Crossing The Border: Fifteen Stories by Joyce Carol Oates/Ex-Marylebone Library

'Crossing the Border - Fifteen Stories'  by Joyce Carol OATES. Published in hardback by Victor Gollancz Ltd, London, WC1, please note that this book is a 1978 edition ex-Marylebone Library book (part of Westminster Libraries) which has all the usual markings and plastic protective cover. The book is in excellent condition and is NOT price-clipped at all. Shipping Costs are £3.49p by Royal Mail 2nd Class parcels (this is the actual cost of postage - I don't charge for packaging).

Crossing the Border - Fifteen Tales is a collection of short stories by Joyce Carol Oates written while the author was residing in Canada between the years of 1968 and 1978. These stories had appeared previously (1974 – 1976) in different US and Canadian magazines, often in different versions.

In this collection of fifteen stories individuals approach and sometimes cross many borders: borders separating men from women, innocence from experience, one way of life from another.  The scene is sometimes Canada, sometimes America, and since she lives in Canada very close to the American border Miss Oates writes with a sympathetic knowledge of the people on both sides.

Seven of the fifteen stories - "Crossing the Border", "Hello Fine Day Isn’t It", "Natural Boundaries", "Customs", "The Scream", "An Incident in The Park", and "River Rising" - have the same two people as their central characters, a young married American couple named Reneé and Evan Maynard, and depict conjugal life in Canada. Again, in a reflection perhaps of Miss Oakes's own academic life, several stories have an academic background, and in one the building of a substantial edifice of empty "scholarship" is savagely satirised. Another story examines the male retreat, from marriage into a curiously troglodyte existence in university buildings, and another in which the husband is a compulsive "faller in love" shows how a wife withdraws into endless sleep in a motel bedroom. But it is the wife who has the last laugh in a third when her husband returns after seventeen years, begging her to forgive his desertion, and she answers with a from "no".  Seven of the stories, The characters in "The Transformation of Vincent Scoville" and "The Liberation of Jake Hanley" are instructors at the same Canadian college. The rest of the stories are not connected to each other.

One can drive many parallel, complementary and contrasting interpretations from the collection, and in this respect it is as rewarding as its predecessors which, have earned Joyce Carol Oates much critical acclaim. 

This 1978 edition ex-library book is in excellent condition and runs to 276 pages. Shipping Costs are £3.49p by Royal Mail 2nd Class parcels (actual cost).

The author: Joyce Carol OATES is an American Professor of English at the University of Windsor, Ontario. Her previous novels and volumes of stories include Upon the Sweeping Flood, A Garden of Earthly Delights, Expensive People, Them (which won a US National Book Award), The Wheel of Love, Wonderland, Do With Me What You Will, Marriages and Infidelities, The Goddess and Other Women, The Poisoned Kiss and Childhood. Her criticism has been collected into two volumes. The Edge of Impossibility and New Heaven, New Earth. She is a recipient of the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction. She is also the recipient of the 2005 Prix Femina for The Falls. She is now the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University, and she has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978. She has also written under the pseudonyms of Rosamond Smith and Lauren Smith.

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