Beautiful Days: Stories


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.

Stories

Selected periodical and date of original publication provided:
I
  • "Fleuve Bleu"
  • "Big Burnt"
  • "Owl Eyes"
  • "Except You Bless Me"
  • "The Quiet Car"
  • "The Bereaved"
II
  • "Les Beaux Jours"
  • "Fractal"
  • "Undocumented Alien"
  • "Donald Barthelme Saved From Oblivion"
  • "The Memorial Field at Hazard, Minnesota"

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 by Balthus.
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. 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. 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?"
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 far less successful."
Citing the short story volume Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? 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. Cutaia laments that Oates conveys her character's emotional states at the expense of providing clarity as to their morality and motivations.
Cutaia reports these literary offenses: