Beautiful Days

<p><strong>A new collection of thirteen mesmerizing stories by American master Joyce Carol Oates including the 2017 Pushcart Prize-winning Undocumented Alien</strong></p><p>The diverse stories of <em>Beautiful Days </em> Joyce Carol Oates explore 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. </p><p>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. </p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p>