The "woman in the window" in Edward Hopper's classic painting is beautiful, young, nude, and (seemingly) lost in melancholy contemplation by a window- perhaps abandoned by her lover; in Joyce Carol Oates's enthralling re-imagining, the woman is all of these but also alert to her situation, not at all passive but prepared to exact an unexpected revenge against one who has wronged her.

In the stories of Beautiful Days, we are allowed access into the most secret, intimate, and unacknowledged interior lives of persons very like ourselves, who do not take refuge in passivity but assert themselves in acts of bold and sometimes irrevocable defiance.

In "Big Burnt"-set on a lushly rendered Lake George, in the Adirondacks-a manipulative university professor exploits a too-trusting woman in a way she could never have anticipated; in "Owl Eyes" a prodigiously bright young adolescent confronts a mysterious stalker-with startling results. In "Friend of My Youth" a woman confronts a friend from college who has since become a world-famous feminist, for whom she feels violent emotions, and in "The Nice Girl" a young woman who has been, through her life, infuriatingly "nice" is forced to come to terms with her deepest motives.