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 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.