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A new collection of thirteen mesmerizing stories by American master Joyce Carol Oates, including the 2017 Pushcart Prize-winning "Undocumented Alien."

The diverse stories of Beautiful Days, Joyce Carol Oates explore the most secret, intimate, and unacknowledged interior lives of characters not unlike ourselves, who assert their independence in acts of bold and often irrevocable defiance.

"Fleuve Bleu" exemplifies the rich sensuousness of Oates's prose as lovers married to other persons vow to establish, in their intimacy, a ruthlessly honest, truth-telling authenticity missing elsewhere in their complicated lives, with unexpected results.

In "Big Burnt," set on lushly rendered Lake George, in the Adirondacks, a cunningly manipulative university professor exploits a too-trusting woman in a way she could never have anticipated. "The Nice Girl" depicts a young woman who has been, through her life, infuriatingly "nice," until she is forced to come to terms with the raw desperation of her deepest self. In a more experimental but no less intimate mode, "Les beaux jours" examines the ambiguities of an intensely erotic, exploitative relationship between a "master" artist and his adoring young female model. And the tragic "Undocumented Alien" depicts a young African student enrolled in an American university who is suddenly stripped of his student visa and forced to undergo a terrifying test of courage.

In these stories, as elsewhere in her fiction, Joyce Carol Oates exhibits her fascination with the social, psychological, and moral boundaries that govern our behavior--until the hour when they do not.

Tavia Gilbert is an acclaimed narrator of more than four hundred full-cast and multivoice audiobooks for virtually every publisher in the industry. Named the 2018 Voice of Choice by Booklist magazine, she is also an Audie Award nominee and the recipient of numerous Earphones Awards, a Voice Arts Award, and a Listen-Up Award. With frequent inclusion on best of year and annual top ten lists, she is a trusted and increasingly sought-after actress for work across every genre, from children's and YA, to literary fiction, nonfiction, and genre fiction. Audible has named her a Genre-Defining Narrator: Master of Memoir, and Library Journal said of her, as close as you can get to a full-cast narration with a solo voice. She is a producer, singer, photographer, and a writer, as well as the cofounder of a feminist publishing company, Animal Mineral, with fiction and nonfiction focusing on relationships, love, and identity.

Caitlin Kelly, an Earphones Award-winning narrator, is a seasoned voice-over artist with experience in Japan and the United States. She has a BFA in drama and studied musical theater at the Collaborative Arts Project 21, an off-Broadway theater company and musical theater training conservatory. She got started in voice-over work in 2009 while living in Japan where she toured with Disney's World of English and World Family Club as a performer and a puppeteer.

Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Book Award and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction, among other major awards. She 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. In 2003 she received the Common Wealth Award for Distinguished Service in Literature and the Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement, and in 2006 she received the Chicago Tribune Lifetime Achievement Award.

Stephen Graybill is an actor, producer, and award-winning voice over artist. He was seen on television in The Girls Guide to Depravity, Law & Order: SVU, Law & Order, and HBO's The Wire. He has also acted on stage and done voice-overs for commercials, winning both a Gold Clio Award and a Silver Effie Award. He has also narrated Jesus Swagger by Jarrid Wilson.