Lovely, Dark, Deep audiobook

This is a collection of 13 short stories. They are haunting and fascinating... with flawed compelling characters. Joyce Carol Oats takes us into the minds and hearts of people navigating the unsettling transitions that life presents to us all. Ordinary people face challenging situations. The first short story: “Sex with Camel”.... catches your attention with the title and the first sentence: “LOTS OF THINGS ARE OVERRATED. LIKE SUICIDE”. It’s a bittersweet story about a teenage boy and his grandmother. The boy loves his grandmother- and tries to keep the jokes coming and moral high.His grandmother has cancer. While at the hospital, patients often sneaked outside with their IV poles to smoke. It was against hospital rules as it was also common sense. Conversation between cancer patients turned into laughter which turned into a coughing fits. While laughing, one of the patients said....“The good news is, they’re stopping chemo.. The bad news is, they’re stopping chemo”. As for grandmother: her results will be in tomorrow morning.This heartfelt tale - was an excellent story to begin with. Next came “Mastiff”. “Mastiff”....includes a day hike to Wild Cat Peak in the Berkeley Hills. It was an ambitious hike for a man and a woman. The man and a woman had been hiking for several hours. Its a funny, semi-erotic- terrifying tale....Single people might consider forgetting a date-hike with somebody you barely know! 😉🚶🏻‍♀️The visuals were outstanding!! Some of these stories connect together - but not all. Mostly they are each very different ....totally varied in content and emotions. Great overall collection: highly imaginative- disturbing & unsettling.The title story...”Lovely, Dark, and Deep”...is a spellbinding story about an artist on the rise. I liked it. There has been controversy about this story ...having to do with the mention of poet, Robert Frost...as whether or not his name was used in vain. I didn’t think so. Joyce Carol Oats sees things that waver just below the surface of life...‘Lovely, Dark, Deep’....is filled with depth.. JCO’s greatness is subtle. Her prose is impressive! Life is unpredictable. Fragilies are explored!A really strong exquisite book-of-short stories that feels like a novel.

There's something hypnotic in the way Joyce Carol Oates writes short stories. She somehow manages to lure you in by creating characters and putting them into situstions that you just can't turn away from. A woman with mixed feelings about a pending abortion and while having to face protestors on her way into the clinic...a young teenager driving his grandmother to the hospital for a "diagnostic procedure"...a boy, killed in an auto accident, yet able to see his parents and friends erecting a roadside shrine at the site where he was killed...such insight and imagination! Many of the stories end without full resolution and I believe this is part of JCO's style of writing...and isn't that more accurate and realistic, much like life, rather than wrapping each story up with a neat ending? Many readers may find this frustrating but I think it shows how powerful her writing is in that you don't want to let go of her characters.I've read a half dozen of her novels and collections of short stories and am constantly in awe of her talent. She is an American treasure.

To decide on a rating for this story collection, I totaled up the rating I gave each story, and divided that number by 13. I ended up with 4.46, or 4 stars if rounded. But this book is close to earning 5 stars.My first experience with reading Joyce Carol Oates was my junior year in high school — my English class was assigned her classic story “Where are you going, where have you been?” and I have been intrigued by the author since, though it was not until very recently that I began to actively seek her work out.This is a stellar collection. The stories hang together perfectly, often offering up common ideas and visuals; it is obvious much care was put into the order in which these tales appear. They aren’t thrown together at random.For me, there’s only one dud in the bunch — that being “Things Passed on the Way To Oblivion”. And I probably would have liked it more had it not followed so many stellar literary treats. My favorite is certainly “A Book of Martyrs” — it details the experience of a young woman getting an abortion, and the impact it has on her romantic relationship. What Oates excels at is writing people, and writing with brutal honesty. Though this is not a horror collection, it works on the nerves the same way a good horror collection should: the stories explore the black depths of the human condition, and what is found is often broken, beyond repair. For someone looking to check out the short fiction of Joyce Carol Oates and isn’t sure where to start (she has something like forty collections to her name), this is as good a place as any. Highly recommended!

One of my favorite collections by JCO. It has a much different tone. It's not haunting or sinister, at least not relatively. I also liked that these didn't have her usual calling cards (locations, color hair etc) there were a couple that had similarities but the end result was not the same. You always have to look a little deeper. The final story Patricide I thought would make a great novella.

Such thought provoking and very interesting stories. My favorite being one about a pretty young woman interviewing Robert Frost. Great story telling! I listened to this while driving and walking and the reader was outstanding! Very enjoyable, I highly recommend this book.

