Where Is Here? by Joyce Carol Oates
In dramatic, tightly focused narratives charges with tension, menace, and the shock of the unexpected, Where Is Here? examines a world in which ordinary life is electrified by the potential for sudden change. Domestic violence, fear and abandonment and betrayal, and the obsession with loss shadow the characters that inhabit these startling, intriguing stories. With the precision and intensity that are the hallmarks of her remarkable talent, Joyce Carol Oates explores the unexpected turns of events that leave people vulnerable and struggling to puzzle out the consequences of their abrupt reversals of fortune. As in the title story, in which a married couple find their controlled life irrevocably altered by a stranger's visit, the fiction in this new collection is punctuated again and again by mysterious, perhaps unanswerable, questions: Out of what does our life arise? Out of what does our consciousness arise? Why are we here? Where is here? Like the questions they pose, these tales -- at once elusive and direct -- unfold with the enigmatic twists of riddles and, often, the blunt shock of tragedy. Where is Here? is the work of a master practitioner of the short story. Editorial Reviews From Publishers Weekly The 35 stories in this exciting collection dramatize electrifying encounters and characters seized by heightened emotions, revealing them with inventiveness and boundless stylistic variety. Many of the stories are little more than brief vignettes, yet each illuminates its protagonist's state of mind like a flash of lightning. Demented voices in monologue animate the succinct Lethal, where a sexual terrorist begins, I just want to touch you a little; and Area Man Found Crucified, in which a wounded war veteran, now a vagrant, pleads for death. Beauty Salon maps the painful, delicate meeting of a convalescing man and the beautiful woman who barbers him. Women are fatal victims of male violence in Turquoise and Murder. In Bare Legs, a willful prostitute hunts for her children and sleeps with truckers; in The Date, a woman changes clothes in a public lavatory, panting like a dog as she prepares to couple with yet another man. The tireless Oates ( Black Water ) seems determined to test her technical skills: several tales read like polished exercises. Running is chiefly a single sentence (over six pages) that mimes the headlong tempo of a runner as she pumps and ponders. Forgive Me and Letter, Lover stretch the epistolary mode: in the one, a woman inscribes the same letter to two former lovers, unable to keep them apart in her mind, in the other, obscenely sinister missives open the door to a new relationship. Oates is evidently willing to go anywhere her imagination leads her, and this collection adds several striking pieces to her already wide body of work about threatening situations. Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Kirkus Reviews Fragments of whispered lust and longing fade in and out like voices on a shortwave radio in Oates' newest collection of stories, most published previously (Michigan Quarterly, Omni, The Massachusetts Review, etc.) and some less than a page long. The result is a book whose cumulative effect proves more riveting than its parts as Oates, in typical fashion, cuts to the essential emotion and lets the details fall to the side. In Angry,'' a young man conceives a passion for a woman he observes speaking to a lover in anger; in From the Life Of...,'' a world-weary writer mechanically seduces a harpist in an anonymous hotel; in Shot,'' a young girl fails to rescue an abused pet dog chained up on the wrong side of town; and in Love, Forever,'' a woman murders her children after she's rejected by the man she loves. What proves most striking about each of these tales is the enormous amount of drama, sensation, and psychological insight Oates manages to convey in very few pages. While the briefest among the 34 remain too fragmentary to be engaging, it takes only two or three pages for Oates's prose to reach a captivating energy: as in the leisurely, wistful meditations of those close to death (the writer in From the Life Of...''; a hairdresser's elderly client in Beauty Salon''), and in the accounts of haunting, frightening encounters with strangers (Running''; Where Is Here?''). Throughout, Oates confidently experiments with content and style, breaking rules whenever she feels like it. Overall: an enthralling, varied, and fascinating collection. -- Copyright 1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. 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.
Publication Details
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Binding: Hardcover
Published by: Ecco: , 1992
Edition:
ISBN: 9780880012836 | 0880012838
203 pages.
Book Condition: Good
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