Exquisite Trauma from the Personal to the Global

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	• I Am No One You Know : Stories Joyce Carol Oates, 2004 - 304 pages average customer review:based on 10 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

America's Master Short Writer

Again Joyce Carol Oates is gritty, frightening, writting with humanity and beauty (it is there, just open up your mind's eye and look). And with apparent ease she is a great stylist. This a great collection of stories, written by Chekov's spiritual daughter.

Stories that grab you and hang on

Ms Oates is one of the finest living writers, particularly in the short story form. As only the most skilled storytellers can, she can hook you with the first line and deeply involve you in the lives of her characters in the first paragraph.

I must object to a comment that the reviewer from Booklist made about the story "Me & Wolfie, 1979." The reviewer completely missed the point of a moving story about a bright, sensitive boy and his bi-polar mother. Despite the problems she created for him, she also introduced him to a world of magic and beauty. Moving and not soon forgotten.

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Exquisite Trauma from the Personal to the Global

Arguably, this is the best collection of short stories ever published by Joyce Carol Oates. Her focus in this book is trauma, from the most personal and emotional to the most global, i.e. The World Trade Center Disaster. Her elucidation of the psychological is center stage in all of her stories. Each story depicting a truly personal trauma, the book takes the reader through the pain and effects of the death of parents, the influence of serious mental illness, the difficult love and emotional interactions of a student who is seduced by a teacher and many other topics that reflect what we have seen going on in the American Society in the last decade.

Always, there is the ever present hardscrabble existence of those in the Upstate New York environment, the struggle to make a living, and the struggle just to live with the prevailing conditions of the region. The struggle to live and live with one's own thoughts and experiences is truly brought to the surface.

From a writing standpoint this book finds Joyce at the apex of her short story writing career. The stories are carefully crafted, with the use of multiple literary techniques. Her use of phrases to highlight and illustrate specific intensities of thought and feeling are wonderfully blended with a writing style that grips the reader like a pipe wrench. The reader is drawn into the lives of the characters time after time. Her stories do not always resolve, leaving the reader to extrapolate the future of the characters. The pictures she paints with her words are explicit and the most intense examples of human reality. This reality is mixed most explicitly with the internal feeling of most of the characters that they are unique and that they are "No One You Know."

The book is recommended for all serious readers of modern literature. It is a classic in all respects. Do not miss this opportunity to read some of the best short stories ever put in one book.

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Oh My! Oh My! Where is the Six Star Button ?

Joyce Carol Oates was born in 1938 in upstate New York State and is a distinguished Professor of Humanities at Princeton. She gained fame with her first novel With Shuddering Fall in 1964. Now four decades later, she is the author of scores of novels and other works. The present work is a selection of short stories that have mostly appeared in print before as individual pieces.

If you have read some of her novels and not been terribly impressed, then read this collection of nineteen short stories, and keep on reading until the end. Oates gives us a treat at the end with her story on Marilyn Monroe at a bookstore. You will understand why she is a professor at Princeton. I got interested in Oates after reading a short story by her and I still think that it is her best area, better than the long novels. She has a number of short story collections.

Oates is known for her emotional and dramatic stories, often with women caught in stressful situations, and often set in her native upstate New York. The present collection contains many of these elements plus a lot more. Most stories involve women, women and families. or women and other family members.

The stories are short and intense and some involve crimes, criminals, or people just released from prison. A few involve people with mental handicaps.

This is a dramatic and entertaining stuff that most Oates fans will love.

As a bit of a bonus, one story takes place in a book store and Oates gives us an interesting reading list which I will repeat here:

Freud, "Civilization and Discontents,"
Crane Brinton, "The Age of Reason,"
Margaret Meade, "Coming of Age in Samoa,"
D.H.Lawrence, "The Rainbow,"
Kierkegaard, "Fear and Trembling,"
and
Mann, "Death in Venice."

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reviews: page 1, 2

I Am No One You Know contains nineteen startling stories that bear witness to the remarkably varied lives of Americans of our time. In "Fire," a troubled young wife discovers a rare, radiant happiness in an adulterous relationship. In "Curly Red," a girl makes a decision to reveal a family secret, and changes her life irrevocably. In "The Girl with the Blackened Eye," selected for The Best American Mystery Stories 2001, a girl pushed to an even greater extreme of courage and desperation manages to survive her abduction by a serial killer. And in "Three Girls," two adventuresome NYU undergraduates seal their secret love by following, and protecting, Marilyn Monroe in disguise at Strand Used Books on a snowy evening in 1956.

These vividly rendered portraits of women, men, and children testify to Oates's compassion for the mysterious and luminous resources of the human spirit.

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