Last Days

by Joyce Carol Oates

Eleven stories deal with life behind the Iron Curtain, a little girl who has witnessed a murder, a woman deserted by her husband, a mentally ill college student, a visit to Poland, and a U.S. diplomat

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction

241 pages, Paperback

First published August 22, 1984

About the author

Joyce Carol Oates is an American writer. Oates published her first book in 1963, and has since published 58 novels, a number of plays and novellas, and many volumes of short stories, poetry, and nonfiction. Her novels Black Water (1992), What I Lived For (1994), and Blonde (2000), and her short story collections The Wheel of Love (1970) and Lovely, Dark, Deep: Stories (2014) were each finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. She has won many awards for her writing, including the National Book Award, for her novel Them (1969), two O. Henry Awards, the National Humanities Medal, and the Jerusalem Prize (2019).
Oates taught at Princeton University from 1978 to 2014, and is the Roger S. Berlind '52 Professor Emerita in the Humanities with the Program in Creative Writing. From 2016 to 2020, she was a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley, where she taught short fiction in the spring semesters. She now teaches at Rutgers University, New Brunswick.
Oates was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2016.
Pseudonyms: Rosamond Smith and Lauren Kelly.

Reviews

[Steven Godin · Rating 2 out of 5]

A few stories were alright - one where a small girl witnesses a murder and another about a gifted student that is edging towards madness, but some I couldn't help but skim, so over all this collection is going to be forgotten pretty quickly. I just hope she is a much better novelist than short story writer when I get around to reading one of her novels. Probably Blonde, after really liking the recent film.

[Jim · Rating 3 out of 5]

A long-time fan of Oates, this collection of short stories don't have the shock value one usually finds, but the delineation of characters becomes so absorbing that one feels the same emotions. One suffers right along with Judith in "My Warszawa" (1980) as she manages her way through not only a difficult cultural exchange in Warsaw but feels growing estrangement with another visiting lover/ intellectual with whom she has arrived and with whom she will leave though the reader may wonder why. The imagery and illusions used are particularly apt in all the stories.

[kerrycat · Rating 5 out of 5]

The story "My Warszaw: 1980" is the focus of my essay, "The Awkward Academic: Why Judith Reads James" published in Bearing Witness: Joyce Carol Oates Studies, in December 2015:
http://repository.usfca.edu/jcostudie...

[Jeff Hobbs]

Read so far:

The witness --
*Last days --
Funland --
*The man whom women adored --
Night. Sleep. Death. The stars. --
Ich bin ein Berliner --
*Détente --
*My Warszawa, 1980 --
Old Budapest --
Lamb of Abyssalia --
*Our wall --

[Lili · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read it in French and that's harder than English, so I didn't really get into it that much. I read only a few stories. They were interesting enough but Oates can be better.