Wild Nights!

by Joyce Carol Oates

Genres: General Fiction

Synopsis

Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson, Samuel Clemens (“Mark Twain”), Henry James, Ernest Hemingway–Joyce Carol Oates evokes each of these Amer­­­ican literary icons in her newest work of prose fiction, poignantly and aud­aciously reinventing the climactic events of their lives. In subtly nuanced language suggest­­­ive of each of these writers, Oates explores the myster­ious regions of the unknowable self that is “genius”–for Edgar Allan Poe, a belated encounter with bizarre life‑forms utterly alien to the poet’s exalted Romantic aesthetics; for Emily Dickinson, resurrected in the twenty-first century in a “distilled” state, a be­lated encounter with blundering humanity and brute passion of a kind excluded from the poet’s verse; for the elderly, renowned Samuel Clemens, a belated encounter with impassioned inn­ocence, in the form of “the little girl who loves you”; for Henry James, an aging volunteer in a London hos­pital during World War I, a belated encounter with the physicality of desire and the raw yearning of love long absent from the master’s fiction; and, for Ernest Hemingway, the most tragic of these figures, a be­lated encounter with the “profound mysteries of the world outside him, and the profound mysteries of the world inside him.”

WILD NIGHTS! is Joyce Carol Oates’s most original and haunting work of the imagination, a writer’s mem­oirist work in the form of fiction.


From the Compact Disc edition.

Release date: October 6, 2015

Publisher: HarperCollins e-books

Print pages: 272