Last Days: 2 [Hardcover]

Joyce Carol Oates (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 241 pages
• Publisher: Dutton Adult; 1st edition (August 22, 1984)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0525242481
• ISBN-13: 978-0525242482
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.5 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,184,416 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Joyce Carol Oates is the author of more than 70 books, including novels, short story collections, poetry volumes, plays, essays, and criticism, including the national bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys and Blonde. Among her many honors are the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction and the National Book Award. Oates is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University, and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Hard To Find But Definitely Worth Reading, October 6, 2006

By 

Notnadia (Currently upstairs.) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Last Days (Hardcover)

This 1984 collection of short fiction is divided into two distinct sections. The first half of the book, "Last Days" features more typical Oatsean subject matter, whereas the second part "Our Wall" collects stories about eastern Europe, the Berlin Wall, the effects of the Cold War on the minds of everyday people, and it includes a marginally fictionalized version of Oates' real-life 1980 pilgrimage to Communist-ruled Poland, a nation her mother's ancestors once left behind on their journey to America.

The best story in the first half of the book is also fairly disturbing (though not to the point that the gruesome "Funland" was). Entitled "Night. Sleep. Death. The Stars." (a reference to famous lines from Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass) it is about a mentally-retarded woman living with a downtrodden university intellectual, who contemptuously regards the woman, even as she works to support him, watches his young daughters from a previous marriage, and acts in a spousal capacity. The innocent-minded woman loves the man despite all his verbal abuse, and even after he leaves her and his daughters behind, the woman says nothing but good things about the man, and waits patiently for him to return, which she, unlike the reader, is sure will happen.

In "Our Wall" the most memorable story tells of the younger brother of an American activist who was killed by Communist border guards while attempting to climb INTO East Berlin from the west. The younger brother, once an adoring sibling, greatly awed by his older, more handsome brother's achievements in life, returns to the scene of his brother's death, and reflects how for a little while longer he will be the younger of the two of them, but shortly he will reach the birthday that will set him ahead of the once-older brother, whose life was tragically stopped that day.

These stories are a milestone in Oates' career and mark her passage in subject matter from the type of material she was writing in the 1970's, and begins a trend into less psychological and more globally exploratory themes she carried thru till the early 1990's.

4.0 out of 5 stars The short story: alive and well, December 10, 2006

By 

Larry the Lawyer (Des Moines, Iowa) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Last Days (Hardcover)

The title story is the perfect example of the storyteller's art. It's heartbreaking and violent, and seems to have been written offhand and casually, but it's the kind of casualness that only comes from years of perfecting the short story. I don't ordinarily like this author's work but the title story alone is worth the price of the ticket.