Heat and Other Stories is a collection of 25 works of short fiction by Joyce Carol Oates published by E. P. Dutton in 1991.[1]
 First edition | |
| Author | Joyce Carol Oates |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Publisher | E. P. Dutton |
Publication date | 1991 |
| Publication place | United States |
| Media type | Print (hardback & paperback) |
| Pages | 416 |
| ISBN | 978-0525933304 |
This volume serves as “a postmodernist allegory of contemporary America” in which Oates returns to the settings of her early fiction in rural western New York state.[2]
The story “Yarrow” won the O. Henry Award in 1991.[3]
Stories
editHeat and Other Stories includes the following stories:[4]
- “House Hunting”
- “The Knife”
- “The Hair”
- “Shopping”
- “The Boyfriend”
- “Passion”
- “Morning”
- “Naked”
- “Heat”
- “The Buck”
- “Yarrow”
- “Sundays in Summer”
- “Leila Lee”
- “The Swimmers”
- “Getting to Know All About You”
- “Capital Punishment”
- “Hostage”
- “Craps”
- “Death Valley”
- “White Trash”
- “Twins”
- “The Crying Baby”
- “Why Don’t You Come Live With Me It’s Time”
- “Ladies and Gentlemen:”
- “Family”
Reception and analysis
editLiterary critic Wendy Lesser in The New York Times reports that Oates’s “own enormous body of work” has become a burden that the author carries into her collection Heat and Other Stories, which deal largely with “parent-child struggles.”[5] Lesser offers the story “Shopping” as an example of Oates’s thematic concerns in this volume: the story is not a Gothic horror reminiscent of Poe, but “transcends” that genre to present normality “in all its terrifying nakedness.”[6] She compares Oates’s handling of violence in stories with that of fiction writer Paul Bowles:
Mr. Bowles hinges his plots on inevitable violation, and he also aims to shock us…Behind his gruesome tales is a stern moralist, a person who trusts that we readers (if not his characters) are still capable of sharing his disapproval and disgust. Ms. Oates, on the other hand, is as cavalierly cynical as a teen-ager. Her stock in trade is precisely not to seem shocked, and she pretends to be equally, mildly, analytically interested in all forms of human behavior, however grotesque.[6]
Biographer and critic Greg Johnson offered this praise for the collection:"Heat and Other Stories represent Oates’s full maturity as a writer of short fiction, the genre that best exploits the versatility and intensity of her narrative gifts.”[7]
References
edit- ^ Johnson, 1994 p. 218-221: Selected Bibliography, Primary Works
- ^ Johnson, 1994 p. 94, p. 99
- ^ Johnson, 1994 p. 99
- ^ Johnson, 1994 p. 219 in Selected Bibliography
- ^ Lesser, 1991: “Heat: And Other Stories," are about bad parents—or, at the very least, about misunderstandings between parent and child.”
- ^ a b Lesser, 1991
- ^ Johnson, 1994 p. 106
- ^ Booklist
Sources
edit- Johnson, Greg (1994). Joyce Carol Oates: a study of the short fiction. Twayne's studies in short fiction. New York: Twayne publ. ISBN 978-0-8057-0857-8.
- Lesser, Wendy (August 4, 1991). "The Shopping Mall Wars". The New York Times. Retrieved 2023-11-11.
- "Heat and Other Stories". Booklist. August 1991. Retrieved 2023-11-10.