Beautiful Days: Stories

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Collection of short fiction stories by Joyce Carol Oates published in 2018

CoverartistEdward Hopper, Eleven A. M. (1926)

LanguageEnglish

Beautiful Days: Stories
First edition
Author	Joyce Carol Oates
Cover artist	Edward Hopper, Eleven A. M. (1926)
Language	English
Genre	Gothic
Publisher	Ecco/HarperCollins
Publication date	2018
Publication place	United States
Media type	Print (hardback)
Pages	352
ISBN	978-0062795786

Beautiful Days: Stories is a collection of short fiction by Joyce Carol Oates published in 2018 by Ecco Press.

The volume includes the story "Undocumented Alien", which won the Pushcart Prize XLII: Best of the Small Presses 2018.^[1]

Selected periodical and date of original publication provided:^[2]

"Fleuve Bleu" (Kenyon Review, Vol. 37, No. 5, September/October 2015)
"Big Burnt" (Conjunctions, Vol. 64, Spring 2015)
"Owl Eyes" (Yale Review, July 1, 2016)
"Except You Bless Me" (Salmagundi)
"The Quiet Car" (Harper's Magazine, October 2016)
"The Bereaved" (Yale Review, Vol. 103, Number 3, July 2015)

"Les Beaux Jours" (Alive in Shape and Color: 17 Stories Inspired by 17 Different Artists, December 25, 2017. Pegasus Books)
"Fractal" (Conjunctions, Vol. 68, Spring 2017)
"Undocumented Alien" (Conjunctions, Vol.67, Fall 2016)
"Donald Barthelme Saved From Oblivion" (American Short Fiction, 2024)
"The Memorial Field at Hazard, Minnesota" (Yale Review, Vol. 102, Number 4, October 2014)

Reception

The title of the volume is the English translation for its short story "Les Beaux Jours." New York Times reviewer Benjamin Markovits points out that this Gothic tale was suggested by the "erotic" painting, The Golden Days (1945–1946) by Balthus.^[3]

The artwork depicts a girl reclining in a chair, admiring her face in a hand mirror; she is in partial undress. A shirtless young man stokes a fireplace in the background.^[4] According to Robert Schaefer at The New York Review of Books, Oates has created "a gothic tale with a portal to horror" through the medium of the Balthus painting.^[5] Schaefer provides a clue as to the fate of the female protagonist with this quote: "Will they not hear me when I cry for help?"^[6]

Regarding Beautiful Days as a "mixed, occasionally satisfying, volume," Kirkus Reviews describes two tales—"Les Beaux Jours" and "Fractal"—as "surprisingly inventive." The story "Undocumented Alien" is deemed "overly long [and] far less successful."^[7]

Citing the short story volume Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? (1993) as a high-water mark in Oates's career, literary critic Sara Cutaia at the Chicago Review of Books sharply distinguishes this early work with Beautiful Days.^[8] Cutaia laments that Oates conveys her character's emotional states at the expense of providing clarity as to their morality and motivations.^[9] Cutaia reports these literary offenses:

The unwieldy sentences, lack of commas, and overuse of parentheses are distracting. The insertion of obvious facts and asides can be infuriating, as if readers can't infer the obvious on their own. The writing is heavy with details and belabored paragraphs, and the man-woman dynamic is stuffy and outdated.^[10]

Footnotes

↑ Beautiful Days: Stories. Celestial Timepiece. ISBN 0062795783.
↑ Oates, 2018: See Acknowledgments, after Contents
↑ Markovits, 2018
↑ Markovits, 2018
↑ Schaefer, 2018
↑ Schaefer, 2018
↑ "Beautiful Days: Stories". Kirkus Reviews. Retrieved March 14, 2025.
↑ Cutaia, 2018: "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? is in my personal canon of classic short stories worth teaching and re-reading."
↑ Cutaia, 2014: "I was never aware of the morality of the characters, where they might draw a line, or how they saw the world."
↑ Cutaia, 2014

Sources

Cutaia, Sara. 2018. "Is Joyce Carol Oates Trolling Us?" Chicago Review of Books, February 16, 2018. https://chireviewofbooks.com/2018/02/16/joyce-carol-oates-beautiful-days-review/ Accessed 5 March 2025.
Markovits, Benjamin. 2018. Sex, Lies and Subterfuge Roil Joyce Carol Oates's New Story Collection. New York Times, March 5, 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/05/books/review/joyce-carol-oates-beautiful-days.html 03 March, 2025.
Oates, Joyce Carol. 2018. Beautiful Days: Stories. Ecco Press, New York. ISBN 978-0062795786
Schaefer, Robert. 2018. Beautiful Days: Stories. New York Review of Books, February 6, 2018. https://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book-review/beautiful-days Accessed 4 March 2025.

