Descriptions, Reviews, etc.
Description:
A wonderfully bizarre new collection of short stories by Oates, "Wild Nights!" reimagines the final days of five major American writers--Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Henry James, and Ernest Hemingway.
Brief description:
Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Medal of Humanities, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Book Award, and the 2019 Jerusalem Prize, and has been several times nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the national bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys; Blonde, which was nominated for the National Book Award; and the New York Times bestseller The Falls, which won the 2005 Prix Femina. 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.
Review Quotes:
"Not only has [Joyce Carol Oates] vividly imagined the last days of a handful of American literary icons, she has done so while channeling the voices of those writers in these five haunting tales. Wild Nights! is a stylish and original piece of literary craftsmanship that works both as a collection of effective stories and as a literary treat for those of a more scholarly bent....Joyce Carol Oates has made an immense contribution to American literature, and we can only hope that her "last days" are far in the future. These five tales further demonstrate why she is worthy of being regarded alongside some of our most admired literary talents." - Bookreporter.com
"A gem of a book - a pathography, in fact - about creativity and age and the complicated, anxiety-ridden relationship between the two." - New York Times Book Review
"The classic authors who appear as fictionalized characters in Wild Nights! aren't the ones most of us met in Intro to American Literature. Edgar Allen Poe copulating with a one-eyed amphibian? Mark Twain pursuing pubescent girls? Henry James clubbing a cat to death? Joyce Carol Oates may cause a few elderly professors to keel over, but the rest of us can take perverse delight in her five surreal tales." - Newsday
"...when tackling Wild Nights!...I found myself not only enthralled but transported." - Washington Times
"...an imaginative, impressive work that spotlights yet another side of Oates' prodigious talent." - St. Louis Post-Dispatch
"In these five tales - all compelling, erudite, uniquely horrifying - Oates once again displays her astonishing capacity to inhabit her characters' minds. Throughout her long career she has shown us the world through the eyes of madmen, murderers, troubled teens, religious fanatics, furious men and frustrated women. And every time - every single time - Oates shows us not some singularity. She shows us ourselves." - Cleveland Plain Dealer
"Our most industrious writer back at the anvil, making her usual unholy racket, while simultaneously throwing off sporadic sparks of unalloyed brilliance." - Kirkus Reviews
"These stories generate fresh insights into the themes and personalities of these authors, and many readers will be hoping for a sequel with five different authors. Recommended." - Library Journal
"Oates masterfully imagines the final days of five literary giants in this clever collection of short stories. The author skillfully mimics the styles of Edgar Allen Poe, Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Henry James and Ernest Hemingway as she mixes known facts from their later years with her own, often bizarre, musings...Oates' ability to replicate the style of the writer she is memorializing is amazing...[her] writing skill is evident on every page. Fans of her previous work, and certainly fans of the authors honored in these stories, will appreciate Wild Nights!" - Rocky Mountain News
