A review by elizabethferguson
The (Other) You: Stories, by Joyce Carol Oates
2.0
Thank you to Goodreads, HarperCollins Publishers, and Joyce Carol Oates for the gifted copy of The (Other) You!
The (Other) You is a newly released collection of short stories that explores potential alternative realities. In the book, the characters face life-altering circumstances and are left to ponder how things could have ended differently. An author performs a book reading in her hometown of Yewville and wonders how her life would have been different if she had stayed. Matt/Matthew Smith encounter alternate versions of themselves while waiting to meet a friend for lunch. Readers repeatedly return to The Purple Onion café, where a deadly tragedy once occurred, but the characters, developments, and outcomes of the event are different in each story. The stories in The (Other) You focus inward, on the narrators’ and characters’ internal musings, and offer interesting commentary on the pressures we all face.
The art of the short story is fascinating to me, so I wouldn’t call any collection “bad,” but this was not my favorite. The characters didn’t have any lasting effect on me, and only a couple of stories stand out in my mind as ones that caught my attention or that I particularly enjoyed. Perhaps if I read this collection again and spent more time analyzing the stories, I would come away with a better sense of what Joyce Carol Oates wanted to reveal through these pieces. Of the stories in The (Other) You that I did enjoy, my favorites included “Subaqueous,” “Waiting for Kizer,” and “The Happy Place.” These stories kept me engaged and trying to pick apart the subtext. Though it wasn’t a personal favorite of mine, avid fans of short stories and Joyce Carol Oates are sure to enjoy her new collection published in February 2021.
The (Other) You is a newly released collection of short stories that explores potential alternative realities. In the book, the characters face life-altering circumstances and are left to ponder how things could have ended differently. An author performs a book reading in her hometown of Yewville and wonders how her life would have been different if she had stayed. Matt/Matthew Smith encounter alternate versions of themselves while waiting to meet a friend for lunch. Readers repeatedly return to The Purple Onion café, where a deadly tragedy once occurred, but the characters, developments, and outcomes of the event are different in each story. The stories in The (Other) You focus inward, on the narrators’ and characters’ internal musings, and offer interesting commentary on the pressures we all face.
The art of the short story is fascinating to me, so I wouldn’t call any collection “bad,” but this was not my favorite. The characters didn’t have any lasting effect on me, and only a couple of stories stand out in my mind as ones that caught my attention or that I particularly enjoyed. Perhaps if I read this collection again and spent more time analyzing the stories, I would come away with a better sense of what Joyce Carol Oates wanted to reveal through these pieces. Of the stories in The (Other) You that I did enjoy, my favorites included “Subaqueous,” “Waiting for Kizer,” and “The Happy Place.” These stories kept me engaged and trying to pick apart the subtext. Though it wasn’t a personal favorite of mine, avid fans of short stories and Joyce Carol Oates are sure to enjoy her new collection published in February 2021.