

In the diverse stories of Beautiful Days, Joyce Carol Oates explores the most secret, intimate, and unacknowledged interior lives of characters not unlike ourselves, who assert their independence in acts of bold and often irrevocable defiance.

“Fleuve Bleu” exemplifies the rich sensuousness of Oates’s prose as lovers married to other persons vow to establish, in their intimacy, a ruthlessly honest, truth-telling authenticity missing elsewhere in their complicated lives, with unexpected results. In “Big Burnt,” set on lushly rendered Lake George in the Adirondacks, a cunningly manipulative university professor exploits a too-trusting woman in a way she could never have anticipated. In a more experimental but no less intimate mode, “Les beaux jours” examines the ambiguities of an intensely erotic, exploitative relationship between a “master” artist and his adoring young female model. And the tragic “Undocumented Alien” depicts a young African student enrolled in an American university who is suddenly stripped of his student visa and forced to undergo a terrifying test of courage.

In these stories, as elsewhere in her fiction, Joyce Carol Oates exhibits her fascination with the social, psychological, and moral boundaries that govern our behavior—until the hour when they do not.

The "woman in the window" in Edward Hopper's classic painting is beautiful, young, nude, and (seemingly) lost in melancholy contemplation by a window- perhaps abandoned by her lover; in Joyce Carol Oates's enthralling re-imagining, the woman is all of these but also alert to her situation, not at all passive but prepared to exact an unexpected revenge against one who has wronged her.

In the stories of Beautiful Days, we are allowed access into the most secret, intimate, and unacknowledged interior lives of persons very like ourselves, who do not take refuge in passivity but assert themselves in acts of bold and sometimes irrevocable defiance.

In "Big Burnt"-set on a lushly rendered Lake George, in the Adirondacks-a manipulative university professor exploits a too-trusting woman in a way she could never have anticipated; in "Owl Eyes" a prodigiously bright young adolescent confronts a mysterious stalker-with startling results. In "Friend of My Youth" a woman confronts a friend from college who has since become a world-famous feminist, for whom she feels violent emotions, and in "The Nice Girl" a young woman who has been, through her life, infuriatingly "nice" is forced to come to terms with her deepest motives.