Where Is Here?

Where Is Here? is a collection containing 34 works of short fiction by Joyce Carol Oates originally published in paperback by Harper & Row in 1989 and in hardback by Ecco Press in 1992.^[1][2]

Stories

• “Lethal”
• “Area Man Found Crucified”
• “Imperial Presidency”
• “Bare Legs”
• “Turquoise”
• “Biopsy”
• “The Date”
• “Angry”
• “The Ice Pick”
• “The Mother”
• “Sweet!”
• “Forgive Me!”
• “Transfigured Night”
• “Actress”
• “From The Life of...”
• “The Heir”
• “Shot”
• “Letter, Lover”
• “My Madman”
• “Cuckold”
• “The Escape”
• “Murder”
• “Insomnia”
• “Love, Forever”
• “Old Dog”
• “The Artist”
• “The Wig”
• “The Maker of Parables”
• “Embrace”
• “Beauty Salon”
• “Abandoned”
• “Running”
• “Pain”
• “Where Is Here?”

Reception

Randall Kenan in The New York Times describes Where Is Here as “a dazzling assortment of fictional hors d'oeuvres.” emphasizing their “miniature” scale which provides the reader with “a catalog of America's ills at the end of the 20th century: paranoia, political deception, homelessness, adultery, venereal disease, child abuse.” Kenan adds that Joyce augments her impressive oeuvre in crafting “these tiny—mostly exquisite—gems.”^[3]

Publishers Weekly praises the “brief vignettes” that comprise the volume for their “inventiveness and boundless stylistic variety.”^[4]

Critical analysis

Literary critic Gretchen Elizabeth Schultz characterizes these works as “short, short stories” and provides this passage from Oates’s Afterword in her collection The Assignation (1989) to explain the nature of these “miniature narratives”:

...They are “narratives” of a particular purity as a steep ski slope is a “hill” of a particular purity— they engender movement so rapid, so blurred, so impersonal, the human personality is swallowed up in narrative; in motion, we are narrative.^[5]

Schultz cautions that reading these works may be “a dangerous experience, an assault on individual sensibilities” and as such, require a rereading and an objective assessment of the narratives which will “restore our obliterated selves—though they may be selves considerably different than what they were before.”^[6]

References

Sources

• 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.
• Kenan, Randall (1992-11-01). "Broken Hearts and Other Anatomical Disasters". The New York Times. Retrieved 2023-11-11.
• Schultz, Gretchen Elizabeth (1994). "The Assignation and Where Is Here?: What's Happening in the Miniature Narratives of Joyce Carol Oates". In Johnson, Greg (ed.). Joyce Carol Oates: a study of the short fiction. Twayne's studies in short fiction. New York: Twayne publ. pp. 202–212. ISBN 978-0-8057-0857-8.
• Oates, Joyce Carol (1992). Where is here? stories. Hopewell, NJ: Ecco Press. ISBN 978-0-88001-283-6.
• Publishers Weekly. 1989. “Where Is Here” September, 1989. https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780880012836 Retrieved November 10, 2023.