Notable colección de relatos con profundas descripciones de sus protagonistas femeninas. Relatos nunca lineales ya que muchas veces abren el juego aumentando su riqueza narrativa sin nunca perder el control de los recursos desplegados. Coronados con una nouvelle (Parricidio) sobre un escritor famoso y su devota hija, con notas de un humor mordaz y donde la rivalidad y la sororidad pueden complementarse.

I am a long time JCO fan but this is the first of her books that I have read in a while. I had a shelf full of her printed books on my bookshelf and didn’t manage to get to all of them before I switched to Audible a few years ago. But it looks like I picked up a few JCO audible books since I see a few coming up on my list which I go through one by one in my anal compulsive way in the order in which I buy them. I am more than a year behind!This is a book of mostly short stories with a couple that might be Novela length. I love short stories and JCO is among the best short story writers. It is interesting that most of the stories in this book involve two characters who interact with each other. The stories occasionally take you inside of people who are having experiences that might be familiar to you but that you have never experienced personally. The story of someone on chemotherapy and of someone going for an abortion are two prime examples of going into the process along with someone.I love JCO for her weirdness and darkness and she is superlative in this book in both of those areas. Some people think she might overdo it but I am not one of those people! And the glory of short stories is that even if you occasionally find one that is definitely not your type, it is pretty quickly behind you. The Robert Frost story in this book is probably the one that left me with the most questions. Since he was a real person I couldn’t figure out if this story portraying him in a pretty negative way was fiction or non-fiction. There was another story in the book about a clearly fictional famous author. But when a story includes a real person it does make you wonder.

Conocí a Joyce Carol Oates con "Infiel", desde entonces me gustó mucho su estilo y decidí leer este libro que en lo personal me ha gustado más. Los dos últimos relatos de este libro son maravillosos: "Mágico, sombrio e impenetrable" y "Parricidio". En el primero, la autora desnuda de forma elegante la discriminación sexual hacia la mujer, esa falta de respeto hacia la mujer disfrazada en paternalismo intelectual. La forma en que el relato se desarrolla es magistral. Luego termina el libro con "Parricidio" un relato en el que la autora pone de manifiesto su profundo conocimiento de la psicología humana. Oates se atreve a mostrarnos deseos oscuros en personajes cotidianos. Además, me encantan sus personajes femeninos, cualquiera podría cuestionarlos porque hay fragilidad, hay emociones contenidas, hay dolor, hay debilidad, hay opresión en mujeres que se conectan con sus pensamientos más profundos, allí donde se han sentido cohibidas, minimizadas, utilizadas.

Una lectura muy extraña por decir lo menos. A veces pesada, a veces ágil pero siempre muy diferente. En cuestión de paginas pasabas del horror al drama y hasta un poco de comedia. Mis relatos favoritos fueron "A Book of Martyrs" porque fue muy interesante leer una perspectiva abiertamente pro-elección en un libro y “Lovely, Dark, Deep” por el final inesperado.

The latest release from our most prolific writer is a collection of short stories. I didn't find much "lovely" in Joyce Carol Oates' Lovely, Dark, Deep, but there's certainly a lot of dark and deep phenomena. Since this is a long collection of stories, a synopsis of each one is impossible. Most of the tales concern upper-middle class angst, and in particular the university setting is explored. Though JCO grew up in a working class family in western New York, she moved into academia and has been at Princeton for years. She likes to write about devious college administrators and professors. Scientists are also featured. The story from which the title is taken is about Robert Frost, and it left me laughing. I don't want to give away why. The last work, Patricide, is long enough to qualify as a novella, or at least it seemed so. I didn't count the pages. It's about an arrogant famous novelist fond of using and abusing women.

I was sure I'd read something by Oates before - besides Wild Nights, which is a different beast entirely - but Goodreads says no and who am I to disagree. But oh well, whatever drove me to pick this up in the SH bookstore, I can only be grateful. I loved the ornate style, the kindness she shows her flawed characters, and the stories that sometimes don't "go somewhere" per se - all the while acknowledging these might be exactly the things someone else would hate. So approach with caution and with a heavy heart, 'cause this ain't cheerful. But it's pretty bloody good.

Don't expect to feel good at the end of any of these short stories and novella. You won't. They are tragic, emotional, and realistic examples of life and suffering. That's what makes them so frightening because you can see yourself (or a family member/friend) living through the subject matter of each story. Even the one about Robert Frost is no exception, since you could substitute any licentious older and powerful male into the story in place of the Frost character and relate to it. Wonderful writing and imagery.