v t e Works by Joyce Carol Oates
Short fiction
The Wonderland Quartet	A Garden of Earthly Delights (1967) Expensive People (1968) Them (1969) Wonderland (1971)
The Gothic Saga	Bellefleur (1980) A Bloodsmoor Romance (1982) Mysteries of Winterthurn (1984) My Heart Laid Bare (1998) The Accursed (2013)
Other novels	With Shuddering Fall (1964) Do With Me What You Will (1973) The Assassins: A Book of Hours (1975) Childwold (1976) Son of the Morning (1978) Cybele (1979) Unholy Loves (1979) Angel of Light (1981) Solstice (1984) Marya: A Life (1986) You Must Remember This (1987) American Appetites (1989) Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart (1990) Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang (1993) What I Lived For (1994) Zombie (1995) We Were the Mulvaneys (1996) Man Crazy (1997) Broke Heart Blues (1999) Blonde (2000) Middle Age: A Romance (2001) I'll Take You There (2002) The Tattooed Girl (2003) The Falls (2004) Missing Mom (2005) Black Girl / White Girl (2006) The Gravedigger's Daughter (2007) My Sister, My Love (2008) Little Bird of Heaven (2009) Mudwoman (2012) The Sacrifice (2015) Night. Sleep. Death. The Stars. (2020) Breathe (2021) Babysitter (2022) 48 Clues into the Disappearance of My Sister (2023) Butcher: A Novel (2024) Fox (2025)
Novellas	Black Water (1992) First Love: A Gothic Tale (1996) Beasts (2001) The Corn Maiden: A Love Story (2005) A Fair Maiden (2010) Cardiff, by the Sea (2020)
Short story collections	By the North Gate (1963) Upon the Sweeping Flood and Other Stories (1966) The Wheel of Love and Other Stories (1970) Marriages and Infidelities (1972) The Goddess and Other Women (1974) The Hungry Ghosts: Seven Allusive Comedies (1974) The Poisoned Kiss and Other Stories from the Portuguese (1975) The Seduction and Other Stories (1975) Crossing the Border (1976) Night-Side: Eighteen Tales (1977) All the Good People I've Left Behind (1979) A Sentimental Education (1980) Last Days: Stories (1984) Raven's Wing (1986) The Assignation (1988) Heat and Other Stories (1991) Where Is Here? (1992) Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?: Selected Early Stories (1993) Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque (1994) Demon and Other Tales (1996) I Am No One You Know: Stories (2004) High Lonesome: New & Selected Stories, 1966–2006 (2006) The Museum of Dr. Moses: Tales of Mystery and Suspense (2007) Wild Nights! (2008) Dear Husband (2009) The Corn Maiden and Other Nightmares (2011) Black Dahlia & White Rose (2012) Lovely, Dark, Deep: Stories (2014) The Doll-Master and Other Tales of Terror (2016) DIS MEM BER and Other Stories of Mystery and Suspense (2017) Beautiful Days: Stories (2018) Night-Gaunts (2018) The (Other) You (2021) Night, Neon (2021) Extenuating Circumstances: Stories of Crime and Suspense (2022) Zero-Sum: Stories (2023) Flint Kill Creek: Stories of Mystery and Suspense (2024)
Short stories	"Sweet Love Remembered" (1960) "A Legacy" (1961) "The Fine White Mist of Winter" (1962) "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" (1963) "Pastoral Blood" (1963) "Stigmata" (1963) "Upon the Sweeping Flood" (1963) "First Views of the Enemy" (1964) "The Survival of Childhood" (1964) "Archways" (1965) "Norman and the Killer" (1965) "In the Region of Ice" (1966) "In the Warehouse" (1967) "The Voyage to Rosewood" (1967) "Accomplished Desires" (1968) "How I Contemplated the World from the Detroit House of Correction and Began My Life Over Again" (1969) "Unmailed, Unwritten Letters" (1969) "Bodies" (1970) "I Was in Love" (1970) "Where I Lived, and What I Lived For" (1970) "The Dead" (1971) "The Metamorphosis" (1971) "Blindfold" (1972) "The Lady With the Pet Dog" (1972) "Nightmusic" (1972) "Small Avalanches" (1972) "The Girl" (1974) "The Goddess" (1974) "Magna Mater" (1974) "The Sacrifice" (1975) "Daisy" (1977) "Night-Side" (1977) "A Theory of Knowledge" (1977) "The Translation" (1977) "Funland" (1983)
Young adult fiction	Big Mouth & Ugly Girl (2002) Small Avalanches and Other Stories (2003) Freaky Green Eyes (2003) Sexy (2005) After the Wreck, I Picked Myself Up, Spread My Wings, and Flew Away (2006)

Related Articles