Heat and Other Stories

Heat and Other Stories is a collection of 25 works of short fiction by Joyce Carol Oates published by E. P. Dutton in 1991.

This volume serves as “a postmodernist allegory of contemporary America” in which Oates returns to the settings of her early fiction in rural western New York state.

The story “Yarrow” won the O. Henry Award in 1991.

Stories
Heat and Other Stories includes the following stories:
 * “House Hunting”
 * “The Knife”
 * “The Hair”
 * “Shopping”
 * “The Boyfriend”
 * “Passion”
 * “Morning”
 * “Naked”
 * “Heat”
 * “The Buck”
 * “Yarrow”
 * “Sundays in Summer”
 * “Leila Lee”
 * “The Swimmers”
 * “Getting to Know All About You”
 * “Capital Punishment”
 * “Hostage”
 * “Craps”
 * “Death Valley”
 * “White Trash”
 * “Twins”
 * “The Crying Baby”
 * “Why Don’t You Come Live With Me It’s Time”
 * “Ladies and Gentlemen:”
 * “Family”

Reception and analysis
Literary critic Wendy Lesser in The New York Times reports that Oates’s “own enormous body of work” has become a burden that the author carries into her collection Heat and Other Stories, which deal largely with “parent-child struggles.” Lesser offers the story “Shopping” as an example of Oates’s thematic concerns in this volume: the story is not a Gothic horror reminiscent of Poe, but “transcends” that genre to present normality “in all its terrifying nakedness.” She compares Oates’s handling of violence in stories with that of fiction writer Paul Bowles:

"Mr. Bowles hinges his plots on inevitable violation, and he also aims to shock us…Behind his gruesome tales is a stern moralist, a person who trusts that we readers (if not his characters) are still capable of sharing his disapproval and disgust. Ms. Oates, on the other hand, is as cavalierly cynical as a teen-ager. Her stock in trade is precisely not to seem shocked, and she pretends to be equally, mildly, analytically interested in all forms of human behavior, however grotesque."

Biographer and critic Greg Johnson offered this praise for the collection:"Heat and Other Stories represent Oates’s full maturity as a writer of short fiction, the genre that best exploits the versatility and intensity of her narrative gifts.”

Booklist also reviewed the collection.