Customer Reviews

Heat and Other Stories

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I loved this book. It's been years since I read it, but several of the stories have stuck with me. My favorite is called "Why Don't You Come Live with Me It's Time," about a woman's recollections of her grandmother. It's an absolutely bizarre story, almost like an LSD trip, but the narration, the urgency of the words, many of them italicized, and the far-out imagery convey a poweful sense of aching for the loss of what may have been this woman's most significant relationship. To be frank, I'm not sure I understood it completely (I'd have to add this caveat to my impressions of most of Oates' works), but I know I felt it. A great, great story, as are many others in this collection.

I can't get enough of Joyce Carol Oates's clever short-story collections. Having read I Am No One You Know and The Assignation, I couldn't wait to read more of her short stories. Heat and Other Stories is the best Oates collection I've read thus far. Her writing is dark and disturbing, yet possesses a beautiful prose that makes her tales unforgettable. "Heat," "Why Don't You Come Live with Me It's Time," "Twins," "Passion," "Naked," and "The Boyfriend" enthralled me the most. Each story has a special brand of darkness, magic and quirkiness that make them irresistible. They're thought provoking and unforgettable. I agree with the reviewer that compared Oates's writing with the likes of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. She's brilliant! I look forward to reading more of Oates. I shall give one of her novels a whirl next time.

In this 1991 collection of short stories, heat, both as a phenomenon of the weather and the metaphorical heat within the soul, is explored as a causative agent for human action. The title story has a woman, now old, telling of the brutal and inexplicable murder of her two best friends, red-headed eleven-year-old twin girls in the 1930's, on a blistering summer day, by a theretofore gentle retarded boy who worked at the local ice house. The twenty-four other tales in this collection prove equally gripping and contain an impact in ways longer prose, even epic novels, often do not. I read this anthology over the course of about a week, and spread the tales out so I was reading several in the course of each day. In my opinion this is not a good starting place for someone new to Oates' work, but it is beyond a doubt her best short story collection of the 1990's and one of her five best anthologies overall.

Heat was the first Oates book that I had been read. The diferents points of views was able to build an credible story. The instincts forces whose live inside a very conservative society, explodes with a twins murder; this last is one of the motifs from the book principal short story: Heat. The atmospher of Heat is sexual and almost innocent. When I read this short story, had think in the Garcia Marques story: Cronica de una Muerte Anunciada. In both cases we could know who the murderer is. In the Oates work, the instinct is the cause; in the Garcia Marques, the cause is inside a cultural point of view. Both, Oates and Garcia Marquez, show us a richness of technic. (please, be patient with my English