Crossing the Border: Fifteen Tales is a collection of short stories by Joyce Carol Oates written while the author was residing in Canada (1968 – 1978).

The stories had appeared previously (1974 – 1976) in different US and Canadian magazines, often in different versions.

Seven of the stories, "Crossing the Border", "Hello Fine Day Isn’t It", "Natural Boundaries", "Customs", "The Scream", "An Incident in The Park", and "River Rising" depict conjugal life of an American couple, Reneé and Evan Maynard, in Canada.

The characters in "The Transformation of Vincent Scoville" and "The Liberation of Jake Hanley" are instructors at the same Canadian college.

Although most of the stories concern Americans in Canada ― people whose private sense of disengagement is intensified by their life in a culture half foreign, half familiar ― the real borders are personal: the boundaries by which each individual defines himself and, rightly or wrongly, fends off other individuals.’[6] But of course these personal boundaries also have to be „crossed“, transcended, and therefore the stories are also concerned with transitions of the psychic boundaries which characterize the individual, with the development from one level of consciousness to another one.